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Critical Security Patch for Adobe Flash and Acrobat Released

admin — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:00:01 +0000

Adobe has recently released a critical security patch for its Flash player and Acrobat reader. The patch is for what is being termed as the biggest security hole in the internet. According to Trusteer, an online security company, 80% of users are still vulnerable! This is a huge number by any reckoning.

Who is affected? Those with the following versions of flash player, AIR or Reader are vulnerable:

Adobe Flash Player 9.0.159.0 and 10.0.22.87 and earlier 9.x and 10.x versions
Adobe AIR 1.5.1 and earlier versions
Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1.2 and earlier 9.x versions

What surprises me is that until I read this article incidently yesterday on WebProNews, most of us had neither heard of the security vulnerability, nor the patch release. This is when the patch was released over 2 weeks ago.

An important update like this one, which affects as much as 80% of internet users, should be given more publicity. I would have expected news releases going out to even mainstream newspapers. After all, don’t we all use the free flash player and the acrobat reader? Infact, it would be hard today to find a PC or a laptop that does not have atleast one of these applications installed! Lets hope that those involved wake up to it. In the meantime, we request our readers to download these security patches and also spread the word around.

Download Adobe Flash

Download Adobe Acrobat Reader Win Mac Unix

Google’s Caffeine an answer to Microsoft’s Bing?

admin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:01:24 +0000

Google unveiled its secret project Caffeine recently. Caffeine is, as Google puts it, the first step in an effort that will raise the bar on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other search dimensions. In other words, it is a marked improvement in terms of the infrastructure behind Google’s search engine. For the user though, there isn’t what one would call a discernible difference. Most of us who tried it have found that the apparent difference in most searches was to do with where the maps, videos and news appeared on the SERPs. In the case of Microsoft’s Bing, on the other hand, the major visible difference was to do with the user-interface.

One which could be called a big difference, though not one that is user-friendlier, was that Local business results were not returned by sandbox for one of the searches I did. Also, the search suggestions that appear at the bottom of the results were fewer and different in case of the page returned by Caffeine. See screen shots of the result pages below.

Google has a web developer preview of Caffeine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com where one can try out the new search engine and provide feedback. One can also perform a local language search and provide feedback in a language other than English by changing the following two values:

hl=language

gl=country

SERP returned by current engine

SERP using Caffeine

Bing a better search engine than Google?

admin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:08:29 +0000

Like most people I was curious when the much touted search engine Bing was launched earlier this year. Was anxious to try it, which I did soon enough. I quite liked the look and feel, but apart from that there was little that my current favorite search engine Google didn’t offer. And so after a few minutes of exploring the new search engine on the block, I went back diligently to Google searches.

But that was until yesterday when we had a meeting with a client for a flash website design. The client was interested in flash sites but wanted to ‘refine’ his requirements based on the kind of flash sites his competition had. And so I had to create a list of flash websites of companies that operate in the same domain as this client.

I tried searching for them by entering keyphrases with ’download flash player”, ‘requires flash’, ‘view flash site’ prefixed and suffixed to the service the client offers. Most search results led me to page 25 and beyond to see perhaps one or two full flash sites. Most that appeared to be flash sites from the description snippet that shows up on the SERPs, had only a flash header or a flash intro or a flash guestbook and some just the music embedded in a flash file.

And it was frustratingly time consuming to click on a search result listing and find just a flash header. Ready to pull my hair apart after nearly an hour of search, I tried Bing. And voila, locating a full flash site became much easier.

How? Well, when you take your mouse over any search result, there is this neat bullet that appears to the right. And a box that shows the text contents on that page. It also gives some info on the menus that exist on the page linking to other pages on the site.

Highlighted listing is not a flash site, even though it appears to be from the description

How does that help? Well, quite simply, I didn’t need to click on a result to see if that site was a full flash site. I just needed to roll my mouse over the results. If text and menus showed up, it was definitely not a site designed fully in flash.

Does that mean its goodby Google for me? Definitely not! But yes now I know an alternative in case Google doesn’t show me the info I need.

Interactive website design and better governance

Tarun — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 09:45:29 +0000

A friend forwarded me a link to this news item. The article was about the internet enabling citizens to police themselves. Well, somewhat. In yet another effort towards transparency and greater people involvement, an official website of a police force has been designed to allow for the citizens it polices, to decide how they want to be policed. Yes, you heard it right. The North Wales Police in the UK gives people an interactive way to residents to decide how they want to allocate the available police force in their area.

Residents sign-up on the website, select their area code, and decide on the distribution of the resources available to policing overspeeding, drug dealing, graffiti, violence and others. They get one vote a month and at the end of the month the department gets the report. These reports will enable The North Wales Police to work towards syncing their resource allocation with any statistically significant opinions received.

Increasing resident participation and involvement in decisions that affect them directly has been made possible with the power of the internet. As the internet penetration increases worldwide, websites, blogs and social media presence will become critical communication and engagement tools.

More and more governments, political parties and leaders are already leveraging the power of internet to build a connect with the general population. After Obama’s online success story scripted his political coup online, we have an ever greater number of politicians taking to Twitter and Facebook. Being there and being available as a “friend” or a “follower” makes them appear approachable and build an emotional connect and engage with their local communities.

Government bodies that allow for greater interactivity and community participation through their websites are likely to come across as more transparent and accountable. However, how the data collected through such online interactivity is used towards better governance will determine the success of these efforts long after the initial hype and is over.

Google launches a new beta for Chrome

Vikas — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:46:28 +0000

Google has launched a speedier beta version of its browser Google Chrome. The new version comes with themes to allow you to customize your browser look and feel to your liking. It also comes with a customizable “New Tab”.

Check out the official Google Chrome blog for more info. Or rather just download the release and try out the new features yourself. The new version offers the ability to delete a thumbnail or pin it so that it always shows up in the New tab, irresective of the number of times it is visited recently. You now have a lot of flexibility in terms of what you want to see on your New tab page in Chrome.

There is also a “Recent Activities” box where it shows pages visited recently, recent downloads etc. This info has been moved from the right column of the screen in the earlier version to below the thumbs in the new beta. There is an “Even more” box next to the Recent Activities box, the purpose of which I haven’t understood clearly. My guess is Google is going to use the beta feedback from users to decide on what to show here. Any suggestions? It might be a good idea to have some links shown up as suggestions based on the Recent Activities. Though not Google Ads hopefully.

Oh and yes, you can switch between a thumbnail view and a List view, hide thumbnails, hide Recent Activities, hide the Even More box. The three small icons on top right let you do all of that. A lot of flexibility there but I couldn’t see the “Recent bookmarks” info anywhere on the new screen