A severe security vulnerability has been found in versions of the Flash Player prior to 7.0.19.0 Many sites require flash player in order to view various features on the site (depending on the site this ranges from commercials to the site navigation.) A specially crafted swf file on a remote website could allow the attacker to run arbitrary code (anything they want) on the local machine. In other words this could be an avenue for viral/spyware infection or trojan activity.
Category: Software
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Microsoft to bundle anti-spyware with vista
Well it shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but Microsoft is expected to bundle their anti-spyware product (which will be renamed windows defender) with Vista when the next version of the OS ships. It’s probably not a big surprise given the headaches that people have with spyware and the potential for a subscription update service. For most people this will probably be the only anti-spyware application they have.
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Firefox market share still growing
This should have made it into the last update, but…. it didn’t.
According to onestat.com and reported at desktoplinux.com the firefox browser is continuing to make market share gains. Now it stands at around 11% market share worldwide and 14% in the US.
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Adsense notifier update
For those of us that have adsense on our sites and use firefox… the adsense notifier extension has been updated to handle the new login system for google adsense, and it should notify the user of terms of service updates.
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Transgaming Cedaga 5 due to arrive Tuesday November 8
I’ve just made it back over to the Transgaming site to check in on the release date for cedage 5.0 (formerly transgaming winex). It looks as though Tuesday November 8th at 2am (eastern Time zone (utc – 5)) will be the day they’re counting towards. I looked the other day and couldn’t get to their site, so I wondered if the release had already happened. It appears not so, and hopefully they’re bracing their servers for the release.
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OpenOffice.org 2
Of course, I alluded to it in my Mandriva 2006 article, OpenOffice.Org 2.0 has officially escaped (been released). Bringing a nice shiny new gui for a database (BASE) a bit quicker load times, lot’s of other improvements.
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Mandriva 2006
Of course, another bit of news the last couple of weeks was the release of Mandriva 2006 by Mandriva Linux. Of course Mandriva is the former Mandrake, which merged/bought Connectiva and then acquired Lycoris, so this is the first release to start drawing on the extended talent pool that they’ve now acquired. From what I’ve seen it looks VERY nice. I’ve got the isos on a removable hard drive and have been looking for a chance to get the install going on my laptop.
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New wine and new bottles this month for linux users to run windows applications
Well, one of the big items in the last span in linux news has been related to WINE… (Wine Is Not an Emulator). WINE of course in the context of linux is a layer of compatibility to allow Windows applications to run under linux without a virtual machine such as vmware or one of the various “run windows on linux” solutions like win4lin or qemu, etc.
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Free Linspire download through September 6
It looks as though Linspire 5 is available for free download through September 6. A review of the release is available here. According to desktop linux, this is in part related to freespire, which has been requested to change it’s name. Currently the codename is “squiggle”.