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Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Voice of the Masses: What's next for Firefox? | Linux Voice - 0 views

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    " Mike Saunders | July 8, 2015 | Voice of the masses | 28 Comments It's been a topsy-turvy few years for the Firefox web browser. Competition from Chrome, interface redesigns, integration of services like Pocket, and the controversial adoption of Adobe's DRM module have pushed many to consider other browsers. Now Firefox "
Paul Merrell

Firefox, YouTube and WebM ✩ Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog - 1 views

  • 1. Google will be releasing VP8 under an open source and royalty-free basis. VP8 is a high-quality video codec that Google acquired when they purchased the company On2. The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264. 2. The VP8 codec will be combined with the Vorbis audio codec and a subset of the Matroska container format to build a new standard for Open Video on the web called WebM. You can find out more about the project at its new site: http://www.webmproject.org/. 3. We will include support for WebM in Firefox. You can get super-early WebM builds of Firefox 4 pre-alpha today. WebM will also be included in Google Chrome and Opera. 4. Every video on YouTube will be transcoded into WebM. They have about 1.2 million videos available today and will be working through their back catalog over time. But they have committed to supporting everything. 5. This is something that is supported by many partners, not just Google and others. Content providers like Brightcove have signed up to support WebM as part of a full HTML5 video solution. Hardware companies, encoding providers and other parts of the video stack are all part of the list of companies backing WebM. Even Adobe will be supporting WebM in Flash. Firefox, with its market share and principled leadership and YouTube, with its video reach are the most important partners in this solution, but we are only a small part of the larger ecosystem of video.
Gary Edwards

Zoho Blogs » Firefox 3.1 & Google Chrome: Javascript Wins, Flash/Silverlight ... - 0 views

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    ZOHO Speaks about Chrome: "The biggest losers in Google's announcement are not really competing browsers, but competing rich client engines like Flash and Silverlight. As Javascript advances rapidly, it inevitably encroaches on the territory currently held by Flash. Native browser video is likely the last nail in the coffin - and Google needs native browser based video for its own YouTube, so we can be confident Google Chrome and Firefox will both have native video support, with Javascript-accessible VOM (video object model) APIs for web applications to manipuate video. As for Silverlight, let me just say that if Silverlight is the future of web computing, companies like us might as well find another line of work - and I suspect Google and Yahoo probably see it the same way too. More speculatively, I believe we will witness the emergence of Javascript as the dominant language of computing, as it sweeps the client side and starts encroaching on the server. The server landscape today is split between "enterprise" platforms like Java and .NET on the one side (we ourselves are in the Java camp on the server side), and "scripting" languages like PHP, Python, Ruby on the other, with Javascript firmly entrenched on the client. Languages like Ruby promise tremendous dynamism and flexibility to the developer, but their relatively weak execution environments have held them back. It is telling that both Java and .NET come with state of the art just-in-time compilers, while none of the major scripting languages do......" Interestingly, ZOHO already has a prototype running on Chrome! Solves tons of performance problems for them, as well as givign them an on-line / off-line story (Gears). The success of Chrome depends on Chrome "killer apps"; Not browser surfing features! And we already have a number of killer apps that will immediately take advantage of Chrome: gMail, gReader, gMaps and Google Docs! ZOHO will no doubt use Chrome to put themselves squarely i
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Make Firefox Look Native in Fedora - Fedora Magazine - 0 views

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    "Firefox has been criticized by users for not fitting well in Fedora Workstation. Although it improved with the new interface called Australis, it still doesn't feel as native as GNOME Web (Epiphany). It's not likely it will close the gap any time soon for two reasons:"
Gary Edwards

The Monkey On Microsoft's Back - Forbes.com - 0 views

  • The new technology, dubbed TraceMonkey, promises to speed up Firefox's ability to deliver complex applications. The move heightens the threat posed by a nascent group of online alternatives to Microsoft's most profitable software: PC applications, like Microsoft Office, that allow Microsoft to burn hundreds of millions of dollars on efforts to seize control of the online world. Microsoft's Business Division, which gets 90% of its revenues from sales of Microsoft Office, spat out $12.4 billion in operating income for the fiscal year ending June 30. Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), however, is playing a parallel game, using profits from its online advertising business to fund alternatives to Microsoft's desktop offerings. Google already says it has "millions" of users for its free, Web-based alternative to desktop staples, including Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint software. The next version of Firefox, which could debut by the end of this year, promises to speed up such applications, thanks to a new technology built into the developer's version of the software last week. Right now, rich Web applications such as Google Gmail rely on a technology known as Javascript to turn them from lifeless Web pages into applications that respond as users mouse about a Web page. TraceMonkey aims to turn the most frequently used chunks of Javascript code embedded into Web pages into binary form--allowing computers to hustle through the most used bits of code--without waiting around to render all of the code into binary form.
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    I did send a very lenghthy comment to Brian Caulfield, the Forbes author of this article. Of course, i disagreed with his perspective. TraceMonkey is great, performing an acceleration of JavaScript in FireFox in much the same way that Squirrel Fish accelleratees WebKit Browsers. What Brian misses though is that the RiA war that is taking place both inside and outside the browser (RIA = fully functional Web applications that WILL replace the "client/server" apps model)
Gary Edwards

Why Mozilla is committed to Gecko as WebKit popularity grows: Page 1 - 0 views

  • One of the primary reasons for the enormous complexity of the Gecko code base is that it aims to provide much more than just an HTML renderer. Mozilla's early goals were extremely ambitious—the original Mozilla application suite included a browser, a complete mail and newsgroup program, a web design tool, and an IRC client. In addition to rendering HTML, Gecko also provides a versatile XML-based user interface rendering framework called XUL that was used extensively in those applications. XUL is still used today to create the Firefox user interface, and it facilitates that browser's support for extensions, which are regarded by many enthusiasts as one of the most valuable features offered by Firefox.
  • XPCOM, a powerful component system
  • Gecko 1.9 uses the cross-platform Cairo rendering framework.
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  • reflow algorithm
  • Firefox 4 and replaces XPCOM reference counting with real garbage collection
  • support for some CSS 3 features that are implemented in WebKit.
  • TraceMonkey engine landed in recent nightly builds and will likely be included in 3.1; it massively boosts JavaScript performance
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    The consensus of the developers who are using WebKit is clear: it's an outstanding rendering engine that lends itself to an extremely diverse assortment of practical uses. It is everywhere, and it is gaining traction at a very impressive rate. That traction is causing some developers to question whether Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine is still relevant.
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    Historical walkthrough comparing two great rendering engines (layout); Mozilla Gecko and WebKit.
Paul Merrell

Tip: Use the new microformats API in your Firefox 3.0 Extensions - 0 views

  • The upcoming Firefox 3.0 release has built-in support for microformats in the form of an API that you can access from a Firefox extension. In this tip, you follow a simple example of how to use this API from within your extension code. You take a skeleton Hello World extension and give it the ability to store an hCard from any Web page and then use that stored hCard to populate a Web form.
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Paul Merrell

We're Halfway to Encrypting the Entire Web | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

  • The movement to encrypt the web has reached a milestone. As of earlier this month, approximately half of Internet traffic is now protected by HTTPS. In other words, we are halfway to a web safer from the eavesdropping, content hijacking, cookie stealing, and censorship that HTTPS can protect against. Mozilla recently reported that the average volume of encrypted web traffic on Firefox now surpasses the average unencrypted volume
  • Google Chrome’s figures on HTTPS usage are consistent with that finding, showing that over 50% of of all pages loaded are protected by HTTPS across different operating systems.
  • This milestone is a combination of HTTPS implementation victories: from tech giants and large content providers, from small websites, and from users themselves.
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  • Starting in 2010, EFF members have pushed tech companies to follow crypto best practices. We applauded when Facebook and Twitter implemented HTTPS by default, and when Wikipedia and several other popular sites later followed suit. Google has also put pressure on the tech community by using HTTPS as a signal in search ranking algorithms and, starting this year, showing security warnings in Chrome when users load HTTP sites that request passwords or credit card numbers. EFF’s Encrypt the Web Report also played a big role in tracking and encouraging specific practices. Recently other organizations have followed suit with more sophisticated tracking projects. For example, Secure the News and Pulse track HTTPS progress among news media sites and U.S. government sites, respectively.
  • But securing large, popular websites is only one part of a much bigger battle. Encrypting the entire web requires HTTPS implementation to be accessible to independent, smaller websites. Let’s Encrypt and Certbot have changed the game here, making what was once an expensive, technically demanding process into an easy and affordable task for webmasters across a range of resource and skill levels. Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority (CA) run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and founded by EFF, Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai as founding sponsors. As a CA, Let’s Encrypt issues and maintains digital certificates that help web users and their browsers know they’re actually talking to the site they intended to. CAs are crucial to secure, HTTPS-encrypted communication, as these certificates verify the association between an HTTPS site and a cryptographic public key. Through EFF’s Certbot tool, webmasters can get a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt and automatically configure their server to use it. Since we announced that Let’s Encrypt was the web’s largest certificate authority last October, it has exploded from 12 million certs to over 28 million. Most of Let’s Encrypt’s growth has come from giving previously unencrypted sites their first-ever certificates. A large share of these leaps in HTTPS adoption are also thanks to major hosting companies and platforms--like WordPress.com, Squarespace, and dozens of others--integrating Let’s Encrypt and providing HTTPS to their users and customers.
  • Unfortunately, you can only use HTTPS on websites that support it--and about half of all web traffic is still with sites that don’t. However, when sites partially support HTTPS, users can step in with the HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. A collaboration between EFF and the Tor Project, HTTPS Everywhere makes your browser use HTTPS wherever possible. Some websites offer inconsistent support for HTTPS, use unencrypted HTTP as a default, or link from secure HTTPS pages to unencrypted HTTP pages. HTTPS Everywhere fixes these problems by rewriting requests to these sites to HTTPS, automatically activating encryption and HTTPS protection that might otherwise slip through the cracks.
  • Our goal is a universally encrypted web that makes a tool like HTTPS Everywhere redundant. Until then, we have more work to do. Protect your own browsing and websites with HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot, and spread the word to your friends, family, and colleagues to do the same. Together, we can encrypt the entire web.
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    HTTPS connections don't work for you if you don't use them. If you're not using HTTPS Everywhere in your browser, you should be; it's your privacy that is at stake. And every encrypted communication you make adds to the backlog of encrypted data that NSA and other internet voyeurs must process as encrypted traffic; because cracking encrypted messages is computer resource intensive, the voyeurs do not have the resources to crack more than a tiny fraction. HTTPS is a free extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. You can get it here. https://www.eff.org/HTTPS-everywhere
Paul Merrell

Save Firefox! | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

  • The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), once the force for open standards that kept browsers from locking publishers to their proprietary capabilities, has changed its mission. Since 2013, the organization has provided a forum where today's dominant browser companies and the dominant entertainment companies can collaborate on a system to let our browsers control our behavior, rather than the other way. This system, "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) uses standards-defined code to funnel video into a proprietary container called a "Content Decryption Module." For a new browser to support this new video streaming standard -- which major studios and cable operators are pushing for -- it would have to convince those entertainment companies or one of their partners to let them have a CDM, or this part of the "open" Web would not display in their new browser. This is the opposite of every W3C standard to date: once, all you needed to do to render content sent by a server was follow the standard, not get permission. If browsers had needed permission to render a page at the launch of Mozilla, the publishers would have frozen out this new, pop-up-blocking upstart. Kiss Firefox goodbye, in other words.
  • The W3C didn't have to do this. No copyright law says that making a video gives you the right to tell people who legally watch it how they must configure their equipment. But because of the design of EME, copyright holders will be able to use the law to shut down any new browser that tries to render the video without their permission. That's because EME is designed to trigger liability under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which says that removing a digital lock that controls access to a copyrighted work without permission is an offense, even if the person removing the lock has the right to the content it restricts. In other words, once a video is sent with EME, a new company that unlocks it for its users can be sued, even if the users do nothing illegal with that video. We proposed that the W3C could protect new browsers by making their members promise not to use the DMCA to attack new entrants in the market, an idea supported by a diverse group of W3C members, but the W3C executive overruled us saying the work would go forward with no safeguards for future competition. It's even worse than at first glance. The DMCA isn't limited to the USA: the US Trade Representative has spread DMCA-like rules to virtually every country that does business with America. Worse still: the DMCA is also routinely used by companies to threaten and silence security researchers who reveal embarrassing defects in their products. The W3C also declined to require its members to protect security researchers who discover flaws in EME, leaving every Web user vulnerable to vulnerabilities whose disclosure can only safely take place if the affected company decides to permit it.
  • The W3C needs credibility with people who care about the open Web and innovation in order to be viable. They are sensitive to this kind of criticism. We empathize. There are lots of good people working there, people who genuinely, passionately want the Web to stay open to everyone, and to be safe for its users. But the organization made a terrible decision when it opted to provide a home for EME, and an even worse one when it overruled its own members and declined protection for security research and new competitors. It needs to hear from you now. Please share this post, and spread the word. Help the W3C be the organization it is meant to be.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

NoScript - JavaScript/Java/Flash blocker for a safer Firefox experience! - NoScript Rel... - 0 views

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    "Congratulations, you've got the latest version. If you find any bug or you'd like an enhancement, please report here or here. Many thanks! Main good news Script Surrogate replacement for googletagservices.com (thanks Guest and barbaz). Fixed XSS false positive in the new gmx.com webmail login and in other services (e.g. mail.com) using the same back-end. Better compatibility with script inclusion enforcers such as Require.js. Safer toStaticHTML() implementation (thanks .mario for reporting). Several XSS filter improvements (thanks Masato Kinugawa for reporting). CAPS-independent, finer-tuned version of the "Allow local links" feature."
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    "Congratulations, you've got the latest version. If you find any bug or you'd like an enhancement, please report here or here. Many thanks! Main good news Script Surrogate replacement for googletagservices.com (thanks Guest and barbaz). Fixed XSS false positive in the new gmx.com webmail login and in other services (e.g. mail.com) using the same back-end. Better compatibility with script inclusion enforcers such as Require.js. Safer toStaticHTML() implementation (thanks .mario for reporting). Several XSS filter improvements (thanks Masato Kinugawa for reporting). CAPS-independent, finer-tuned version of the "Allow local links" feature."
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    "Congratulations, you've got the latest version. If you find any bug or you'd like an enhancement, please report here or here. Many thanks! Main good news Script Surrogate replacement for googletagservices.com (thanks Guest and barbaz). Fixed XSS false positive in the new gmx.com webmail login and in other services (e.g. mail.com) using the same back-end. Better compatibility with script inclusion enforcers such as Require.js. Safer toStaticHTML() implementation (thanks .mario for reporting). Several XSS filter improvements (thanks Masato Kinugawa for reporting). CAPS-independent, finer-tuned version of the "Allow local links" feature."
Gary Edwards

Opt out of PRISM, the NSA's global data surveillance program - PRISM BREAK - 0 views

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    "Opt out of PRISM, the NSA's global data surveillance program. Stop reporting your online activities to the American government with these free alternatives to proprietary software." A designer named Peng Zhong is so strongly opposed to PRISM, the NSA's domestic spying program, that he created a site to educate people on how to "opt out" of it. According to the original report that brought PRISM to public attention, the nine companies that "participate knowingly" with the NSA are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Zhong's approach is to replace your workflow with open-source tools that aren't attached to these companies, since they easily stay off the government's radar. If you want to drop totally off the map, it'll take quite a commitment.   Are you ready to give up your operating system?  The NSA tracks everything on Windows, OSX and Google Chrome.  You will need to switch to Debian or some other brand of GNU Linux!  Like Mint!!!!! Personally I have switched from Google Chrome Browser to Mozilla Firefox using the TOR Browser Bundle - Private mode.
Paul Merrell

'Let's Encrypt' Project Strives To Make Encryption Simple - Slashdot - 0 views

  • As part of an effort to make encryption a standard component of every application, the Linux Foundation has launched the Let's Encrypt project (announcement) and stated its intention to provide access to a free certificate management service. Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, says the goal for the project is nothing less than universal adoption of encryption to disrupt a multi-billion dollar hacker economy. While there may never be such a thing as perfect security, Zemlin says it's just too easy to steal data that is not encrypted. In its current form, encryption is difficult to implement and a lot of cost and overhead is associated with managing encryption keys. Zemlin claims the Let's Encrypt project will reduce the effort it takes to encrypt data in an application down to two simple commands. The project is being hosted by the Linux Foundation, but the actual project is being managed by the Internet Security Research Group. This work is sponsored by Akamai, Cisco, EFF, Mozilla, IdenTrust, and Automattic, which all are Linux Foundation patrons. Visit Let's Encrypt official website to get involved.
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    The blurb is a bit misleading. This is a project that's been under way since last year; what's new is that they're moving under the Linux Foundation umbrella for various non-technical suoport purposes. By sometime this summer, encrypting web site data and broadcasting it over https is  slated to become a two-click process. Or on the linux command line: $ sudo apt-get install lets-encrypt $ lets-encrypt example.com This is a project that grew out of public disgust with NSA surveillance, designed to flood the NSA (and other bad actors) with so much encrypted data that they will be able to decrypt only a tiny fraction (decryption without the decryption key takes gobs of computer cycles).  The other half of the solution is already available, the HTTPS Everywhere extension for the Chrome, FIrefox, and Opera web browsers by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the TOR Project that translates your every request for a http address into an effort to connect to an https address preferentially before establishing an http connection if https is not available. HTTPS Everywhere is fast and does not noticeably add to your page loading time. If you'd like to effortlessly imoprove your online security and help burden NSA, install HTTPS Everywhere. Get it at https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Paul Merrell

With Microsoft Midori, Platforms Take Shape In The Cloud -- Cloud Computing -- Informat... - 0 views

  • Meanwhile a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup called CherryPal just released a new mini-PC, known as the CherryPal, that is designed to operate solely via a Firefox browser. While the new machine, which will run on just 2 watts of power, has an embedded Linux-based OS, it's hidden from the user and is used mainly to boot up the browser to access common applications.
  • Several startups and open-source projects have built cloud-based operating systems, also known as WebTops, such as DesktopTwo, EyeOS, G.ho.st, and YouOS. To date these have mostly been of interest to the open-source development community, but the advent of browser-based "thin clients" like CherryPal and of projects like Midori indicates that fully cloud-based computing could make its way to the masses. Google is also said to be at work on a cloud OS, while a Swedish startup called Xcerion has gained attention for its hybrid, an XML-based system called iCloud.
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Gary Edwards

SVG Is The Future Of Application Development | SitePoint » - 0 views

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    I could see this coming a mile away, ana it's about time! ".... So if HTML can't deliver for us here, what will? Microsoft wants us to use Silverlight and Adobe wants us to use Flash and AIR, of course. And Apple…? Apple ostensibly wants us to use HTML5's canvas. Both Microsoft's and Adobe's contenders are proprietary, which seems to be reason enough for web developers to avoid them to a certain degree, and all of them muddy HTML, which is a dangerous thing for the semantic web. But Apple actually has a trick up its sleeve. Like Mozilla's been doing with Firefox, Apple has quietly been implementing better support for SVG, the W3C's Recommendation for XML-based vector graphics, into WebKit. SVG delivers the same kind of vector graphics capabilities that Flash does, but it does so using all the interoperability benefits that XML brings along for the ride. SVG is great for graphically displaying both text and images, manipulating them with declarative visual primitives, and it comes with a host of lickable effects. Ironically, SVG was originally jointly developed by both Adobe and Sun Microsystems but recently it's Sun Labs that has been doing interesting stuff with the technology. The most compelling experiment of this kind has to be Sun Labs's Lively Kernel project....."
Paul Merrell

ZoooS Previews "OpenOffice.org 3.0 in a Browser" | Software Journal - 0 views

  • ZoooS LLC today previewed ZoooS Office, a web-based office suite that puts OpenOffice.org 3.0 in a browser, targeting enterprise, SMB, and individual users alike with a blend of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and desktop advantages.
  • Other key ZoooS Office implementations will include Mozilla XULRunner; Firefox, Opera, Safari as well as the new Google Chrome web browser; social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life; and Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation. Regardless of implementation, ZoooS applications run entirely on the client machine, performing all file operations locally to reduce network traffic, improve application performance, and support offline access.
  • Public availability of ZoooS Office is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2008. Initially, ZoooS will deliver the Mozilla XULRunner version, a Firefox plug-in, an Opera widget, and an intranet server. ZoooS will follow up with a Vista gadget and Internet Explorer support in the first half of 2009. For more information on ZoooS, please visit www.zooos.com.
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    Yet another wrapper around OpenOffice.org, this time the 3.0 version still in beta. $99.90 per seat for 10 users, Lots of Javascript to give a web collaboration capability. Perhaps most notable so far: [i] a sniff that there's a fair amount of money behind this one; and [ii] an article by Eric Lai says they approached the OOo Project but were rebuffed because they compete with desktop OOo. Support for different browsers planned. an XULRunner plug-in the works. Several mashups mentioned. Claims 80 percent of OOo features available, which is another way of saying that 20 per cent of the features are not supported. Claim that oSays code will be released under GPL. Apparently that's just their custom stuff because OOo 3.0 beta is LGPL. Building a business atop a code base controlled by a malevolent branch of Sun Microsystems seems less than wise. More at zooos.com. Preliminary impression: Like OOo itself, dead end technology that sucks mind and market share from software that supports truly open standards. The world needs to figure out that the OpenDocument format is roughly as open as OOXML. Open standards are fully specified so anyone can implement them.
Gary Edwards

Google's ARC Beta runs Android apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac, and Linux | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • So calling all developers: You can now (probably, maybe) run your Android apps on just about anything—Android, Chrome OS, Windows, Mac, and Linux—provided you fiddle with the ARC Welder and submit your app to the Chrome Web Store.
  • The App Runtime for Chrome and Native Client are hugely important projects because they potentially allow Google to push a "universal binary" strategy on developers. "Write your app for Android, and we'll make it run on almost every popular OS! (other than iOS)" Google Play Services support is a major improvement for ARC and signals just how ambitious this project is. Some day it will be a great sales pitch to convince developers to write for Android first, which gives them apps on all these desktop OSes for free.
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    Thanks Marbux. ARC appears to be an extraordinary technology. Funny but Florian has been pushing Native Client (NaCL) since it was first ported from Firefox to Chrome. Looks like he was right. "In September, Google launched ARC-the "App Runtime for Chrome,"-a project that allowed Android apps to run on Chrome OS. A few days later, a hack revealed the project's full potential: it enabled ARC on every "desktop" version of Chrome, meaning you could unofficially run Android apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. ARC made Android apps run on nearly every computing platform (save iOS). ARC is an early beta though so Google has kept the project's reach very limited-only a handful of apps have been ported to ARC, which have all been the result of close collaborations between Google and the app developer. Now though, Google is taking two big steps forward with the latest developer preview: it's allowing any developer to run their app on ARC via a new Chrome app packager, and it's allowing ARC to run on any desktop OS with a Chrome browser. ARC runs Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS thanks to Native Client (abbreviated "NaCL"). NaCL is a Chrome sandboxing technology that allows Chrome apps and plugins to run at "near native" speeds, taking full advantage of the system's CPU and GPU. Native Client turns Chrome into a development platform, write to it, and it'll run on all desktop Chrome browsers. Google ported a full Android stack to Native Client, allowing Android apps to run on most major OSes. With the original ARC release, there was no official process to getting an Android app running on the Chrome platform (other than working with Google). Now Google has released the adorably-named ARC Welder, a Chrome app which will convert any Android app into an ARC-powered Chrome app. It's mainly for developers to package up an APK and submit it to the Chrome Web Store, but anyone can package and launch an APK from the app directly."
Paul Merrell

Leaked docs show spyware used to snoop on US computers | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • Software created by the controversial UK-based Gamma Group International was used to spy on computers that appear to be located in the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia, Iran, and Bahrain, according to a leaked trove of documents analyzed by ProPublica. It's not clear whether the surveillance was conducted by governments or private entities. Customer e-mail addresses in the collection appeared to belong to a German surveillance company, an independent consultant in Dubai, the Bosnian and Hungarian Intelligence services, a Dutch law enforcement officer, and the Qatari government.
  • The leaked files—which were posted online by hackers—are the latest in a series of revelations about how state actors including repressive regimes have used Gamma's software to spy on dissidents, journalists, and activist groups. The documents, leaked last Saturday, could not be readily verified, but experts told ProPublica they believed them to be genuine. "I think it's highly unlikely that it's a fake," said Morgan Marquis-Bore, a security researcher who while at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto had analyzed Gamma Group's software and who authored an article about the leak on Thursday. The documents confirm many details that have already been reported about Gamma, such as that its tools were used to spy on Bahraini activists. Some documents in the trove contain metadata tied to e-mail addresses of several Gamma employees. Bill Marczak, another Gamma Group expert at the Citizen Lab, said that several dates in the documents correspond to publicly known events—such as the day that a particular Bahraini activist was hacked.
  • The leaked files contain more than 40 gigabytes of confidential technical material, including software code, internal memos, strategy reports, and user guides on how to use Gamma Group software suite called FinFisher. FinFisher enables customers to monitor secure Web traffic, Skype calls, webcams, and personal files. It is installed as malware on targets' computers and cell phones. A price list included in the trove lists a license of the software at almost $4 million. The documents reveal that Gamma uses technology from a French company called Vupen Security that sells so-called computer "exploits." Exploits include techniques called "zero days" for "popular software like Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and many more." Zero days are exploits that have not yet been detected by the software maker and therefore are not blocked.
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  • Many of Gamma's product brochures have previously been published by the Wall Street Journal and Wikileaks, but the latest trove shows how the products are getting more sophisticated. In one document, engineers at Gamma tested a product called FinSpy, which inserts malware onto a user's machine, and found that it could not be blocked by most antivirus software. Documents also reveal that Gamma had been working to bypass encryption tools including a mobile phone encryption app, Silent Circle, and were able to bypass the protection given by hard-drive encryption products TrueCrypt and Microsoft's Bitlocker.
  • The documents also describe a "country-wide" surveillance product called FinFly ISP which promises customers the ability to intercept Internet traffic and masquerade as ordinary websites in order to install malware on a target's computer. The most recent date-stamp found in the documents is August 2, coincidung with the first tweet by a parody Twitter account, @GammaGroupPR, which first announced the hack and may be run by the hacker or hackers responsible for the leak. On Reddit, a user called PhineasFisher claimed responsibility for the leak. "Two years ago their software was found being widely used by governments in the middle east, especially Bahrain, to hack and spy on the computers and phones of journalists and dissidents," the user wrote. The name on the @GammaGroupPR Twitter account is also "Phineas Fisher." GammaGroup, the surveillance company whose documents were released, is no stranger to the spotlight. The security firm F-Secure first reported the purchase of FinFisher software by the Egyptian State Security agency in 2011. In 2012, Bloomberg News and The Citizen Lab showed how the company's malware was used to target activists in Bahrain. In 2013, the software company Mozilla sent a cease-and-desist letter to the company after a report by The Citizen Lab showed that a spyware-infected version of the Firefox browser manufactured by Gamma was being used to spy on Malaysian activists.
Paul Merrell

Fight over 'forms' clouds future of Net applications | Pagalz.com - Blog - 0 views

  • As Net heavyweights vie to define the next generation of Web applications, the Web’s main standards body is facing a revolt within its own ranks over electronic forms, a cornerstone of interactive documents.
  • “The W3C is saying the answer is XForms. Microsoft is saying it’s XAML. Macromedia is saying its Flash MX. And Mozilla is saying it’s XUL.
  • Though the success of one method or another might not seem to make much difference to the person filling out an order form, the fate of open standards in the process could determine whether that form can relay the data it collects to any standards-compliant database or banking system, or whether it can only operate within certain proprietary systems. The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system–an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • browser makers still want a standards-based forms technology to help the Web steer clear of proprietary application platforms. They’re particularly concerned about Microsoft’s sprawling vision for Windows “Longhorn” applications built in the XML-based XAML markup language using Longhorn’s Avalon graphics system. Browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Apple’s Safari will be useless to access these Internet-based Windows applications.
  • “The WHAT approach works OK for small examples,” Pemberton said. “But actors like the Department of Defense say ‘no scripting.’”
  • HAT approach works OK for small examples,” Pemberton said. “But actors like the Department of Defense say ‘no scripting.’”
  • The evolution versus revolution debate over forms centers on the use of scripting–specifically JavaScript–to perform important tasks in forms-based applications.
  • “I understand where WHAT is coming from, but they are browser makers, not forms experts,” Pemberton said. “It is important to build something that is future-proof and not a Band-Aid solution. Forms (technology) is the basis of the e-commerce revolution and so it is important to do it right.”
Paul Merrell

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Novell Turns ICE Into Kablink - 0 views

  • The newly-renamed project is being expanded with workflow capabilities that Novell hopes will expand business usage. The Kablink project is Novell's effort to grow the market for open source collaboration solutions, and chip away at the hold that Microsoft's Sharepoint commands among small business users.
  • "We have a system inside of Kablink that allows developers to create business objects and these business objects model data," McConnell explained. "Then with the model of the data you can pass it views for forms and displaying the business model. So you can model a business object and then add collaboration items for that object." With the Kablink release, workflow capability is being added to the ICEcore collaboration features. A business user can now create a business workflow for a process -- be it approval, development or otherwise and attach that workflow to the business objects.
  • "We think our offering is unique; there are point solutions that have workflow embedded in them but the kind of social networking collaboration that we do, I don't know anyone that has a workflow component that can do the things that we can," McConnell claimed. "There are customers that have designed ISO 9000 processes with this, so it's a nifty thing to have, especially in an open source project."
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    See the video demo of the enterprise version at http://www.novell.com/products/teaming/demo.html Sourceforge project home page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/icecore/ Project home page at http://www.icecoreopen.org/ Reading related materials. This is open source crippleware. Enterprise version has features unavailable in open source version. Open source version packaged for SuSE, RHEL, and Windows, but clients only for Windows and SuSE (seems somewhat odd since the demo shows it running in Firefox). License is CPAL. Intra-corporate politics afoot? Seems like an X/K/Ubuntu package would be a natural for the Kablink product itself and drive uptake. OTOH, this is a new acquisition for Novell, so packaging may reflect what was done before Novell acquired. A lot of signs on the web site that the rebranding from ICEcore to Kablink was rushed, conceivably for OSCON, where it was announced.
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Gary Edwards

New mobile browsers bringing real Web to handhelds - Network World - 0 views

  • All of them have in common powerful, modern rendering engines, which make it possible for the browsers to display Web sites that look like those you see with a desktop browser. Safari and the Nokia browser use the same rendering engine: the open source WebKit. All Firefox projects use the same rendering engine, Gecko. Opera has over a decade invested in its core engine.
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    Mobil Web Browsers are changing the Web for everyone - including the desktop browser market!
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