Software-Programming

Programmers who aren't security savvy are coding SQL injection as a feature in some Web applications, putting users at risk when an application goes live or is distributed to affiliates of online advertising networks.

The coding is critical to the way the application runs. The problem is so pervasive that some security vendors, including TippingPoint, ship their intrusion prevention systems (IPS) with SQL injection protection filters disabled by default to avoid breaking applications.

Google Tuesday launched Version 3 of its Chrome Web browser, which keeps the pressure on competing tools by boosting JavaScript performance by 25% vs. the latest stable release. Improvements to tabs and video/audio handling round out the major new features in the release of Google Chrome, which can be downloaded here. The update comes about a year after Google Chrome made its debut. "This release comes hot on the heels of 51 developer, 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bugfixes in the past year," Google writes on its blog.

Belarc Advisor (free) is one of the handiest programs going, especially for IT types. This program creates an HTML report that not only tells you everything you could possibly want to know about the hardware on your system (except perhaps why it doesn't work correctly), but also what you might need to know about the software that's installed. Gathered info includes motherboard type and revision, CPU and GPU info, drive space, Microsoft hotfixes, operating system revision, and Web browser vulnerabilities, as well as third-party software installs.

Flickr has added a new feature called galleries to showcase photos--and this time not just your own shots.

Galleries, announced on Monday, lets Flickr members assemble collections of up to 18 photos. The photos are shown on the page along with the gallery curator's comments. Flickr has a reason for the 18-image limit: it wants to emphasize quality, not quantity.

Google is testing a service that will let newshounds read Web pages of magazines and newspapers like they were flipping through an old-fashioned paper copy.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, plans to demonstrate Google Fast Flip later on Monday at TechCrunch50. It's a Google Labs project that expands the presence of publishers on Google News, organizing and displaying authorized screen grabs of news stories--not snippets--within the Google News site.

One year ago, The New York Times and ProPublica filled a grant proposal in the Knight News Challenge 2009 competition. DocumentCloud was awarded $719,500 and the mission to build a document-based application which should make it easy to organize and examine documents. With highly expensive processing tasks to accomplish in parallel, DocumentCloud decided to implement its own cloud solution in 100% Ruby: CloudCrowd.

DocumentCloud primarly uses CloudCrowd for PDF processing, but it can be used for other expensive tasks such as:

A Spanish company has released an upgraded version of a powerful software application that can be used to perform intelligence gathering on a company's Web site and network.

The application, called FOCA (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives), will download all documents that have been posted on a Web site and extract the metadata, or the information generated about the document itself. It often reveals who created the document, e-mail address, internal IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and much more.

I’ve had my PSP almost a year now and I still can’t adjust to how often new firmware is released for the PSP. Case in point, firmware version 6.00 is officially go for Sony’s handheld system. The PlayStation.Blog announced the update’s forthcoming debut yesterday (September 9, 2009), and it’s now available today. Though I suppose it has been quite a while since a new update, since firmware 5.55 was released a month or so ago on the SMT: Persona, Tales of VS. and G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra UMDs.

Social networks are rife with examples of users failing to understand the privacy implications of posting sensitive information online.

In February, for example, school officials in Wisconsin suspended a teacher who posted on Facebook a picture of herself pointing a gun at the camera. In April, the Swiss insurance company Nationale Suisse fired an employee after she called in sick and then posted updates on the same site. Others have raised concerns about users handing so much personal information to social-networking companies themselves.

If you’re on a Mac and you use Facebook frequently, you’re going to love this. We’ve stumbled across a new experimental application being developed in-house at Facebook that’s called “Desktop Notifications“. It’s exactly what it sounds like — the application sits in your menubar at the top of the screen, giving you easy access to your News Feed, recent Wall Posts, and messages.