Mozilla has renamed the oft-delayed Firefox 3.1 to Firefox 3.5 and said a fourth beta of the browser is slated for a 14 April release.

A possible name change has been batted around inside Mozilla Towers for several weeks, but the outfit finally confirmed the decision yesterday.

“As recently proposed, the version number of the Shiretoko project will be changed to Firefox 3.5 before the upcoming fourth beta release,” said Firefox director Mike Beltzner on the corporation’s developer blog.

The number of new features that have been packed into the upcoming version of Internet Explorer’s closest rival meant it was necessary to reflect those changes in the name, said Mozilla’s engineering veep Mike Shaver last week.

“The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that’s gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label 3.1,” he said.

Adobe Systems on Tuesday issued a security update to fix a critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 that could allow an attacker to take complete control of a computer and for which exploits had been reportedly found in the wild for nearly two months.

Adobe alerted users about the vulnerability more than two weeks ago and promised to have a security update for it by March 11.

Basically, attackers can take advantage of a hole on unpatched systems to overwrite memory with a buffer overflow and install a backdoor through which to control the system remotely.

In its advisory, Adobe said it plans to provide security updates for Adobe Reader 7 and 8 and Acrobat 7 and 8 by March 18 and for Adobe Reader 9.1 for Unix by March 25.

Meanwhile, US-CERT said on Tuesday it is aware of public reports of two new attack vectors for the vulnerability involving the Windows Indexing Service that indexes PDF files and the Windows Explorer Shell Extension.

The vulnerability can be exploited with little or no user interaction if the Windows Indexing Service processes a malicious PDF file stored on the system or Windows Explorer displays a folder containing a malicious PDF file, the CERT advisory said.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor won the $250,000 Turing Award, one of the most prestigious honors in computing, for helping to make computer programs more reliable, secure and easy to use.

Only the second woman to win the prize, Barbara Liskov was honored Tuesday for pioneering new designs in computer languages that gird everyday digital applications.

“Her exceptional achievements have leapt from the halls of academia to transform daily life around the world,” MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif said. “Every time you exchange e-mail with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of her research.”

The Association for Computing Machinery, which awards the Turing, said Liskov revolutionized the programming field after she was the first U.S. woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in computer science, which she got from Stanford University in 1968. Liskov has been an MIT professor since 1972.

Liskov’s early work in software design has been incorporated into major programming languages for more than three decades. Her innovations in data abstraction - a way of organizing complex programs - has helped made software easier to write, modify and maintain.

In an interview, Liskov explained that her work “has to do with `modularity,’ taking complex systems and breaking them into small pieces to keep them simple.”

Hitachi Displays Ltd. has agreed to plead guilty to conspiring to fix prices on the sale of LCD panels.

The Japan-based electronics firm agreed to pay a $31 million fine as part of its deal with the U.S. Justice Department.

Three other major producers of liquid crystal display panels have already admitted their involvement in price-fixing.

Hitachi admitted to fixing prices of the screens sold to Dell, Inc. for use in desktop monitors and notebook computers from 2001 to 2004.