Version 3.0.7 of the popular Firefox Web browser, released yesterday, fixes some security issues and is more stable than its immediate predecessor, according to the official Mozilla.org launch advisory. The advisory rates the patch as ‘critical’… Mozilla developers identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. […]

The European community has launched a major initiative to address the growing online traffic in child pornography. The European Financial Coalition (EFC), announced earlier this week, is composed of online transaction technology giants MasterCard, Microsoft, PayPal, VISA Europe in partnership with anti-porn organizations Missing Children Europe and Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). […]

The Obama administration has released documents from the Bush Whitehouse, written following 9/11, that approved (or expressed legal justification for) virtually unlimited government tapping of phones and the Internet, restrictions on free speech and the use of the U.S. military at home against suspected terrorists. The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) this week released two […]

Apple today announced updates to its desktop computer family, including a whole new slate of iMacs with faster processors and twice the memory than their predecessors plus a new Mac Mini with powerful new integrated graphics. There’s also a new Mac Pro line featuring your choice of four- or eight-core system architecture. The new Mac […]

No, really! Today’s date, expressed in purely mathematical terms, is ‘3/3/09’. And, as most of us will recall, three is the square root of nine. That makes it Square Root Day! “[Square Root] days are like calendar comets. You wait and wait and wait for them, then they brighten up your day and — poof […]

Yahoo! says it spent (US)$79 million last year fighting off the then-unwelcome overtures by Microsoft (MS) to take over the financially troubled company’s search business. The figures were buried in a mandatory annual report by Yahoo! to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which monitors the activities of all publicly traded corporations in the […]

Japan’s largest cell service provider, DoCoMo, has suspended sales of the Blackberry Bold smart phone following reports that the device can overheat during recharging. The company reports that it has sold about 4,000 of the new phones and, of those, about 30 users have reported overheating problems. Apparently, the phone’s keyboard area can heat up […]

We are all familiar with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. But, now, the console gaming world has come up with a new wrinkle on repetitive strain injuries. The British Journal of Dermatology reports that a new skin disorder associated with intense console game playing has been discovered by Swiss researchers. Dr. Vincent Piguet, who teaches at the […]

Yahoo!’s search business is officially up for sale (or a partnership, or doing some other kind of deal that would save the company from financial doom). “We are not opposed to doing a deal that would maximize the value of the business in one way or another, be it a partnership or be it a […]

Where does the time go? The ubiquitous bar code quietly celebrated its 30th birthday this week. Bar codes are used for inventory control, process control in the manufacturing sector, automated mail sorting and even traffic control in the rail and container transportation industries. But the average person is almost certainly more familiar with the bar […]

Apple boasts that it has thousands and thousands and thousands of free and pay iPhone apps at its online App Store. But how many are actually downloaded by users? And how many of those are actually used? Mobile apps developer PinchMedia has the surprising answer. According to a recent Pinch survey of 30 million app […]

A coalition of 70 Internet-based companies including search giant Google, retail giant Amazon and Internet phone giant Skype has called on the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to ban practices employed by Internet access providers known collectively as ‘traffic shaping’. Traffic shaping is commonly used, by some access providers, to reduce the impact […]