Software-Programming

Apple on Monday formally invited developers to begin submitting applications written for Mac OS X Lion its new Mac App Store, promising that a next-generation operating system will be released "soon."

"OS X Lion, the eighth major release of the world's most advanced operating system, will soon be available to millions of Mac users around the world," the Mac maker wrote in an email to developers. "Submit your Lion apps for review now so they can be on the Mac App Store when Lion ships this month."

Mozilla on Friday said it would update Firefox for the Mac to deal with a bug in Apple's impending Lion operating system.

Firefox 5.0.1 is "coming soon," Mozilla announced in a blog post, but did not set a release date. Users running Microsoft Windows or Linux will not see the update. According to Mozilla, Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, contains a bug that causes Firefox 5 to crash when displaying websites that use downloadable fonts.

Microsoft Research and the Systems Groups at ETH Zurich have released the latest version of their research operating system, Barrelfish, under an MIT licence and placed it in a Mercurial repository for public access.

During the last few months we have talked about improvements on your SSL/TLS (HTTPS) implementation, for example through the usage of newly supported HTTP headers, such as Strict-Transport-Security (available since Firefox 4). Besides that, and due to the fact there have been several serious CA incidents, the general public has been more aware of the weaknesses of the current Internet PKI the digital commerce is based on.

Version 6.0 of Firefox has been released into the Beta Channel after being developed in the "alpha" Aurora channel. If beta testing doesn't bring up any major problems then, according to the Mozilla Releases Wiki, the first production version of Firefox 6.0 will be available on 16 August.

You are not anonymous on the Internet. Even if you practice safe surfing by keeping your name, credit card number, and other private data off the Web, your Internet service provider may not be so scrupulous. Many telecom companies and search engines log user activities, and smart snoopers can mine these logs for your IP address and browsing history to figure out where you live, what you like and who you've been talking to.

JailbreakMe.com, the one-click web-based way to jailbreak your iOS devices, is back online and ready to jailbreak your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. From the Jailbreakme.com website:

JailbreakMe, undoubtedly the easiest method of jailbreaking an iOS device, is set to return imminently with version 3.0 — the all-purpose jailbreak for any device, including the iPad 2, running iOS 4.3.3 and below. Comex has updated the site for the second time in the past week, leading some to speculate the relaunch of the new service will be today.

Unidentified attackers have managed to backdoor the official vsftpd source package prompting the project's administrator to issue an alert and switch hosting providers.

Once a year, the CWE and SANS Institute publish a study into the 25 most commonly made programming mistakes that can, ultimately, lead to critical vulnerabilities in software. In this year's "Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors" the top of the bottom of the pile is SQL injection, which is the result of unfiltered or poorly filtered parameters.