I chatted with Bryan Starbuck and his team about the new mail client that works with Windows Live Mail and all your POP3 and IMAP accounts as well… and RSS… and seems to go way beyond the feature set of Oulook Express. The new Windows Live Mail Desktop beta that is shown in the video will be released in early June. Users can sign-up on http://ideas.live.com/ in order to receive an invite as the beta scales up over the next several months. Note that the name “Windows Live Mail Desktop beta” is a place holder name until the final name comes in.

Video: Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta

Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been updated to fix 13 security vulnerabilities, five rated critical. The open-source group on June 1 shipped Firefox 1.5.0.4, a security and stability release to correct flaws that could cause security bypass, cross-site scripting, system access and HTTP response-smuggling attacks.

Security alerts aggregator Secunia rates the update as “highly critical” because of the risk of remote code execution exploitation. According to Mozilla’s advisory, the most serious flaws occur because of errors in the browser engine that could be exploited to cause a memory corruption. This may allow arbitrary code execution attacks.

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Source: eWeek via MSFN

Though it was designed as the heart of the upcoming Sony PlayStation3 game console, the STI Cell processor has created quite a stir in the computational science community, where the processor’s potential as a building block for high performance computers has been widely discussed and speculated upon.

To evaluate Cell’s potential, computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluated the processor’s performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. The results of the group’s evaluation were presented in a paper at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, held May 2-6, 2006, in Ischia, Italy.

“Overall results demonstrate the tremendous potential of the Cell architecture for scientific computations in terms of both raw performance and power efficiency,” the authors wrote. While their current analysis uses hand-optimized code on a set of small scientific kernels, the results are striking. On average, Cell is eight times faster and at least eight times more power efficient than current Opteron and Itanium processors, despite the fact that Cell’s peak double precision performance is fourteen times slower than its peak single precision performance.

View: Complete Paper
View: Complete Article
Source: HPC Wire via ieXbeta

As expected, The Pirate Bay is back online - in the Netherlands. An IP check shows it’s hosted at Leaseweb, the same server Newnava and Torrentspy use. This provider doesn’t easily move when threatened with law which is probably the reason for the choice.

Appearantly the owners of the Pirate Bay had a full backup of the servers, because all the torrents are back online. Not all functions are fully functional yet, but that’s only a matter of time.

The MPAA who was cheering loudly last week when the servers where confiscated won’t be so happy now. An image of the Pirate Bay logo has a small change in it, saying the movie industry can well…. that.

Because the Pirate Bay isn’t afraid of legal actions, these actions will probably come. Meaning for the Netherlands it’s going to be made clear if torrentsites are legal or not.

Source: The Pirate Bay via Flexbeta

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

What’s New:
- Added Opera 9 detection and cleaning.
- Fixed bug in Uninstaller tool.
- Fixed overflow error when Secure Deleting large files.
- Fixed bug in ActiveX/COM Issue cleaning.
- Updated Desktop shortcut cleaning to include Quick Launch.
- Added Windows Defender cleaning.
- Updated Nero Burning ROM cleaning.
- Startup speed increase.
- Minor bug fixes and display tweaks.

Download: CCleaner 1.30.310 Standard Build (1,423KB) | Basic (559KB - No Toolbar) | Slim (417KB - No Toolbar, English Only)
View: CCleaner HomePage
Source: MSFN

Mozilla Firefox - faster, more secure, easier to use and sporting a new look, this latest Firefox release sets a new standard for web browser innovation. Mozilla Firefox project (formerly Firebird, which was formerly Phoenix) is a redesign of Mozilla’s browser component, written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform. It is small, fast and easy to use, and offers many advantages over other web browsers, such as the tabbed browsing and the ability to block pop-up windows.

Download: Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.4 for Windows | Linux | Mac OS X
Source: Flexbeta

A glitch in an Apple iPod software download is still frustrating a number of users more than two months after it was first reported in the company’s online technical forums.

On March 23, the company rolled out an update to its iPod software to enable people to set “personal maximum volume limits” on a range of iPod portable music players.

However a number of iPod Nano users reported on Apple’s online forum that when they downloaded the upgrade, their device was no longer able to connect to iTunes through their PC.

While a technical fix has been made available by other users on the forum thread, the process does not appear to be straightforward, and one Nano user said it had taken him up to five hours to implement.

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Source: SMH

In the morning of 31-05-2006 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnell. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law. Read more …
The police officers were allowed access to the racks where the TPB servers and other servers are hosted. All servers in the racks were clearly marked as to which sites run on each. The police took down all servers in the racks, including the non-commercial site Piratbyran, the mission of which is to defend the rights of TPB via public debate.

According to police officers simultaneously questioning the president of Rix|Port80, the purpose of the search warrant is to take down TPB in order to secure evidence of the allegations mentioned above.

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Source: Flexbeta

The next version of Firefox will come out of the virtual box with Google’s anti-phishing tools built in. While the Googlified security services have been available through use of the Google Toolbar for either Firefox or IE6 for quite some time already, this marks the first default installation. And we all know how much Google values the defaults.

The phishing-prevention tool works by comparing every URL the browser encounters to a blacklist. The user can add and remove entries to/from the list, or simply point it to the official, actively maintained Google list of evildoers. In the Firefox incarnation, the feature will be named “Safe Browsing,” and it’s one of the highest-profile new features in the upcoming 2.0 release of Firefox.

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View: Release Notes
Download: Windows (5.3MB) | OS X Universal Binary (17MB) | Linux (8.8MB)
Source: Ars Technica via Flexbeta

A security feature used in the open-source world is now helping to harden Windows Vista against buffer overrun exploits. Microsoft has quietly fitted the feature, called ALSR (Address Space Layout Randomization) in Windows Vista Beta 2 as part of a larger plan to make it more difficult to automate attacks against the operating system.

“Not only is it in Beta 2, it’s on by default too,” said Michael Howard, senior security program manager at Microsoft in a blog entry announcing the news. “We added ASLR pretty late in the game, but we decided that adding it to beta 2 and enabling it by default was important so we can understand how well it performs in the field,” Howard said.

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Source: eWeek via MSFN