One of the more bizarre architectural elements of HTML that may still be excused with the phrase, "This behavior is by design," is the ability for a floating text frame using the <IFRAME> element to be rendered effectively invisible (or so miniature as to not be seen), and then to run JavaScript code. It's a trigger for a disaster; and pressing that trigger tens of thousands of times today is a particularly virulent SQL injection attack, the evidence of which can be detected through a simple Google search: Wednesday afternoon, Betanews discovered about 82,800 compromised pages appearing in Google's index just for one of the actual malicious triggers -- probably just a fraction of the actual number of cases. And there are multiple triggers.

The plague was first reported last Friday by security services provider ScanSafe. In an update filed today, its engineers report that as the number of infected sites grows, their geography becomes more pronounced instead of less. It's as if the source of the injection, whatever it is, is targeting Chinese sites.

Continue reading →

It's been about three months since Skyfire officially launched on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 3rd Edition, and this week the popular mobile browser has been given a general performance upgrade.

Skyfire's Senior Director of Product Management Robert Oberhofer said in his team blog that Version 1.1 has an upgraded algorithm to shorten load times, improved reconnect (the browser disconnects from pages to save battery), support for WML markup language, and upgrades to its support for Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight. This final upgrade is central to Skyfire, as it is one of the best mobile browsers for watching streaming video.

Continue reading →

This past year, what has very clearly distinguished one company's cloud services from another has been their intended uses. Whereas Microsoft Windows Azure has been a custom applications platform, and Salesforce.com has built a business logic platform around Force.com, Amazon Web services has been about deploying entire servers in the cloud, letting customers lease the processing time and bandwidth to deploy their own Web fronts on Amazon's hardware.

Up to now, the question for AWS customers has been to deploy or not to deploy; but this morning, data center architects will be asking how much to deploy. With the rollout of what it's calling Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, the service will enable a new class of customers to deploy limited resources into the cloud, and then secure and administer those resources through the customers' own firewalls and admin software. Amazon announced the initial beta of VPC to select customers this morning.

Continue reading →

On the eve of easily the most important Federal Communications Commission open hearing since being sworn in as its chairman, Julius Genachowski is taking the strong personal stand he was expected to take, in favor of equal and open access to Internet services. Returning to the heart of the original debate from which the term "net neutrality" was coined, Genachowski told the Capitol Hill daily The Hill yesterday that he remains committed to enforcing net neutrality principles, assuming they actually become law.

"One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles," the FCC Chairman told The Hill.

Continue reading →

For the last few months, there's been a steady stream of rumors about Motorola's forthcoming Android handsets; speculating on form factor, carrier and OS version. Earlier this week, the Schaumburg, Illinois telecommunications company sent out invitations to a San Francisco press event on Thursday, September 10 adorned with the lime green Android logo.

Since the invitations didn't contain many details, the rumors have thusly picked up steam. It is widely expected that the two devices shown on September 10 will be the "Morrison" on T-Mobile, and the "Sholes" on Verizon.

Continue reading →

Like Sony Pictures and Lionsgate Entertainment before it, Paramount Pictures has agreed to supply its films to Redbox DVD rental kiosks. The $1 per night rentals that Redbox offers have caused a good deal of controversy among motion picture studios and has resulted in legal actions on the part of 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros., both of whose opinions are clearly on record: Cheap rentals devalue their DVDs.

Paramount's availability on Redbox will only be a trial, where the studio receives detailed rental metrics from the kiosks until the end of 2009. The studio will then evaluate the impact and viability of Redbox, to decide if it wants to stick with the program. At the end of the four-month trial, Paramount will have the option to extend it to 2014, with an "out clause" after two years.

Continue reading →

If you're collecting reasons people have given for avoiding Windows 7 purchases and upgrades, add this one in a little shelf all to itself: It is a threat to your civil liberties, according to the Free Software Foundation.

Today is the official launch day of an FSF fundraising campaign whose stated goal is to bombard employees of 499 of the world's Fortune 500 companies (the one they left out probably wouldn't make any difference) with letters claiming, among other assertions, that Microsoft is engaging in a clandestine spy operation, masquerading under euphemistic names such as "Windows Genuine Advantage" (one example the FSF lists), invading homes, offices, and even schools.

Continue reading →

The e-reader market is hot, and everyone loves the competition. Thanks to the heightened activity in the sector, market research group NPD's DisplaySearch this morning forecasts an astonishing growth in e-paper displays.

This year, 22 million units were shipped, resulting in $431 million in revenue. E-paper displays aren't limited to the Kindle/Reader set either, they're being used in cell phones, watches and clocks, advertisements, and more. Because of this, NPD forecasts a 64% compound annual growth rate in unit sales and a 41% growth rate in revenues. By that formula, the market will be worth $9.6 billion by 2018, with 1.8 billion e-paper displays shipped out for use.

Continue reading →

Download Opera 10 for Windows Release Candidate Build 1733 from Fileforum now.

"At Opera, we love speed," reads the beginning of a March 2009 blog post from Opera Software Product Analyst Roberto Mateu. "We work hard to make our browser faster with features that speeds you up."

Continue reading →

The world's largest torrent indexing site Mininova is the next site to fall to anti-piracy group Stichting BREIN, Dutch news services are reporting today.

A civil court order handed down today has given Mininova three months to remove all copyrighted works from its servers or face a €5 million fine. Stichting BREIN (lit: "The Brain Foundation"), which represents copyright holders, took action against The Pirate Bay earlier in the summer and won on similar grounds. However, that particular case is in appeal and awaiting its retrial on October 5.

Continue reading →

Nokia has been quite busy this week. In advance of Nokia World 09, the company introduced its first PC in more than 18 years and two new handsets (the 5800 navigation edition and the 5230.) Today, the Finnish mobile phone leader introduced Nokia Money, a mobile banking platform that will continue the company's advancement into the "wallet phone" model.

Working in cooperation with Obopay, Nokia Money will let users buy merchandise and pay bills with their mobile device.

Continue reading →

Skype's connection fee for placing calls to landline and mobile phones in certain countries will increase 100% on September 6th, the company's site now says.

For Skype users who are not on an unlimited calling plan, calls that connect to landline or cellular numbers incur a one-time connection fee and a per-minute charge.

Continue reading →

Google is not saying much today about a flaw discovered in the V8 JavaScript engine of its Chrome 2 stable Web browser, one which triggered an update that is being rolled out to Chrome users today. Amid what it is sharing today, however, is a surprising fact: Mozilla Security is being credited with the discovery.

Malicious JavaScript, Google says, can cause the Chrome browser to run arbitrary code, although that code may still be protected by the browser's "sandbox" -- its protected area of memory where running code has no access to system resources. However, it's conceivable that code running within the sandbox could provoke the user (by social means, perhaps by feigning a crash or system bug) to perform an action that may trigger a more damaging process delivered through a different payload, so Google treated the issue with a "High" severity rating.

Continue reading →

Foxit Reader, a free, lightweight PDF viewer and printer popular in our FileForum, has an evil twin.

Today, the Foxit Corporation warned that a malware claiming to be Foxit Reader for Macintosh has been perpetrating attacks on users thinking they were downloading an official version of the free PDF reader. The thing is, there is no Foxit Reader for OS X. The software is available for Windows, Windows Mobile, Embedded Linux, Desktop Linux, and U3.

Continue reading →

Microsoft's most recent Web-driven database technology is ADO.NET, although only the first three letters of its name have been a throwback to its predecessor: There's nothing "ActiveX" about ADO.NET whatsoever. Up to now, its purpose has been to expose data through HTTP Web services that can be utilized by JavaScript clients (read: common Web pages) as well as by .NET applications including Silverlight.

But that fact has kept the pairings of ADO.NET with ASP.NET, and PHP with MySQL, separate and distinct from one another.

Continue reading →