From the early days, Mozilla has been focused on empowering users across platforms and devices. They released Firefox Home as an experiment in bringing a part of the Firefox experience to iOS, focusing on Firefox Sync. This project provided valuable insight and experience with the platform, but they have decided to remove Firefox Home from the Apple App Store and focus our resources on other projects.
Microsoft this week updated its services agreement with subtle, yet potentially significant changes to its policy on privacy and dispute settlement. The company notified users of the changes in an e-mail sent Friday, informing them that the new Terms of Service would go into effect on October 19th. Apparently taking its cue from Google, Microsoft's revised policy allows the company to access and display user content across all of its cloud properties.
In response to the findings of a recent vulnerability in Java 7 that was being exploited by malware developers, Oracle has released an official patch that takes care of the problem. In the past week, a new vulnerability was unveiled in Oracle's Java 7 runtime, which has been used by hackers in targeted attacks on Windows-based systems. Similar to the recent Flashback malware in OS X, this vulnerability allows criminals to create a drive-by hack where the only action needed to compromise a system is to visit a rogue Web page that hosts a malicious Java applet.
It's shaping up to be a hell of an October for Microsoft. David Pierce has known for a while that Windows 8 will be available (alongside a large and growing set of hardware) on October 26th, but according to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley Windows Phone 8 is set to be launched only three days later. On the 29th, Microsoft will reportedly have an event on the West coast to launch the new operating system, and then handsets running the new OS.
Samsung announced an ambitious line of Windows 8 mobile devices using the ATIV name on Wednesday, including an ATIV S smartphone with a 4.8-in. HD display and three tablet PCs. The lineup, unveiled in Berlin, Germany during a webcast, also includes an ATIV Tab that runs Windows RT and two Windows 8 x86 tablets that have magnetically attachable keyboards called the ATIV Smart PC and the ATIV Smart PC Pro. The company didn't offer pricing or availability information.
During its big press event at the IFA trade show yesterday, Sony unveiled Android tablet and three smartphones. The devices were described by Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai as helping accelerate Sony's turnaround. Hirai briefly described the new products along with innovations in gaming and camera technologies, but offered no details on pricing. All of the smartphones are slated to launch globally sometime in the fourth quarter.
After announcing its intentions to do so a few weeks ago, Microsoft launched its official SkyDrive app for Android devices. Similar to its sibling apps on Windows Phone and iOS, this newest release lets users access their SkyDrive cloud storage accounts from devices running Google's mobile operating system.
Samsung will take the wraps off its new Windows 8 hybrid tablet at the IFA 2012 trade show in Berlin. The company's Facebook page displays a photo of the new tablet with the tagline "Ready to be smart" and the phrase "IFA 2012, Berlin." IFA 2012 officially gets off the ground this Friday and runs until September 5. But the press will get a head start with events scheduled this Wednesday and Thursday. Samsung's press event is scheduled for Wednesday and will be live streamed.
Adobe announced a new set of Adobe Illustrator features exclusively to Adobe Creative Cloud members. These new features come ahead of the September release of new Adobe Dreamweaver features and the addition of the Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition to Adobe Creative Cloud. Delivering on the promise that Creative Cloud members will get early VIP access to new product features, today's release improves productivity for designers and production artists needing fast and error-free production cycles when handing off files to colleagues, clients and service bureaus.
Security researchers from FireEye, AlienVault, and DeependResearch have intercepted targeted malware attacks utilizing the latest Java zero day exploit. The vulnerability affects Java 7 (1.7) Update 0 to 6. It does not affect Java 6 and below. Based on related reports, researchers were able to reproduce the exploit on Windows 7 SP1 with Java 7 Update 6. There's also a Metasploit module available.