Opera has added a phishing filter to warn about fraudulent websites in its newest browser. Upon browsing to a website, Opera 9.1 will check the address against a database of possible scam websites. Fraudulent sites will be marked with a red exclamation point next to the address, while good sites will have a yellow padlock beside the address.
Skype may be good for something other than Internet calls. According to the Financial Times, the company is working on a peer-to-peer television service that could legally deliver videos to millions of users. Code-named 'The Venice Project', the service will stream videos and encrypt videos directly from the content owners and Skype hopes this will bypass copyright issues that have dogged other video sharing sites.
Yahoo has issued a patch for a vulnerability in Yahoo! Messenger that could allow attackers to crash chat sessions and execute code. The vulnerability was rated as "Highly Critical" by the Secunia security website and involved an ActiveX module inside of the popular chat program.
A new study shows that worldwide 1.25 million people are signing up for DSL every week and that the total number of subscribers has hit 173 million. The study also shows that there are more than 263 million broadband customers which include cable, fiber to home and other technologies.
Mozilla has rolled out a beta version of its upcoming Thunderbird 2.0 email program. The free client is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms and includes cosmetic enhancements along with keyword tagging of emails. Color-code keywords can now be added to emails which can then be sorted into virtual folders.
Google's latest member in its massive collection of search tools lets users forage through US patents, as the search giant launched the beta version of Google Patent Search late yesterday.
Microsoft has released a flurry of security updates to fix several critical vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and Adobe Flash Player. Exploit code for some of the vulnerabilities had already been released to the Internet. The code could have crashed or allowed hackers to take control of vulnerable computers.
Social security numbers and other personal information from over 800,000 students and faculty members at UCLA were accessed from a hacker that went in and out of the school's database for over a year, causing what security experts say is the largest-encompassing case of data theft at a North American university.
Microsoft today opened a private beta of its new enterprise voice communications server, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, to 2,500 IT professionals.
Hackers have posted up code that exploits a critical bug in Windows Media Player. The bug is in how Media Player opens an .ASX playlist and affects Media Player versions 9 and 10. Exploiting the bug could allow someone to take control of the computer.
Microsoft and third-party security sites are warning of a new "extremely critical" Microsoft Word vulnerability. Specially crafted Word documents could corrupt a computer's memory and allow attackers to gain system access. Both Windows and Macintosh computers are affected.
Santa Clara (CA) - Intel has announced that it built its first WiMAX baseband chip for laptops. The WiMAX Connect 2300 chip, combined with a radio antenna, could be a long-range replacement for 802.11 Wi-Fi and cellular networks by providing multi-megabit speeds over several kilometers. Intel has also incorporated multiple antennas to increase speed and signal strength.
Adobe is saying that its Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat programs contain code vulnerabilities which could crash or even allow hackers to gain control of computers. The vulnerabilities affect ActiveX control inside of Internet Explorer when a computer is running Adobe. Adobe rates the vulnerability as critical and says hackers could gain complete control of the system.
