Mozilla, the firm behind the open-source web browser, which is also the most popular currently, had shared that it would release a Firefox 3.6 version in December 2009, but now, the Mozilla site now states that "ship Firefox 3.6" is a goal it expects to reach during 2010's first quarter.

Als...

                         

 Whenever we write a glowing story aboutFirefox or Mozilla, the ExtremeTech postbag has a tendency to fill up with letters and missives from concerned readers who are worried about Mozilla’s close ties with Google. Almost the entirety of Mozilla’s income — 97% of $104 million — arrives in the form of royalties from the Firefox search box, and the lion’s share (86%, $85 million) of those royalties are paid by the default search engine: Google.

In November 2011...

Google has announced that it will buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. It has been approved by the directors of both companies and should pass regulatory approval by the end of the year. With some 19,000 employees, revenue of $11 billion, and assets of $6 billion, Motorola Mobility is certainly not the biggest manufacturer of its kind — both Samsung and Nokia are many times larger, both in terms of revenue and market share — but this doesn’t make Google’s purchase any less signifi...

Now, engaging in some online jujitsu, the ACLU of Northern California is employing a cautionary Facebook quiz of its own to illustrate how quizzes that may seem "p...

In their July 2011 U.S. Search Engine Rankings, the company revealed that Google finished first place with 65.1%, down 0.4% from June. Second-place Yahoo! gained ground, increasing 0.2% from June to July and finishing last month with a 16.1% share.

Microsoft's Bing search engine held steady in third place with a 14.4% share,...

The system is called Telex, and it is the brainchild of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo in Canada. They will present it Aug. 12 at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco.

"This has the potential to shift the arms race regarding censor...

Facebook wants to be a part of everything we do on the Web. The company's philosophy is that the Internet is more fun when it's shared. In some ways social networks are like parties that never end. The problem is, we can't be sure who else Facebook has invited to the party, and whether these unknown guests can be trusted.

This week there was a minor dust-up about our friends' phone numbers being exposed to strangers. On Wednesday the official Facebook page explained that the feature has been i...

Google will start to populate individual users' search results with posts that have been shared publicly by their connections on Google+, the company said Friday.

The new feature, which works only when users are signed in to their Google accounts, aims to tailor results to individual tastes. The idea is if a user posts a note on Google+ about a link--be it to a restaurant's Web site, a news story, or a retail store's site--their Google+ connections are going to be more likely to want to see th...

Gaming could be a major weapon in the growing social networking war:

Google+ took a big swing at its most prominent competitor this week when it added gaming to the fledgling site.

The new social network announced Thursday that it is gradually rolling out gaming capabilities to the site and adding highly popular games like Angry Birds. The rollout started Thursday, although the company didn't say how long it would take before the games would be available to all of its users.

The move to add game...

Key weaknesses in system are fixed, say operators:

As the phone hacking saga continues to grip the country, mobile operators are saying that spying on someone's voicemail messages wouldn't be possible today as several weaknesses in the systems have been eliminated.

Reporters and private investigators working for the News of the World and Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., are accused of repeatedly illegally accessed the voicemail messages of more than 4,000 people -- from royal family m...

But is it a hoax?

The hacking group Anonymous is allegedly threatening to "destroy" Facebook on 5 November, accusing the social networking site of spying on users, cooperating with authoritarian governments and abusing people's privacy.

The threat is contained in a video that was posted on YouTube on July 16, which has now been viewed more than 700,000 times and has been getting more commen...

Criminals are using psychology to spread mobile malware:

Social engineers have been using various dirty tricks to fool people for centuries. Social engineering, the art of gaining access to buildings, systems or data by exploiting human psychology, rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking techniques, is as old as crime itself and has been used in many ways for decades.

For the past...

Attacks such as the ones detailed by McAfee this week in a report are frequent and hard to detect:

The strange e-mails arrived in executives' inboxes around the same time that the Australian oil company was negotiating a deal with a Chinese energy company.

The e-mails had the same structure and format as those sent around the company and were baited with text that appeared to refer to a supposed continuing discussion between executives. The messages looked authentic from a nontechnical perspect...

Many UK admins lack the skills, resources and time necessary to keep firewalls secure from well-drilled hackers, one of the country’s loading penetration testing experts has claimed while launching a new defence training course.

The problems start with expert oversight of the firewall and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) logs, said former head of penetration testing at the Royal Air Airforce, Steve Armstrong, who will lead the new SANS course, 464 Hacker Detection for Systems Administrators....

HSBC and Cathay Pacific share news inaccessible:

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange suspended trading in several shares yesterday following a glitch in its online news service that may have been caused by hacking, according to Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) chief executive Charles Li.

The glitch came on a day when several firms announced earnings, preventing investors from accessing company announcements made during the midday break.

Company that started it all says times have moved on:

After Apple's Steve Jobs began referring to the iPad as a "post-PC" device, an IBM executive has added fuel to the fire with one of its chief technology officers, Mark Dean, claiming the company did the right thing in getting out of the PC business.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM 5150 PC, which was widely considered to be the beginning of the PC era. IBM, for years, lead the way in ensuring a PC in every home, a campaign which i...

Watson also tackles some of the greatest problems in understanding text:

?If you've been following the Jeopardy-IBM Watson faceoff this week, then you have witnessed a breakthrough in analytics and in new architectures for mining and analysing diverse types of information in a single application. Watson and its successors may usher in a new approach to computing, combining as it does, so many disparate techniques to create a "thinking" machine. IBM has combined deep NLP with machine learning, ...

Web browsing data appears flawed however:

Microsoft's claim that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and IE9 beat the usage share gains posted by Chrome last month don't hold up, according to the data the company cited Monday.

But the matter may be moot: Overall, IE again lost ground to Google Chrome and Apple's Safari in the battle for browser hearts and minds.

“Friends don't let friends use IE6"

“Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6," Microsoft said last week in launching a new site that tracks the progress of pushing IE6 market share below 1%.

Microsoft speeds up browser development cycle with Internet Explorer 10 platform push:;

Screenshots of Apple's unreleased operating system reveal a microphone icon:

A few new screenshots hint that iOS 5, just released in beta to developers, may be have the much rumoured speech-to-text functionality.

The images were sent to 9to5Mac from a “reliable source” and show a microphone icon next to the space key in the iOS keyboard. 9to5Mac reports that users can activate the new feature (when it’s available) by clicking on the microphone icon and talking. The software will then popu...

News International in urgent IT security clampdown:

A fake ‘Murdoch dead’ news report, placed on newspaper The Sun’s website during a hacking attack last night by Lulz Security, has prompted a massive IT security crackdown at parent company News International.

Computerworld UK.com has learned that the hackers injected a preformatted HTML file into an old internal server at News International, which is used to serve a text entry window on screen in the company's content management system. ...

Microsoft and Google, never the best of friends, are starting to get nasty in their fight over whether enterprises should use Microsoft Exchange and Office, or move to Google Apps. Microsoft this week claimed that enterprises who move to Google Apps pay a hefty "Google Tax," while Google claims that businesses can save money and be more innovative by using Google Docs. Who's right?

Tom Rizzo, senior director of Microsoft Online Services, claims in his blog that enterprises pay a big Google Tax...

Google+, which is less than two months old, said Thursday afternoon that it's beginning to roll out a games button at the top of users' streams. The highly popular Angry Birds is one of the first games to be added to the site, along with Zombie Lane and Edgeworld.

Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of engineering at Google, announced the gaming news in a blog post. Gundotra noted that users will be able to click on a Games button that will be placed above their streams. The button takes them ...

Celebrating the most significant moments in website history

Tim Berners-Lee published the first ever website on 6 August 1991 - we look back at some of the key milestones of the past 20 years that have helped to make the web such a ubiquitous part of everyday life.

1989: The web is born

Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal at Cern in March 1989. This became the foundation for the W...