Hasta La Gadget!

You can make calls, read books, and listen to music on this flexible computer from Canada. But do you really want to keep bending it to make it work?

This article was written on May 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

There is so much junk going around the Internet these days that it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to browse the Web securely. Last year we wrote about 10 great Firefox extensions that will not only keep you secure, but also help you maintain your privacy. This time around we have 4 more tools that a user has submitted, and some work for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

You’ll notice that three of the four tools are all similar to the McAfee SiteAdvisor that we mentioned in our previous article, but the purposes they each serve are very important. Not only that but each of them has their own unique benefits so we felt it necessary to mention each of them.

—LinkScanner for Firefox & IE (Homepage)—

It does what search engines should already be doing for us, and that is scanning results and marking which ones might be potentionally malicious.

It does have one other feature that is pretty cool, and that is the ability to scan links on-demand. You can right-click on any link and it will quickly analyze it for anything that is out of the ordinary. It will then let you know what the result is.

There is also a professional version of LinkScanner available for $19.95 per year that goes beyond just your browser. It actually works with your firewall to monitor traffic, which means you are even protected when reading email!

—Finjan SecureBrowsing for Firefox & IE (Homepage)—

This tool also checks hyperlinks to see if the resulting page is safe or not, but it is a little different in how it works. Finjan actually scans the content of each page looking for content that could end up harming your PC. Unlike other software alternatives this scanning process is done in real-time and is not based solely on a database of blacklisted URL’s.

Finjan will scan search results and even advertisements and warn you about any potentially malicious content that is found. A green result means that the content is clean, yellow means the site was unavailable to scan, and red means that the site is not safe.

—TrendProtect for Firefox & IE (Homepage)—

This tool will automatically scan the page that you have open in the browser, as well as search results from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. It will place an icon next to each of the results so that you can quickly identify the good and bad sites.

One of the things that is cool with TrendProtect is that you can configure some of the options, such as whether to highlight the search results links or whether to display the advice baloon when you hover of the icon. You can also manage the trusted pages and configure a few advanced options.

In the balloon you’ll find information regarding the site along with an option to scan your computer or whitelist the page.

—Firekeeper for Firefox (Homepage)—

This is a Firefox extension that is still in the early stages of development. However, it is still an effective solution at sniffing for malicious code on the websites that you visit. When malicious code is found, you will quickly be prompted with information regarding the problem. You’ll also be given some references so that you can read up on why the code was determined to be malicious as well as options to blacklist or whitelist the site.

If you have problems downloading the extension, use these download links: Windows and Linux.

—Overview—

Security is pretty important to me, and tools like these could save me a lot of headaches from having to fix computers for people who unknowingly visit these malicious sites. If you have any security tools that you find useful please let us know in the comments below!

Thanks to “s” and “C” for the tips!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Whoops. If you’ll recall, Sony held what can only be described as an emergency press event in Japan a week ago in order to issue a number of assurances about the resumption of service as it relates to the PlayStation Network and Qriocity. Seven days later, things are still as dead as they were pre-Cinco de Mayo. This evening, the company’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications Patrick Seybold punched out a quick update to let the world know that they could actually leave the house and find something else to entertain ’em — like it or not, PSN isn’t coming back online today. The reason? On May 1st, Sony was apparently “unaware of the extent of the attack on Sony Online Entertainment servers,” and now, it’s spinning its wheels in order to restore security on the network and “ensure” that user data is safe. Mr. Seybold seems to understand that you’re overly anxious about getting back into the swing of things, and he’s even going so far as to ask your trust that Sony’s doing “everything [it] can” to get the lights blinking once more. Oh, and if you were planning on visiting that source link just to find the new ETA… don’t. Sony’s planning to update you “as soon as it can.”

[Thanks, Alex]

Sony misses promised PlayStation Network and Qriocity restoration date, begs for more patience originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 May 2011 03:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on March 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Today marked the death of two great startups: AllPeers and Ezmo. AllPeers is the Firefox extension that originally emerged as a way to share files between your friends and family, and later on they started to support BitTorrent transfers. Having this integrated into your browser is pretty convenient, but it didn’t take off quite like they hoped that it would. They didn’t get the user growth that they were shooting for, and that’s understandable. The extension didn’t last long on my system because it was difficult to find other people willing to install it, which is required if you want to share files with them.

Here’s a snippet from what the AllPeers blog had to say about shutting down the service:

It is with deep regret that we inform our users, friends and fans that we will be shutting down the AllPeers service today. We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.

Ezmo actually sounds like a pretty nifty music sharing service, but I hadn’t heard about it until today. They would let you upload your music to their servers so that you could listen to it no matter where you were at. The software worked with iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player for uploading your tunes, which you could then share with your friends.

They ran into problems when trying to work with the music labels who weren’t very cooperative:

It has always been clear to us that Ezmo had to be a free service for all users. Our revenue model is based on music sales (and promotion), for which one needs at least some sort of cooperation with music labels. We have had repeated meetings and contact with the major labels, but their willingness to cooperate in finding innovative solutions for music sales seems non-existent. Their terms were not compatible with the conditions a small start-up operates under. We still feel absolutely confident that services like Ezmo will have a major significance in the future, but the lack of cooperation and even threats of lawsuits from the labels and their organisations has made intermediate financing paramount in order to secure a necessary time horizon for the company. Without that financing in place, Ezmo has no alternative but to shut the service down and close the company.

So here we are burying two great startups today. The AllPeers site has already been taken down, but the extension is still available on the Firefox add-ons site. Ezmo will continue running until March 14th.

Thanks to Emil for the tip on Ezmo!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

Now that Firefox 3 is approaching the home stretch it is important that Mozilla starts to throw in performance improvements to really make the browser purr. Over in our forum xpgeek pointed out that a Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) build of Firefox 3 had been created which greatly improved the performance of JavaScript in the browser. While PGO itself hasn’t yet landed in the nightly builds there have been some significant improvements to the JavaScript engine.

I’m sure what most of you care the most about are the facts, and so I’ve compiled the results of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test for each of the different browsers. All of the tests below were performed on the same Windows machine, and the Firefox 3 nightly builds definitely came out on top. Here are the results sorted from best to worst (each one is hyperlinked to the full stats):

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms

It’s important to know that every time you run the SunSpider Benchmark it conducts each test five times, and the result is the average of the five tests. So it is a rather thorough test, and definitely shows off the speed improvements that Firefox 3 is going to be bringing to the table.

What does this all mean for you? Depending on what browser you typically use you may not notice a huge speed difference, but the change will be the most noticeable on sites that use JavaScript heavily. With the Web 2.0 era upon us all JavaScript speed enhancements are welcomed with open arms.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is expected to be released in the next few weeks, and you can expect to see these (and many more) improvements shining through!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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