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On September 6 a security vulnerability affecting all versions of Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite was reported to Mozilla by Tom Ferris and on September 8th was publicly disclosed.

On September 9, the Mozilla team released a configuration change which, as a temporary measure to work around this problem, disables IDN in the browser. IDN functionality will be restored in a future product update. The fix is either a manual configuration change or a small download which will make this configuration change for the user.

To manually change the browser configuration for Firefox or the Mozilla Suite, follow these instructions:

1. Type about:config into the address field and hit Enter.
2. In the Filter toolbar, type network.enableIDN.
3. Right click on the the network.enableIDN item and select toggle to change value to false.

Source: Mozilla.org

Yahoo had to comply with a demand by Chinese authorities to provide information about a personal e-mail of a journalist who was later convicted under state secrecy laws and sentenced to 10 years in prison, the company’s co-founder Jerry Yang said Saturday.

Yang, responding to questions during an Internet forum in this eastern Chinese resort city, said he could not discuss the details of the case involving Shi Tao, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News.

Overseas-based human rights groups disclosed days earlier that Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd., part of Yahoo’s global network, provided e-mail account information that helped lead to Shi’s conviction.

Yahoo earlier defended its move, saying it was obliged to comply with Chinese laws and regulations.

The demand for the information was a “legal order” and Yahoo gets such requests from law enforcement agencies all the time, and not just in China, Yang told the forum.

But he added, “I cannot talk about the details of this case.”

Source: AP

A 26-year-old PhD student from the University of New South Wales has patented a new way of exploring the web that could revolutionise existing search engines.

Developed by Ori Allon, the Orion© search engine is designed to complement searches conducted on services such as Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.

Search engines find pages on which keywords occur. Sometimes these pages are important to the topic. Other times they are not.

Orion© finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.

“The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving you the relevant information without having to go to the website - although you still have that option if you wish,” said Israeli-born Allon, who completed a Bachelor and Masters degree at Monash University in Melbourne before moving to UNSW for his PhD.
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