Software-Programming

Something we have learned over the past few months is that if you don’t release, someone else will do it for you. Since we are open-source, we absolutely encourage it! Unfortunately, the quality of unofficial builds can vary, and we are serious about quality. Of course nightlies are always available, but we realized that having something that is a bit more stable on a more frequent basis is important. Starting now, we are rolling out our M-Series releases. M-Series builds will be done at the beginning of every month.

Mozilla released Firefox 15.0.1 last week in order to fix a bug that potentially exposed the websites visited by users while in "Private Browsing" mode.

The goal of the "Private Browsing" mode is to enable Firefox users to surf the web without leaving any traces of the visited websites behind.

Security researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong – who released details of an attack on SSL/TLS last year, along with a tool called BEAST – are preparing to present a new attack on SSL/TLS at the Ekoparty Security Conference in Argentina later this month, according to Threatpost. The new attack has been given the name CRIME by the researchers.

Apple has released a security update for the Apple-supported Java runtime for OS X, which many users have installed on their systems. Java for OS X is available for Apple's latest three OS X releases starting with Snow Leopard. The update should be available through Apple's Software Update service (in the Apple menu).

Browsing "Incognito" on Chrome for iOS may help protect users' privacy, but it was having the opposite effect on their saved passwords.

The Next Web reported earlier today that numerous iPhone and iPad users had been complaining about their saved passwords vanishing in the recently updated Chrome iOS app. According to a thread on the Chrome development site Chromium, the problem had to do with closing an Incognito tab after browsing anonymously. But it seems the Chrome folks heard the gripes:

Robert Rosario, the developer behind the open source document management tool Mayan EDMS, has pulled the development code of the software from public repositories he says it's being pinched by folks who use it in ways not allowed by the GNU Public Licence.

In a Google+ post, Rosario says he works hard to make the software, happily releases it for free but uses the GPL but reserves the right to retain property rights to the code. That's perfectly fair, he argues, given that the code is free to download and use.

Security professionals have urged organisations to test antivirus updates before live deployment, after a glitched McAfee anti-virus update last week left thousands of machines exposed.

On Monday night, McAfee issued an enterprise 100Mb Super DAT (Hotfix 793640) and a consumer fix (DAT 6809) for the borked updates which it rated as ‘critical’.

I've been credited with coining the term "do-ocracy." When I've had the opportunity to lead an open source project, I've preferred to "run" it as a do-ocracy, which in essence means I might give my opinion, but you're free to ignore it. In other words, actual developers should be empowered to make all the low-level decisions themselves.

As suggested by some of its developers back in 2010, the Firefox browser will introduce enhanced separation between add-ons and the rest of the browser. With the change, which is planned to take effect with the release of Firefox 17, scripts on web pages will only be able to access the data belonging to add-ons if they are included in a whitelist.

Last spring an announcement from the platform team at Twitter not-at-all-subtly suggested developers of third party clients should find something else to do, and today a list of changes to its API turns that whisper into a firm nudge. The limit that most directly affects any of the unofficial clients you may be interested in using is that existing apps currently servicing more than 100,000 individual user tokens will be allowed to double their current count, but cannot add any users past that without Twitter's permission.