Software-Programming

Google kicked off its annual developers' conference on Wednesday by introducing tools to help people build web-based applications, while making a strong push for HTML5, the next generation of the code on which the web is built.

In a wide-ranging keynote, Google engineers and guest speakers emphasized the potential of the web as an open-source platform for developers to build apps and reduce the dependence on plug-ins -- small external programs, such as the Flash media player, that can make browsers more useful.

Onapsis Research Labs is proud to announce the release of Bizploit, the first opensource ERP Penetration Testing framework. Presented at HITB Dubai, one of the most renowned security conferences in the world, Bizploit is expected to provide the security community with a basic framework to support the discovery, exploration, vulnerability assessment and exploitation of ERP systems.

Mozilla has confirmed that the next major upgrade to its open source browser will be known as Firefox 4.0. The organization's current roadmap has version 4.0 arriving in November 2010, with the first beta hitting in June.

Previously, developers had planned to follow Firefox 3.6, the last major release, with Firefox 3.7 around the middle of the year. But the vagaries of Mozilla versioning have changed. The former Firefox 3.7 will be released as Firefox 3.6.4.

The government has set in motion an ambitious plan to develop its own software and end the reliance on foreign operating systems and anti-virus products after growing worries over the spurt in cyber attacks on Indian establishments.

The government formed a high-level taskforce in February to devise a plan for building indigenous software, said a senior intelligence official who is a member. The panel will also suggest ways to conduct third-party audits on existing software in government offices to prevent online sabotage attempts until the software’s launch, he said.

You’ve always got a trusty bootable USB flash drive with you to solve computer problems, but what if a PC’s BIOS won’t let you boot from USB? We’ll show you how to make a CD or floppy disk that will let you boot from your USB drive.

This boot menu, like many created before USB drives became cheap and commonplace, does not include an option to boot from a USB drive.

A piece of freeware called PLoP Boot Manager solves this problem, offering an image that can burned to a CD or put on a floppy disk, and enables you to boot to a variety of devices, including USB drives.

Google released a Chrome 5 beta build this week that brings a significant boost to the browser's JavaScript performance, improved support for emerging Web standards, and a number of noteworthy enhancements to the browser's cloud synchronization framework. After running the beta for most of the day, I'm convinced that Chrome is reaching a sweet spot of feature richness and leading performance that will make it a real winner.

Foxit Software, the developer of a rival PDF viewer to Adobe's vulnerability-plagued Reader, released an update today that blocks some attacks with a "safe mode" that's switched on by default.

Foxit Reader 3.3 for Windows includes what Foxit dubbed "Trust Manager," which blocks all external commands that may be tucked into a PDF document. The new version is designed to stymie some common attack vectors that hackers use when they probe PCs for bugs in the PDF format, or in a viewer application.

BumpTop, an application that turns your desktop from a 2D environment into a 3D workspace has been bought by Google starting rumours that the company's Chrome OS operating system due out later in the year will be getting a shiny new interface.

BumpTop, currently available to download for Mac and Windows users until the end of the week for free will be phased out following the buyout the company has said.

A new beta build of VirtualBox, Sun’s Oracle’s free x86 virtualization software, makes it possible to run Mac OS X as a guest operating system…no shenanigans or flaming hoops to jump through, just pop in the $30 retail Snow Leopard upgrade disc and go. This had previously only been possible with some awkward Hackintosh-style maneuvering, or using recent editions of commercial virtualization products.

Last time we wrote about “Android on iPhone” bits was when hackers had successfully ported Android to an iPhone 2G. We also posted a complete step by step guide on how to install it on a jailbroken 2G. But the problem was that it was only for the iPhone 2G, not for the 3G version which is more widely used now than the original iPhone EDGE model.