Mozilla Corp. continues to fine-tune the feature set for the next major update to its Firefox browser, due in the second half of 2007, and on Wednesday posted an updated plan.

The Firefox 3 wiki, a list of the planned changes and additions to the next upgrade of the open-source browser, now sports designations that mark features as either “functional” or “non-functional.” The latter, although strictly not optional, are more intangible goals, such as “improve usability of Add-On Manager” or “simpler print preview dialog.” The former, however, are more concrete, and include to-dos like “support Microsoft CardSpace” and “improve search, retrieval, and startup performance.”

Among the features currently pegged as must-haves by Mozilla for Firefox 3 are an overhaul of the browser’s bookmark system and new identity management tools.

Source: InformationWeek

If this is true, it’s Beta vs VHS all over again and HD-DVD may be the foregone winner of the format wars. First, Heise reports (summarized from the German by sgknox.com) that Digital Playground, who were committed to Blu-ray last year, are now producing HD-DVD titles instead.

No Blu-ray disk manufacturer would make their disks because Sony doesn’t want porn on Blu-ray (just as with Betamax). Second, as reported by tgdaily, the porn industry overwhelmingly favors HD-DVD because it’s much cheaper and easier to produce. As noted in the tgdaily article, porn was a huge factor in VHS winning the VHS/Beta format wars even though many people don’t like to acknowledge it. Porn, like gaming, pushes tech adoption.

Source: Slashdot

Under competitive pressure from local cable competitors like Cablevision, Verizon is fighting speed with speed. The company just announced that it is now offering connection speeds of up to 50 Mbps (megabits per second) downstream and 5 Mbps upstream over its FiOS network.

The previous top speed was 30 Mbps/5Mbps, on the high end. In the medium tier, Verizon upped the speed from 15 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream to 20/5 Mbps, and the top-tier service was increased from 30/5 Mbps to 50/5 Mbps.

Source: GigaOM

Bug hunters of the world, VeriSign’s iDefense has an updated bug bounty challenge for you.

For the current quarter, the company will pay $8,000 for a security vulnerability that lets an attacker remotely gain control over a computer running Microsoft’s Windows Vista or Internet Explorer 7, the company said on its Web site. iDefense will pay for a maximum of six vulnerabilities, if more are reported only the first six will qualify, it said.

In addition to the $8,000 award for the submitted vulnerability, iDefense will pay between $2,000 and $4,000 for working exploit code that exploits the submitted vulnerability, the company said.

Source: News.com

Most new PCs aren’t up-to-date on security patches when a buyer takes them out of the box, but at least fixes can be downloaded as soon as an Internet connection is established. (And that’s exactly what you should do, particularly if you just bought a Windows computer.)

But Acer ships some of its computers with a vulnerable ActiveX control for which there is no apparent fix, according to F-Secure. If an Acer user were to visit a malicious Web site using Internet Explorer, an attacker could commandeer the system, the Finnish antivirus experts warned on their blog.

“It gets even better. Acer enabled ’safe for scripting’ on that ActiveX library so you wouldn’t even see when it’s used,” F-Secure wrote. The library, named LunchApp.ocx, is probably meant to help with browsing the vendor’s Web site, it said.

To unregister this ActiveX from your system do the following

Go to Start->Run
Type: regsvr32 -u lunchapp.ocx
Click OK

Source: News.com

So it’s no surprise that the company did just that for the 14th consecutive year. But it’s still worth noting the number of patents Big Blue was awarded–3,651–especially in light of various efforts to reform what some say is a flawed system to balance intellectual property and innovation. Not to mention IBM’s continued willingness to launch patent infringement lawsuits and the fact that smaller companies eagerly trumpet the award of even a single patent.

IBM plans to tout its patent tally Wednesday. Second place went to Samsung Electronics, with 2,453 patents, followed by Canon with 2,378, Matsushita Electronics with 2,273, Hewlett-Packard with 2,113, Intel with 1,962, and Sony with 1,810.

Source: News.com

NASA is investigating whether incorrect software commands may have doomed the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which abruptly fell silent last year after a decade of meticulously mapping the Red Planet.

The space agency said that theory is just one of several that may explain the probe’s failure. NASA on Wednesday announced the formation of an internal review board to investigate why the Global Surveyor lost contact with controllers during a routine adjustment of its solar array.

John McNamee, deputy director of solar system exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said a preliminary investigation points to incorrect software commands uploaded to the spacecraft in June.

The software was aimed at improving the spacecraft’s flight processors. Instead, bad commands may have overheated the battery and forced the spacecraft into safe mode, McNamee told scientists gathered Tuesday in Virginia to plan for future Mars missions.

Source: AP

Can the coins jingling in your pocket trace your movements? The Defense Department is warning its American contractor employees about a new espionage threat seemingly straight from Hollywood: It discovered Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside.

In a U.S. government report, it said the mysterious coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

The U.S. report doesn’t suggest who might be tracking American defense contractors or why. It also doesn’t describe how the
Pentagon discovered the ruse, how the transmitters might function or even which Canadian currency contained them.

Further details were secret, according to the U.S. Defense Security Service, which issued the warning to the Pentagon’s classified contractors. The government insists the incidents happened, and the risk was genuine.

“What’s in the report is true,” said Martha Deutscher, a spokeswoman for the security service. “This is indeed a sanitized version, which leaves a lot of questions.”

Top suspects, according to intelligence and technology experts: China, Russia or even France — all said to actively run espionage operations inside Canada with enough sophistication to produce such technology.

Source: AP