Computer analysts are going berserk on the arrival of the first virus capable of infecting the Macintosh Operating System. MacOS has always been seen as less susceptible to viruses, in contrast with Microsoft Windows. This illusion has now been unearthed, leaving the Mac community at least a bit shocked. The virus is called A-leap (or Oompa Loompa) and comes disguised as an image file.
Apple has not released any comment to date.
Mozilla is seemingly addressing security patches a lot faster than its competitor Microsoft. In 2005, it took Microsoft at least 38 days to address a publicly known and actively used exploit. Unused exploits took MS 256 days to patch. Firefox, on the other hand, only took 16 days to seal comparable vulnerabilities.
The difference lies within Firefox’ open nature. The public knows about the flaws and is allowed to look into the code, possibly even contributing to the patch. Aside from this fact, there’s also the the market-share factor. Internet Explorer still owns 85% of the browser-market, making it much more of a target to hackers, because of this fact IE experiences substantially more security issues.
Whichever browser you choose, keeping your software up to date is a must.
Canonical, the leading sponsor of the most successful community-driven Linux distro ‘Ubuntu’ and Linspire (another key distro) have decided to work together. Upcoming Linspire releases will be based on Ubuntu, instead of Debian. Linspire will continue to mix open source with commercial drivers and applications for a nice out-of-the-box feeling. Consequentially, Linspire has announced that Ubuntu will be the first external distro to benefit from its CNR technology.
Great news!
LinSpire/FreeSpire has announced they’ve developed an inter-distribution version of their CNR-technology, which should bring installing applications on Linux on par with Windows and the Mac. CNR is a website that syncs with the most popular Linux Distro’s (currently supported: Debian, Fedora, LinSpire/FreeSpire, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) and shields the user away from dubious package managers and repositories — providing a uniform installing experience across any of the [currently] supported distributions.
Find more at cnr.com.
Everyone’s quite excited about this and can’t wait for it to be adopted by the mainstream Linux distros — and so am I. Now lets hope it’ll work as promised.
Good work.
IsoHunt, one of the larger BitTorrent Tracker sites is back. The MPAA filed a lawsuit because of the large amounts of illegal content that’s available on IsoHunt (and ANY other tracker site). After being offline for 4 days, they somehow managed to get back online. Good.
Whilst it is truthful that there’s a bunch of illegal content available, it is not IsoHunt putting these files up — it’s people like you and I — IsoHunt is a search engine. Outside of copyrighted stuff, you can also find other — legal — files, like Linux distributions and other free content.
Ever tried to insert a flash animation into a valid XHTML webpage? I certainly have, and it always breaks your markup. The standard markup flash uses to render its animations stems from an ancient era of semantically misused tags and properties. There must be a better way, I hope…
Several methods have independently been developed, each with their own benefits. There are two major techniques to choose from: the first being the “Flash Satay” method, the other kinda remains nameless. Let’s start with the Satay method.
The full directives are listed at the notorious A List Apart website.
In short, this method basically incorporates a container movie, into which you load the actual animation, preserving your content, with a friendly wrapper. This produces fairly nice markup, but it’s kind of a hassling experience — nonetheless effective.
The other technique uses the omni-valid tag called “object”, which is recognized by [nearly] all major browsers. No container file is used: you provide the user with an image containing a friendly error message. This is the way I do things. It’s a clean thing to do, but leaves a white backdrop on transparent framed flash movies (like those from YouTube). I’m certain there’s a way to cure this, but I haven’t had the (uhm) chance to look into it yet.
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="yourflash.swf" width="288" height="128"> <param name="movie" value="images/banner.swf" /> <img src="error.gif" width="288" height="128" alt="banner" /> </object>
Either path you choose, there are always drawbacks. For instance, when a visitor doesn’t already have Flash installed, he/she will not get a direct link to Adobe’s website (unless you make the effort of defining it yourself). Nevertheless, standards compliance is the way to go, although I know we’d all appreciate an out-of-the box solution — someday soon.
Toshiba is currently drafting a new breed of HD DVD discs which should top Blu-Ray’s maximum capacity barrier by one gigabyte (totalling 51GB of space) – hence removing the claim that HD DVD is inferior to Blu-Ray, capacity-wise. It will incorporate three (3) layers, 17 gigs each. Toshiba claims this disc could hold up to seven (7) hours of high definition video.
It’s not sure if this disc will be backwards compatible with the older generation of HD DVDs.
ArsTechnica: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070116-8628.html
Digg story: http://digg.com/tech_news/High_capacity_HD_DVD_disc