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Week in Geek: Forced Facebook E-mail Changes are Altering Address Books, Causing Lost Mail

Our first edition of WIG for July is filled with news link goodness covering topics such as why Microsoft killed the Start Button in Windows 8, how to outsmart websites trying to get you to pay top dollar, OS X Mountain Lion will check daily for security updates, and more.

Weekly News Links

  • Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered; e-mail lost
    Facebook’s new unified e-mail and its implementation is causing unwanted changes to users’ address books; worse, the changes have gone unnoticed by users and vital communication is being lost.
  • Why Microsoft murdered the Start button in Windows 8
    Speaking with U.K. publication PC Pro, a Microsoft program manager claims that people were no longer using the Start button.
  • Microsoft unveiled Surface after seeing partners’ designs, says analyst
    Surface saga continues: PC guys are mad at Microsoft for another reason: not only because Microsoft is now competing against them.
  • Hands-on: Firefox for Android may become your favorite mobile browser
    Mozilla has released a major new version of the Firefox Web browser for Android. The developers have greatly improved the performance and responsiveness of the application while introducing a new user interface that is built with native widgets.
  • First stable version of Chrome for Android released
    Chrome for Android has seen its first stable version released by the Google Chrome development team. The mobile browser is tipped to be a future replacement for Google’s default browser on the mobile operating system for smartphones and tablets.
  • Android 4.1 Jelly Bean: faster, smoother, more delightful
    Google announced Android 4.1 at Google I/O this past Thursday. With “Project Butter,” the operating system has become faster and smoother, with an emphasis on smooth animations throughout.
  • HP releases “Community Edition” of webOS as open source
    Despite having shelved its webOS hardware months ago, HP continues to work towards finalising the open source version of its Open webOS mobile operating system by September.
  • How to outfox Web sites trying to get you to pay top dollar
    Following news that Orbitz is showing pricier hotels to Mac OS users, here are some tips for changing browser settings and other practices to get deals and access you wouldn’t normally get on the Web.
  • Berkeley Law’s first Web Privacy Census is out and it’s troubling
    That Web site you love? It’s tracking you. So is the other one. In fact, so are all of the top 100 sites, according to new research.
  • Sonic.net stopped saving logs for more than 14 days in order to frustrate copyright trolls
    Sonic.net is a great ISP. Not only are they technically proficient, but they also spend their own money fighting stupid subpoenas on their customers’ behalf. They noticed that neither their sysadmins nor the cops ever needed logfiles going back more than 14 days, and that only scummy copyright trolls benefited from longer log retention, so they cut their logging to two weeks.
  • Google: Yes, Chrome is crashing MacBooks
    While this problem is rooted in Chrome, it ultimately is an issue with Apple’s drivers that allows the kernel panic to be triggered.
  • Update for Windows Update has teething troubles
    Microsoft has released an unscheduled, non-patch day update for Windows to update the Windows Update function itself. However, according to reports from readers, the Windows Update Agent update does not always run smoothly.
  • Security concerns over Firefox’s “new tab” thumbnail feature
    One of the new features in the recent Firefox 13 release is raising security concerns from privacy-conscious users: when users open a new tab in version 13 of the open source web browser, they are presented a grid of the nine most visited pages, each with its own screenshot thumbnail. These thumbnails could be displaying private information though.
  • Mountain Lion to phone home daily looking for security update
    Apple is showing signs that the company is taking the security of OS X far more seriously than it has in the past. In addition to features like app sandboxing and Gatekeeper, OS X Mountain Lion will also apparently check for critical security updates more regularly by default and will install them automatically.
  • Social networking sites for kids equally dangerous
    Social networks targeted at underage children are “ideal” but their success may actually make them more attractive to predators, say security market players. Although there are additional safeguards in place on such sites, protection ultimately begins with house rules and close supervision.
  • Cybercrime moves to the cloud
    Researchers say criminals are moving their malware heavy lifting from end user PCs to servers in the cloud.
  • Russian botnet operators infected 6 million computers
    Russian police authorities say that the botnet of a 22-year-old hacker they arrested last Thursday comprised more than 4.5 million computers – making it the largest publicly known botnet to date.
  • Operation High Roller achieves ‘organized crime’ status
    A global financial fraud that uses an active and passive automated transfer system to siphon money from high balance accounts in financial institutions has been discovered by McAfee and Guardian Analytics.
  • Worth Reading: Exploited despite sandbox
    Adobe Reader X runs in a sandbox at a very restricted privilege level. Important system calls are supposed to be handled by a special broker process that will subject them to extensive testing. However, a small design flaw allows attackers to user system calls, circumvent ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomisation) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and execute arbitrary code.
  • Automated robbery: how card skimmers (still) steal millions from banks
    In January 2011, a pair of Bulgarian-born Canadians named Nikolai Ivanov and Dimitar Stamatov took a road trip from their home in Quebec to New York City. Their five-day visit to Manhattan’s East Village and Astor Place wasn’t your typical tourist trek, though; instead of Statue of Liberty souvenirs, the pair collected the card data and personal identification numbers for over 1,100 ATM cards.

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Comments (2)

  1. July 2, 2012
    Nathan J.

    I wouldn’t call Chrome for Android stable. It requires ICS; yet, in CM9, it crashes when you try to open a tab. So I suppose it doesn’t do that if you got ICS pushed to you OTA, which is only a couple devices. Since there are more devices that need CM9 to get ICS on their device, and ICS is required, I would suggest that Chrome is broken for over half its target audience. That is not stable.

    Not that I’m holding Google responsible for CyanogenMod. Just their software that needs it to run. They could also make one for Gingerbread, with a way to get the Gingerbread one in CM9 (if that would help).

  2. July 2, 2012
    Stephan

    @Nathan , It works perfectly for me, I have CM9 on my Samsung Galaxy S+ (ported). Although I just downloaded it, so they might have fixed that?..

Akemi Iwaya (Asian Angel) is our very own Firefox Fangirl who enjoys working with multiple browsers and loves 'old school' role-playing games. Visit her on Twitter and .

  • Published 07/1/12

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