internet

Microsoft FUDwatch II: Internet Explorer vs. Firefox security

Microsoft is at it again. Or, rather, Jeff Jones is. Jones is Microsoft's security strategy direction and is the one who periodically remixes history and data to declare that Windows is more secure than Linux. Now he's declaring [PDF] that Internet Explorer is much safer than Firefox.

However, as ZDNet's Ryan Naraine writes, Jones may be mis-analyzing the data:

...[T]here's one key thing missing from Jones's analysis - the auto-patching mechanism built into Firefox that gives Mozilla a clear advantage over Microsoft.

In effect, Firefox patches itself whenever Mozilla ships updates while immediate Internet Explorer updates depend entirely on the end-user using the Windows AU mechanism. Don't even get me started on the forgotten world of dial-up Windows users who never, ever apply patches.

That's one of the main reasons malware authors take aim at IE more than any other desktop application.… Read more

Bye! Bye! Windows on Mac. ies40x gives me all I need: IE7

It's very rare that I pine for the Dark Ages of my Windows years. But occasionally I'll stumble across a poorly designed website (alas, they're all soccer sites and, hence, very important :-) that is Internet Explorer-only. I'm not sure how anyone manages to commit a crime like that anymore when Firefox has such a large market share, but anyway....

Well, today I stumbled across ies40x, a program that allows me to run Internet Explorer on my Mac without launching Parallels (virtual machine) or rebooting into Windows using Apple's Boot Camp.

Installation is apparently slightly … Read more

News.com talk: 'The Future of the Internet--and How to Stop It'

SAN FRANCISCO--Restrictive tools and rash approaches to security challenges are endangering the health of the online ecosystem, an Oxford University researcher warned Wednesday.

Jonathan Zittrain, who has written a book due out in April called The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, gave a public talk on the issue Wednesday night at CNET's offices here. News.com hosted the talk--a first for our newsroom. The event, which drew 120 people, was sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You can call Zittrain's theme the AOL-ization of technology. Instead of personal computers being able to run any … Read more

Comodo comes back with version 3--how does it hold up?

Comodo Firewall Pro gets a major revision from its publisher, upgrading to version 3 with some significant changes. Most importantly, user complaints about resource hogging when version 2 came out have been all but eradicated with the new model.

The TV station in a box

TV broadcasting stations are going portable.

NetTVworld is working on a device that will essentially let people or small organizations more easily broadcast their own TV programs via the Internet, according to the company's CEO, Steve Baker. The black box in the picture digitizes and packetizes video streams and then sends them over the Internet.

The box itself can only broadcast 10 streams at once, but NetTVworld hopes to leverage peer-to-peer networks. With peer-to-peer, a single box can effectively send out 20,000 streams. The company has hit this number of streams in lab tests and it can probably … Read more

Nailing down the model for online video ads

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--What is the best way to make money with ads tied to online video? And how can traditional advertising models benefit from new methods pioneered online?

Those were major topics of discussion during the morning keynote today at the Dow Jones Consumer Technology Innovations conference here. And while panelists--representatives from Google, Verizon and Polaris Venture Partners--made some interesting points, they also made it quite clear that there are not yet obvious answers to the questions.

To Michael Hirshland, a general partner at Polaris, one encouraging developing trend is the continued emergence of what he termed "prosumer&… Read more

Nexus Radio 2.2 adds drag 'n' drop

Earlier this month I spotlighted Nexus Radio, a free Internet radio app that streams music from 38 genres and also lets you capture, edit, and save tunes.

Not being able to drag and drop music files from the desktop to the playlist was one quibble I had with a previous version of Nexus Radio, reviewed in a First Look video. Instead, users had to waste clicks going though the app interface to add songs.

This version hops the hurtle, and playlist-building is easy-peasy once again. It's a little upgrade that makes a big difference in user-friendliness, and it's … Read more

P2P Part 3

I love the feedback on my position on P2P traffic. The well thought out "You Suck", " Or "the internet isnt that way", or "The ISP is selling me 10mbs, I can use it anyway I want."

Guess what, business models do evolve over time. You may want your ISP to be exactly how you want it to be. You may read into your experience with them anything you want. But it can and will change if the economics don't work for them. No amount of whining about "what the internet is … Read more

Time to end the digital 'arms race' of parental spying?

I caught CNET Editor at Large Brian Cooley on the CBS Evening News report last night, "The Secret Lives of Teens." In the second installment of this three-parter, which featured a tug-of-war between a daughter and her mother concerned about her risky online behavior, Cooley observed that, "This is just the return of the Cold War, with different players. Instead of the U.S. and Russia, it's Mom and Dad versus Joey and Bill." Cooley talked about parental control technology but added that, "In the end, this points back to the parenting relationship, and it moves away from technology when you really have to make a difference in their lives...you cannot rely on software."

I agree with Cooley's conclusion. Online safety for teens is a complex issue that cannot be covered in one blog post, but the CBS Evening News series gave me a lot of food for thought. They posed the question, is parental spying on teen Internet use an "invasion of privacy or smart parenting?" and I wish the CBS series had given more consideration to the possibility that digital spying is a misguided parenting practice.… Read more

Pandora adds classical

Pandora has added classical music to the Music Genome Project, the extensive music database and engine that powers its DIY Internet radio site.

If you were addicted to Pandora before, just wait until you can actually figure out what kind of classical music you like.

The addition is significant as more than any other DIY Internet radio site, Pandora is known for its ability to figure out what listeners like based on a musical genetic code for each song. Nowhere is a song's musical genetic code more relevant to figuring out what you like than in the complexities of … Read more