Stan's List

Flash Player 9 now includes H.264 standard video support, same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities. More …

Web-browser, e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing all in one application.

What’s new in SeaMonkey - 1.1.7

* Security and stability fixes
* The problems with running SeaMonkey from read-only application directories have been fixed in this release. (Bug 389136).

A very brief note as to what is new in Firefox 2.0.0.11.

Stability Update:
This release corrects a problem that was found in the previous release, Firefox 2.0.0.10.

Version 2.0.0.10 fixed the following security issues:

MFSA 2007-39 Referer-spoofing via window.location race condition
MFSA 2007-38 Memory corruption vulnerabilities (rv:1.8.1.10)
MFSA 2007-37 jar: URI scheme XSS hazard

All three are rated “High Vulnerabilities” by Mozilla. Download page.

Manuals have not evolved to match the web’s fix-it pages. Maybe it is because it is not practical. What is important is that users have available substantial resources for fixing most anything. The New York Times has a number of suggestions about what you can expect to fix yourself. The article gives some reasons why you might want to have your iPod repaired by a 3rd party or yourself rather than Apple which might not return the very same iPod to you. More …

Everyone recognizes the iPhone as a mobile Mac. Maybe 3G will make it more like a Mac. Nokia, who controls an abnormal percentage of cell phone market, is acquiring web technology. Do you use your cell phone for web browsing? Not many do. Most have to be iPhone owners. With Edge I do not get excited. The lack of Flash and Java restrict where I surf. This New York Times Technology article is a good read about where the technology is going and how long it will take to get there. More …

WebKit is the open source web engine that is the bases for Safari, Dashboard, Mail, other applications. This open source project begin as part of KHTML, who provided Apple the original source code for Safari 1.0.

In an blog posting entitled Ten new things in WebKit 3, the WebKit Open-Source Project details the features in this latest Safari release:

01. Enhanced rich-text editing
02. Faster JavaScript and DOM
03. Faster page loading
04. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
05. XPath
06. New and improved XML technologies
07. Styleable form controls
08. Advanced CSS Styling
09. Reduced memory use
10. Web developer tools

The 2.0.0.8 release fixed some 200 issues, but accidentally regressed a few things. Most users won’t see any difference or experience any problems, and those 200 fixes make the 2.0.0.8 update very valuable, but you should never have to choose functionality over security. The specific problems are:

* Bug 400406 - Firefox will ignore the “clear” CSS property when used beneath a box that is using the “float” property. There is a temporary workaround JS/CSS code available for web developers with affected layouts.
* Bug 396695 - Add-ons are disabled after updating. Users can fix this problem by opening their profile folder and removing three files (extensions.rdf, extensions.ini and extensions.cache)
* Bug 400421 - Removing a single area element from an image map will cause the entire map to disappear. There is no workaround available at this time.

Firefox 2.0.0.9

Flash Player 9, which addresses an issue with flash uploads in Leopard. Here is what else is new:

• Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs (new Aug. 21).
• Enhancements to full-screen mode to use hardware scaling for improved video performance and quality on systems running Windows 2000 and newer or Mac OS X 10.2 and newer.
• Faster rendering of vector graphics on multi-core CPUs.
• Higher quality and performance for downscaling large bitmaps (SWF 9 only).
• Support for caching common platform components, such as the Flex framework, to reduce average application sizes. This feature is enabled in the Flex 3 beta available on Adobe Labs.
Flash Player 9 download page

(Prior versions of) RealNetworks RealPlayer are prone to multiple memory-corruption vulnerabilities that arise when the application processes specially crafted files.

Successfully exploiting these issues will allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code within the context of the affected application. Failed exploit attempts will cause a denial-of-service condition.

Update to the latest version for your OS, to close this vulnerability.

RealNetworks is making available product upgrades that contain security bug fixes. We have received no reports of any machines actually compromised as a result of the now-remedied vulnerabilities.

Check which version you have and see if you are vulnerable.

If necessary, get the latest RealPlayer