Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
Apple have released a Security Patched version of Safari for Windows (v 3.0.1). The patch fixes security vulnerabilities in Safari I wrote about earlier this week.
There is still no fix for the bug I highlighted earlier this week (clicking on the x to close a window with multiple tabs doesn’t alert you and goes ahead and closes all tabs).
It is still beta software and should be used with extreme care for the moment.
The download links are on the Safari Download page.
via infoworld
Irish hosting company Hosting365 went dark this morning at around 10:30am according to reports I am receiving. The last time this occurred was last July when there was a fire in a nearby ESB substation if memory serves.
I contacted Hosting365’s Marketing Director, Ed Byrne, about this incident and Ed informed me that:
We are back now. I need to get a full report but we did have a serious issue while electrical engineers we working on the UPS. Human error, incredibly annoying. Will tell all openly when I know.
As I write this, Hosting365’s main site is still offline and not answering pings.
UPDATE - Ed contacted me again to say that he is updating the blog on hosting365status.com with info as he gets it.
[Disclosure - I am a director of CIX - a company building a data centre in Cork]
I got an email from Brian Cleland notifying me that the next Irish BarCamp, BarCamp Belfast is taking place in Queens University Belfast on Saturday June 30th.
Sign up on the wiki now if you are going to attend.
Mozilla recently released Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 5 (aka Firefox 3). This is the up and coming version of Firefox and although still in Alpha, I have been running it for several days now and it is quite stable.
According to the release notes:
Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 5 introduces several new features:
- Bookmarks portion of Places has been enabled
- New crash reporting system, Breakpad. It’s enabled by default on Mac OS X, on about 50% of Windows installations, and not yet available on Linux.
- You can also view crash reports at this site.
- New Javascript-based Password Manager. More details available here.
- Support for Growl notification under Mac OS X
- Support for native controls on Mac OS X
- Miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes
Most of these fixes are under-the-hood, so the new Firefox is remarkably similar to the old one!
The major obvious differences are it appears slightly faster (though this could be due to the lack of plugins!) and the pages render better. The major downside is that Gran Paradiso is a memory hog, using 1.15gb of virtual memory on my MacBook Pro! But that is with four windows and fifty tabs open.
Upgrading, as always, disables most of the plugins. I have mixed feelings about that. Some plugins I love and hate having to go without (Adblock, for example) but the majority of the plugins I had in Firefox 2 were downloaded to try out and never used again!
Overall, if you are happy running Alpha software, try Gran Paradiso. You will like the improvements and there are very few downsides.
According to an article on the BBC’s website, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is to receive an Order of Merit from the Queen of England.
I don’t think there is anyone who would argue with that award. Not alone did Tim Berner-Lee invent the World Wide Web, but he made no attempt to patent it and that fact was one of the factors in its success.
Frankly, I don’t think there is a single person who has done as much to change the world for the better as Tim Berners-Lee.
Wow that was fast!
Apple released a beta of their Safari browser last night to run on Windows and a few short hours later, vulnerabilities which allow remote code execution have been published already!
It looks like Safari for Windows was released a little early. Whatever about the small functionality bug I found, the ability to run code remotely on your Windows machine is a critical vulnerability. Don’t use Safari on a Windows machine until these exploits have been fixed.
Hard to know where the blame lies for this - Thor Larholm blames Apple’s ignorance of Windows:
On the OS X platform Apple has enjoyed the same luxury and the same curse as Internet Explorer has had on the Windows platform, namely intimate operating system knowledge. The integration with the originally intended operating system is tightly defined, but the breadth of knowledge is crippled when the software is released on other systems and mistakes and mishaps occur.
While some commenters on his site blame Microsoft:
I don’t know, the way you described it seems more like a hole in the way Windows handles things than a Safari hole. Does a Windows API call launch a shell process, or does Safari manually go and run a command line program? If it’s the Windows API for URL handling, then it’s clearly broken. Every program that needs to grab a URL should not be responsible for patching holes in Windows.
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