Google has released version 10 of its browser. The update brings hundreds of bug fixes as well as many features that have been available on the Chrome beta and dev channels to users interested in using Chrome’s latest builds. Chrome 10 also addresses 23 security vulnerabilities in the WebKit-based browser (easily more than Google has ever fixed before): 15 rated as High, three rated as Medium, and five rated as Low.

The new Chrome version is significantly faster in some respects (a 66 percent improvement in JavaScript performance on Google’s own V8 benchmark suite) and adds features such a new settings interface with a search box that shows you the settings you’re looking for as you type, the ability to synchronize passwords across your computers and encrypt them with your own secret passphrase for extra security, as well as the options to sync bookmarks, extensions, preferences, themes, and more.

Facebook has introduced a service that allows users to report friends who have posted suicidal content on their account pages.

The Report Suicidal Content form, asks for the URL where the comments were made, the user’s full name and other information. From there, “A Facebook administrator will review your report and take any available action from our end,” although the social network doesn’t say exactly what that means.

Given the explosive growth of Facebook, it was probably inevitable that the site rolled out a service like this one. On Sunday, authorities in Washington state recovered the body of a 12-year-old girl who hadn’t been seen since mentioning on Facebook that she planned to kill herself.

Mozilla has begun to wind down work on the next generation of its Firefox browser. In today’s release of Firefox 4 beta 12, there are few improvements that will be instantly noticed by most users. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, what has changed are under-the-hood improvements to how Firefox 4 handles Flash and more stable overall performance.

One visual change has been to move hover-over links to the bottom of the window, rather than place them in the location bar as was done in the previous beta. Along with the changes to Flash handling and stability, Mozilla said in its release notes for Firefox 4 beta 12 that the browser now has better integration of add-ons with hardware acceleration support.

Ookla Net Metrics’ free network speed test speedtest.net is so widely used that even the federal government has recognized it as a reliable tool for measuring wireless network conditions. Friday, the company published results of some 57,000 user-initiated iPhone speedtests in the U.S., which showed users on the AT&T network getting average speeds substantially higher than iPhone users on Verizon Wireless.

After publishing the data, the story got some good coverage pitting iPhone against iPhone. But it should have come as no surprise to anyone who knows wireless technologies that HSPA was faster than EV-DO rev. A. On paper, HSPA’s theoretical max speed is 7.2 Mbps, and EV-DO rev. A’s is only 3.1 Mbps. It’s pretty widely accepted.

Later in the day, though, Ookla’s Co-Founder Doug Suttles released a much broader list, one that included every wireless carrier in the world where more than 100 users tested their iPhone speeds. With this list, Ookla revealed where the fastest iPhone in the world can be found.

With an average downlink speed of 3331 Kbps and an average uplink speed of 1278 Kbps, Israel’s Pelephone really lived up to its name (in Hebrew, literally “Wonderphone”) and had the highest average iPhone speeds of 104 international wireless carriers.

The Internet on Thursday officially ran out of the IP4 addresses.

Blame surging Web traffic in Asia and the worldwide proliferation of smartphones.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the top-level administrator of the system, distributed its last batches of Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses Thursday to regional registries, which will make them available to service providers, websites and others. That supply should run out in six or nine months, said John Curran, CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, or ARIN, the regional group covering the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.

Websites and service providers have been experimenting with IPv6 But many have been slow to do so because of a lack of immediate benefits. The exhaustion of IP addresses at the top level puts pressure on them to move more quickly.

Curran said only about 2 percent of websites support it. However, many of those are the most-visited sites on the Internet, including Google and Facebook. He expects smaller sites to scramble for IPv6 addresses now.

Techcrunch just got an anonymous tip that Google’s been ‘hacked’ – sure enough, visitors of the company’s Bangladesh search site (Google.com.bd) see a defaced landing page rather than the usual search site. As far as I can tell, www.google.com.bd functions properly, so whether this really constitutes a ‘hack’ is up for debate.

Local Bangladesh media, including online newspaper bdnews24.com, reported on the news as well, quoting a CTO of a local ISP, who confirmed the hack.

How can a site with 12 million users send more traffic than a site with 600 million users? When your site is specifically designed to do nothing but send traffic. StumbleUpon may be small compared to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, but it sends the most social media traffic around the web according to the latest numbers by StatCounter.

StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp is excited about it, announcing it to the world via Twitter at 1am EST this morning:

A record-breaking 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over New Year’s weekend, the social network announced Tuesday afternoon.

The news follows a much bigger announcement made Monday: namely, that Facebook has received $450 million in a new round of funding from Goldman Sachs and $50 million from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies.

Some users of Microsoft Hotmail are starting off the new year scrambling to get back e-mails of old. A chorus of frantic users has posted complaints on Microsoft’s online forum that all of their messages have disappeared.

“Please help me get them back,” wrote one user under the moniker ‘Zacgore’ in a post dated Saturday. “All my kids’ info and pictures are in there!”

Others complain that the majority of the e-mail in their inboxes was sent to their deleted mail folders instead. It is unclear from the posts how widespread the problem is. The free Web-based e-mail service is the world’s most used with about 360 million users globally, according to comScore Inc.

Windows Live support technicians have said in numerous threads that the Hotmail team is aware of the problem and working on a fix.

Skype went down for several hours Dec. 22, the result of a crashing of servers linked by peer-to-peer technology. Millions of VOIP users were affected in worst outage since 2007.

Skype suffered a serious server outage Dec. 22 that left swaths of its 560 million or so worldwide users without PC calling capabilities for most of the day.

Skype, the VOIP service people use to make free and low-cost long-distance calls from their PCs and phones, began going down for users around 11 a.m. EDT, according to ReadWriteWeb.

Users of Google’s Android phones, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S, use more data services than those with other smartphones, threatening to choke wireless network capacity, an industry study showed.

The growing popularity of Android-operated phones — made by companies including Asian vendors HTC Corp and Samsung Electronics — comes as handsets look set to overtake computers as the most used device for browsing the Web.

Wireless operators are keen on raising revenue from Internet browsing and the social networking boom as revenue from traditional voice calls decline, but they are facing increasingly congested networks.

Fearful of losing customers, only a few operators have publicly admitted to the problem of keeping pace with data traffic, but the majority is experiencing difficulties.

Internet activists defied efforts to end their online assaults against institutions seen as enemies of WikiLeaks on Thursday, promising more cyber attacks on targets starting with PayPal.

The campaign to avenge WikiLeaks against those who have obstructed its operations, calling itself Operation Payback, has already temporarily brought down the websites of credit-card giants Visa and MasterCard, and of the Swedish government.

A succession of U.S. institutions has withdrawn services from WikiLeaks after the website published thousands of sometimes embarrassing secret U.S. diplomatic reports that have caused strains between Washington and several allies.

Online retail and web-hosting powerhouse Amazon last week stopped hosting WikiLeaks’ website, and on Thursday it briefly became the main target of the pro-WikiLeaks campaigners — before they admitted it was too big for them, for the moment.

“We cannot attack Amazon, currently. The previous schedule was to do so, but we don’t have enough forces,” read one message on Twitter.

The activists said they would instead attack PayPal, which has suspended the WikiLeaks account that the organization had used to collect donations. MasterCard and Visa had also become targets after stopping processing donations.

At 1:10 pm EST, the websites of PayPal, Amazon — a key Christmas shopping destination — MasterCard and Visa all appeared to be functioning normally.

Source: Reuters

Facebook said it had removed the activists’ Operation Payback page on Thursday because it was promoting a distributed denial of service attack — a form of freezing websites by bombarding them with requests that is illegal in many countries.

The campaign also disappeared briefly from Twitter before reappearing in a different guise. Twitter declined to comment.