When you upgrade you version of Firefox some extension might stop working, however most of the times they will work fine with the new version of Firefox. There is an easy way to make Firefox stop checking for compatibility.


1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. Then click the button promising to be careful.

2. Right-click anywhere on the screen, choose: New > Boolean and name this boolean:

extensions.checkCompatibility

Press OK. Then set it to false and press OK again.

3. Now right-click again anywhere choose New > Boolean and make the name of this one:

extensions.checkUpdateSecurity

and set the value of that one to false.

When Apollo 11’s Lunar Module landed on the Moon 40 years ago today, the software that helped take humans to another celestial body was essentially built using paper-tape rolls and thick cardstock that was punched with special holes.

It wasn’t open source in the sense we know today, but it was built for NASA under contract, then was tested, modified and fine-tuned by NASA engineers in ways that are similar to open source projects nowadays.

“Well, in today’s definition it was open source–the source code was publicly available” to mission engineers, said John “Jack” Garman, who was a 24-year-old NASA computer engineer when Apollo 11 lifted off July 16, 1969, on its way to the Moon. “But ‘open source’ in the Linux sense generally means that anyone can contribute additions and improvements, and of course that wasn’t the case for the Apollo software.”

Garman helped test and re-write the software before Apollo 11 ever left the ground, then continued to monitor it while it was used in the onboard computers. “The software was programmed on IBM punch cards. They had 80-columns and were ‘assembled’ to instruction binary on mainframes… and it took hours.”

During the mission, most of the software code couldn’t be changed because it was hard- coded into the hardware, like ROM today, he said. But during pre-launch design simulations, problems that came up in the code could sometimes be finessed by Garman and the other computer engineers using a small amount of erasable memory that was available for the programs.

“Some of us NASA engineers who also worked in Mission Control would [literally guess and] ‘make up’ minor changes to the software to work around [hypothetical] ‘failures’ that were thrown at the flight control team during simulations,” Garman said. “In a sense, that fits the ‘open source’ model, but only within the NASA and NASA Contractor domain.” NASA staff members had full access to the program code through their contracts with the Apollo hardware vendors, so they were able to change the code to make the program behave differently as needed.

Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers, and even PINs are available to the highest bidder.

The information being traded on the Web has been intercepted by a British company and collated into a single database for the first time. The Lucid Intelligence database contains the records of 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans; four million are Britons. Security experts described the database as the largest of its kind in the world.

The database is in the hands of Colin Holder, a retired senior Metropolitan police officer who served on the fraud squad. He has collected the information over the past four years. His sources include law enforcement from around the world, such as British police and the FBI, anti-phishing and hacking campaigners, and members of the public.

Mr. Holder said he has invested £160,000 in the venture so far. He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached.

Microsoft today announced that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have hit the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) milestone. The software giant still has a lot of work to do, but the bigger responsibility now falls to OEMs that must get PCs ready, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are testing their new apps, and Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) that are preparing their new hardware.

OEMs can get their hands on it this Friday, while MSDN and TechNet subscribers will be able to get it on August 6. Consumers will have to wait until October 22.