Yahoo's Risky Antispam Gambit

It's bypassing the Internet's standards body and implementing its own tech solution, a unilateral move that many experts criticize

On Jan. 16 some of the e-mail business' biggest brains will gather on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus at Spam Conference 2004. The one-day powwow will mark the event's second year and will feature 18 presentations from a wide variety of spam fighters.

The conference is quickly becoming a hot ticket. Top-level technology executives from the Big Four Internet service providers that handle the majority of e-mail traffic in the country -- Microsoft's MSN (MSFT ), Yahoo! (YHOO ), America Online (TWX ), and Earthlink (ELNK ) -- will probably attend. So will a host of academics and company officials from the plethora of antispam software, hardware, and services outfits that have sprung up over the past two years. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body that oversees the adoption and application of new tech standards to the Internet, will be represented by none other than Eric Raymond, the open-source guru and Linux legend.

Yahoo faces a delicate task. Push too hard, and it'll upset everyone else, including the other three big ISPs. Push too gently, and antispam technology standards may not develop quickly enough to alleviate the acute pain big ISPs are feeling from spam's rising costs. It's a high wire to walk, and Yahoo's grand plan for fighting junk messages could either make it a hero or cause a fall from grace. It's one story definitely worth watching.

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IE10 Won't Run on Windows Vista

Microsoft released the first preview of Internet Explorer 10 this week, but immediately drew some criticism that it won't be backwards compatible with Windows Vista.

Microsoft confirmed this week that the next major version of its browser will not work with Windows Vista, but at least one analyst wonders if that's a problem.

Even though Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) just shipped IE9 a month ago, it continues to try to pick up the pace of browser development in order to try to regain some of the market initiative that it has lost in recent years -- largely by not moving fast enough to keep IE current with competitors offerings.

In fact, the company released the first platform preview for Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) earlier in the week at its annual MIX Web developers and designers conference in Las Vegas.

However, the IE10 platform preview requires Windows 7 and will not support Vista, a discovery that has led to a controversy similar to complaints that IE9 will not run on Windows XP, although it does run on Vista.

"With IE9, we made the decision to help unlock the best web experience possible, which means taking advantage of everything around the browser -- including Windows 7 and modern PC hardware," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email to InternetNews.com.

"Windows Vista customers have a great browsing experience with IE9, but in building IE10 we are focused on continuing to drive the kind of innovation that only happens when you take advantage of the ongoing improvements in modern operating systems and modern hardware," the spokesperson added.

It doesn't take Bing translation to read the meaning -- Microsoft is not going to be looking back when it comes to new versions of IE.

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GNOME 3 finally released

GNOME 3 -- officially released today is a similar kind of 'big break' for the GNOME project, but it's not in my opinion the same nightmare the KDE 4 unleashed on its users.

The big ticked item that should define GNOME 3 is the GNOME Shell interface.

"The new GNOME Shell is an entire new user experience that was designed from the ground up to improve the usability of the desktop and giving both designers and developers a quick way to improve the desktop and adapt the user interface to new needs," Miguel de Icaza, one of GNOME's founders said in a statement. "By tightly integrating Javascript with the GNOME platform, designers were able to create and quickly iterate on creating an interface that is both pleasant and exciting to use. I could not be happier with the results."

Ubuntu doesn't use GNOME Shell, though Red Hat, Novell and likely every other Linux distro that include GNOME likely will. Personally, I like GNOME Shell and am looking forward to seeing it as the default in the upcoming Fedora 15 release.

Backwards compatibility is also a key hallmark of GNOME 3 (holy cow did I have compatibility issues with KDE 4), which is a big deal too.

 

 This is a release, five plus years in the making and it really shows. The way we all use our desktops and access information is now a bit different and the need to streamline menus and user interface is necessary.

The only issue I have is that this took a long time to accomplish, but hey, I'm also a fan of technology being done -- when it's done.

I'm not so naive as to think that there won't be a vocal group of GNOME users that hate GNOME 3 and now decide to move to KDE, but considering how long that GNOME 3 has been baking, there are few surprises.

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Google Chrome 11 debuts web navigation API

Google Chrome 11 is now in Beta and with it is coming two new interesting experimental APIs.

The Web Navigation and Proxy Extension APIs are both for extension developers and could help to enable a new generation of capabilities for extension developers on Chrome.

"The Web Navigation Extension API allows extension developers to observe browser navigation events," Google Software Engineers Dominic Battre and Jochen Eisinger wrote in a blog post."These events fire both for top-level navigation and in-page navigation."

That's a neat feature that goes beyond the basic capabilities that an HTTP header might provide to an extension developer. Personally I can see this being used for some kind of guided navigation (customer service) type of technology. Google sees use for the Web Navigation API as a way to get statistical or benchmarking data.

Going a level deeper the API adds some new listeners for devs to take advantage of including:

• onBeforeNavigate which kicks in when a navigation is about to occur
• onBeforeRetarget, which activates when a new window, or a new tab in an existing window, is about to be created to host a navigation.

The Proxy Extension API is all about enabling extensions to be able to configure proxy settings for Chrome. The obvious use-case here if for private incognito sessions.

According to Google," proxies can be configured for the entire browser or independently for regular and incognito windows."

Neither of these new APIs are enabled by default in Chrome 11 beta, users will have to activate them with the about:flags options for Experimental Extension APIs. I personally expect to see the final version of Chrome 11 by the end of April.

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Java Founder Gosling going to Google

Google's Java credibility is about to get a major boost.

James Gosling, the creator of Java is now a Google employee.

Gosling was among the many former Sun employees that were not happy with the new Oracle ownership. Gosling left Oracle in April of 2010 and has been looking for a home ever since.

One of the major things that has changed over the course of the last year is the fact Oracle is now suing Google over Java. How that will now play out with Gosling at Google will likely keep journalists like me very busy over the coming months and likely years to come.

"One of the toughest things about life is making choices," Gosling wrote in a blog post." I had a hard time saying "no" to a bunch of other excellent possibilities. I find it odd that this time I'm taking the road more travelled by, but it looks like interesting fun with huge leverage. I don't know what I'll be working on. I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon."

Will Gosling help drive Google's efforts on the JCP (Java Community Process) for Java 8 and beyond? I sure hope so.

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Internet Explorer 9 speeds past the competition

Throw away what you think you know about Internet Explorer -- because the just-released IE9 will turn it all on its ear. Think IE is sluggish? Think again, because according to SunSpider tests, it rivals or beats the speed demons Chrome and Opera. Believe that IE sports a tired-looking interface? No longer --- it now has the same type of stripped-down look that Chrome originated, and that the latest version of Firefox uses as well.

IE9 (available only for Vista and Windows 7) also introduces other goodies, such as HTML5 support, Windows 7 integration, a double-duty address bar and more. It's clearly Microsoft's best shot at stopping the erosion of its market share by rivals Firefox and Chrome.

All unneeded buttons and controls have been eliminated, and tabs are now at the top of the browser. (For a bit of simple eye candy, the top and the sides of IE9 are transparent.) The arrangement works. Web pages take center stage, with very little to distract you. There's not even a search box; as with Chrome, the address bar does double-duty as a search box.

Three small icons on the upper-right corner of the screen give you access to IE9's options: a Home button, a Favorites button for managing bookmarks, and a Tools button shaped like a gear. The Tools button leads you to most of the browser's other features and options, such as security, privacy, add-ons, customizing search and so on.

There's another new feature to the IE9 interface as well. When you open a new tab, it displays thumbnails of pages you frequently visit. Rival browsers have done this for some time, but IE9 adds a new twist: At the bottom of each thumbnail is a bar that shows how frequently you visit each page. The longer the bar, the more you've visited the page. And there are some very useful other things you can do from this page as well, including reopening your last browsing session, reopening tabs you've closed during the browsing session, and getting recommendations for sites you might want to visit, based on the sites you frequently visit. You can also launch an anonymous browsing session, which IE terms "InPrivate Browsing."

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Google patches 6 serious Chrome bugs

Google on Thursday patched six vulnerabilities in Chrome, and as usual, silently updated users' copies of the browser.

The update to Chrome 10.0.648.204 also included two more blacklisted SSL certificates that may be related to last week's theft of nine digital certificates from a Comodo reseller.

Google's second-most-serious ranking in its threat scoring system. Of the half-dozen bugs, two were "use after free" flaws -- a type of memory management bug that can be exploited to inject attack code -- while a second pair were pegged by Google as "stale pointer" vulnerabilities, another kind of memory allocation flaw.

As is Google's practice, the company locked down its bug-tracking database, blocking access to the technical details of the patched vulnerabilities. Google usually unlocks the bug entries several weeks, sometimes months later, to give users time to update before the information goes public.

Google paid out $8,500 in bounties to three different researchers for finding and reporting the six vulnerabilities. So far this year, Google has cut bounty checks totaling $58,145.

Frequent-contributor Sergey Glazunov took home $7,000 for reporting four of the bugs patched Thursday, bringing his 2011 bounty total to $20,634. Glazunov has become the most prolific of the independent researchers who specialize in rooting out Chrome flaws, reporting 14 of the 54 bugs attributed to outsiders.

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