Software-Programming

It’s not everyday you see a Windows Mobile smartphone running a Linux-based mobile operating system. But, in the crazy (crazy cool, that is) world of handset hackery, anything is possible. So, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Android hackers have ported Android OS to the HTC Touch Diamond (Diamond) and HTC Touch Pro (Raphael). The new Android OS ROM has been posted to the HTC-Android forums for anyone willing to use their previous-gen smartphones as Android guinea pics.

Saying that it still plans to launch Firefox 3.5 by the end of the month, Mozilla Saturday issued the new browser's first release candidate, the most stable and polished build delivered so far in the year-long development process.

Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate (RC) was the first milestone since Beta 4, which Mozilla released in late April, and the second to carry the "3.5" label. The upgrade was originally called Firefox 3.1, but the company decided in March that it had added enough new features to justify the larger bump in number from last summer's Firefox 3.0.

In considering the ramifcations of a slow denial of service attack against particular services, rather than flooding networks, a concept emerged that would allow a single machine to take down another machine's web server with minimal bandwidth and side effects on unrelated services and ports. The ideal situation for many denial of service attacks is where all other services remain intact but the webserver itself is completely inaccessible. Slowloris was born from this concept, and is therefore relatively very stealthy compared to most flooding tools.

The game of cat-and-mouse continues between hackers at the iPhone Dev Team and Apple. As we near the launch of iPhone OS 3.0, the Dev Team's pineapple-faced spokesperson, MuscleNerd, broadcast on Tuesday night a qik livestream showing off ultrasn0w, the updated version of the Dev Team's iPhone software jailbreak. MuscleNerd said in the video the new jailbreak applies to any iPhone 3G running 3.0.

When Palm began selling the Pre smartphone June 6, one of the features it touted was the ability to sync your Apple iTunes library to your Pre, but Apple is now saying, “Not so fast.”

In a statement posted on its Web site June 16, Apple notes that “some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players.”

Writing buggy applications is a cinch--for decades, the world's software developers have been proving that with just about every program they release. Truly interesting bugs, however, are a relatively rare breed. I'm talking about the kind that cause technology products and services to stop working for extended periods, or that prompt them to behave as if they were possessed or harbored grudges against the humans who use them. And even though the bugs themselves usually stem from mundane errors such as typos or faulty math, their symptoms are anything but boring.

Apple has been desperately trying to turn Safari into a mainstream browser player. Unfortunately, its numbers simply don't compare to Firefox.

Safari 4.0 notched 11 million downloads in just three days. While significant, this number is almost a rounding error compared with Firefox 3.0.11, which pulled down 150 million downloads in just 24 hours, as Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reports.

Google has shipped a Chrome browser update to fix two serious security issues in WebKit. According to Google Chrome program manager Mark Larson, the most serious of the two flaws could allow hackers to execute harmful code in the browser’s sandbox. It is rated “high severity.”

From Google’s advisory:

Kaspersky Lab has pre-announced its latest all-in-one security suite with the lure that it has packed even more protection layers of into one software product.

A look at the features list and the claim stands up well, assuming they work correctly against real-world threats. Internet Security 2010, available from July, covers the standard bases of file-based malware with more complex intermediate threats types that try to attack PCs through web, email and instant messaging ports.

Mozilla will allow companies to build their own customised browsers based on the next version of Firefox, which will be out this month.

Through the programme, which will start sometime soon after Firefox 3.5 is released at the end of June, companies can use a Web application provided by Mozilla to specify certain customisations for the browser -- such as bookmarks to certain sites or corporate intranets or portals, he said.