The Law & Order franchise has covered a lot of ground over the years… SVU, CI, Trial by Jury, and even the French Paris enquêtes criminelles. The newest series is starting on Monday, and it’s also an international version–the London-based Law & Order: UK.
Of course, even Americans might be interested in the new show, especially SciFi fans. It stars Jamie Bamber (aka “Apollo” from Battlestar Galactica) as DS Matt Devlin on the “order” side and Freema Agyeman (aka Martha Jones from Doctor Who) as Alesha Phillips on the “law” side. And the lead writer is Chris Chibnall, known for his work on Torchwood.
Interestingly, the first thirteen episodes are based on scripts from the original Law & Order series–adapted to fit British law, of course. Which means that there are suddenly people wearing funny wigs.
On February 19th, Adobe confirmed reports that its version 9 software of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader were vulnerable to buffer overflows that have allowed some companies to be targeted in spearphishing attacks.
A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 and earlier versions. This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this issue is being exploited.
Adobe is planning to release updates to Adobe Reader and Acrobat to resolve the relevant security issue. Adobe expects to make available an update for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 by March 11th, 2009. Updates for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 will follow soon after, with Adobe Reader 7 and Acrobat 7 updates to follow. In the meantime, Adobe is in contact with anti-virus vendors, including McAfee and Symantec, on this issue in order to ensure the security of our mutual customers.
McAffee’s Avert Labs Blog has screenshots of the buffer overflow in action here. They go on to say:
Needless to further remind everyone, zero-day attacks are the preferred choice of cyber criminals and will continue to be so in 2009. If the recent W32/Conficker.worm (MS08-087) and Exploit-XMLhttp.d (MS08-078, MS09-002) were not good enough to prove our point, here is another one.
As a reminder, the Better Business Bureau phishing scam successfully exploited many large companies last year by sending emails with malicious .PDF attachments to executives of those companies. And since there will not be a patch in place until Mid-March, you need to watch out which adobe files you choose to open.
Every parent knows it. A roaming baby is just like a little tornado, leaving everything in the house strewn about. Unless closely monitored (and shouldn’t they always be?), they just love to regurgitate on the floor, put soil from potted plants all around the place, and make a mess out of everything they touch. But fear not, dear parents. The Baby Mop™ is here. With the Baby Mop, your infant will finally have a chance to earn his bottle!
You’ve probably heard about the recent Facebook TOS debacle and subsequent backpeddling. After a few quiet changes to the terms, a bunch of users of the social networking site revolted, followed by preparation to file a formal complaint by the Electronic Privacy Information Center to the FTC. So Facebook has backed down, reinstating the previous version of the terms (last modified in September). However, this doesn’t mean that all is well. On the contrary, Facebook’s terms have always been a little scary when it comes to your content. Here is what Facebook’s TOS still says:
When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content. (emphasis added)
Of course, I should note that despite the title of this post, the terms do make it clear that Facebook never owns your copyright–but in the copyright world, having a non-exclusive license with all of those rights attached to it isn’t much different. The problem with these terms is that it looks like the first sentence nullifies the overarching character of the rest, and that the second-to-last sentence gives you a clear way out, but that actually isn’t so clear. I mean, it’s bad enough that most people don’t even read terms of service or end-user license agreements, but most of the time the important stuff is shoved into confusing legalese anyway. I won’t bore everyone with the possible interpretations of the paragraph above, but if you’re interested, I would recommend taking a look at this article from the Santa Clara Computer & High Technology Law Journal. One kind of alarming theory is that the first sale doctrine (i.e., what lets you sell a copy of a book once you’ve bought it) might allow Facebook to sell your content even after you’ve left the site–because since they don’t have the authority to use the content anymore at that point, they can’t make copies of it and thus only have the one. Granted, this is kind of a stretch, but it’s a possible interpretation. And of course, until you actually delete everything on your account, they can use your content pretty much any way they want as long as it’s in “connection with the site,” which is pretty broad–including making derivative works.
The moral of this story is, of course, always pay attention to the TOS if you’re posting anything that might potentially be of value anywhere. Like, I don’t know, if you’re a teenager now and in thirty years you’re running for president. Even though you haven’t had a Facebook account for twenty years, they’ve still got a copy of that picture of you doing a keg stand in your underwear… and I’m not totally sure that these terms keep them from being able to sell it to the Washington Post.
After 20 years, the Simpsons has changed their opening sequence. Now they seem to have this weird part where they are chasing their couch across Springfield. I’ll let you decide whether or not the new opener is a good one.
We’re usually not in the “cute business” here at [GAS], but since this is cool and funny in so many ways, we just had to post it. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
One of the concerns I had at that time was if you intend to use Lunascape for cross-browser testing, you should be aware that it doesn’t always render pages identically to Chrome or Safari when using WebKit, and there are small differences between IE7 and Lunascape when using Trident (check my previous article for details). Those differences do not seem to have been addressed in the beta. The release notes mention an update to the Gecko engine, but not to WebKit or Trident. Search as I might, I couldn’t find anywhere what versions of WebKit or Trident Lunascape uses.
Lunascape is still claiming the fastest JavaScript engine, based on the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. As I said back in November, though, it depends on what you test. The results from Mozilla’s Dromaeo benchmark again show that Chrome beats Lunascape in most categories hands down, with a few exceptions. Here are the new results for Lunascape (Gecko, WebKit) and Chrome. The Dromaeo benchmark has been changed to report runs per second now instead of elapsed time, so larger numbers are better.
Still no English language plugins at the Plugin Center, either. Only Japanese.
So what exactly have they been up to since November? Perusing the release notes, we find a lot of fixes for situations that caused the browser to crash, along with a lot of minor fixes and a few new features. They also claim to have improved performance and lowered CPU usage. It does seem a bit snappier than the Alpha version, and appears to release resources consistently. The first time you load a new engine, memory usage increases significantly — but that’s to be expected. Loading subsequent pages with the same engine doesn’t incur the same overhead.
Lunascape’s home page states that Lunascape passes the Acid3 test with a 100% score. That’s true, but only when using the WebKit engine. Gecko scores 93, and Trident gets a miserable 5 (same as Internet Explorer 7 stand-alone). For comparison, Google Chrome version 1.0.154.48 scores 79, Safari 3.2.1 gets a 74, Firefox 3.0.6 ranks 71, and Opera 9.2.5 crashes and burns (at least on Windows Vista)! So for compatibility with standards for DOM and JavaScript, Lunascape turns out to be your best bet among these options — especially when using WebKit.
UPDATE 2009-02-21: Just installed Opera 9.51, which fixed the crash on the Acid3 test. Opera scores 84, which is second-best to Lunascape in WebKit mode.
Even as banks topple, Juan Enriquez says the big reboot is yet to come. But don’t look for it on your ballot — or in the stock exchange. It’ll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. In just a generation or two, kids are going to be very different from what they are right now.
What you see above is a 103-inch Panasonic plasma display transformed into a multi-touch air hockey table, thanks to Uicentric’s U-Touch overlay technology. The table was featured a few weeks ago at ISE 2009 in Amsterdam
On February 19th, Adobe confirmed reports that its version 9 software of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader were vulnerable to buffer overflows that have allowed some companies to be targeted in spearphishing attacks.
You’ve probably heard about the recent Facebook TOS debacle and subsequent backpeddling. After a few quiet changes to the terms, a bunch of users of the social networking site revolted, followed by preparation to file 
