Hasta La Gadget!

Soon political dissidents, whistle blowers, and those trying to cheat MLB.TV’s blackout restrictions will have an easier way to protect their privacy thanks to a dedicated Tor Browser. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Tor is a tool for anonymizing web browsing and communications through encryption and proxy servers. Trouble is, it requires both a browser extension and a standalone app to work — leaving average users “horribly confused,” according to developer Mike Perry. So, the organization has decided to retire the Tor Button and create its own fork of Firefox with private browsing features baked in. As an added benefit, Tor will no longer be at the mercy of Mozilla to fix bugs that affect privacy and security. For now, the group will focus on its downloadable bundle with automatic configuration scripts for simplifying setup, but eventually the paranoid will have a browser they can finally call their own.

Tor to fork Firefox for simplified anonymous browsing, doesn’t think you’re paranoid originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 May 2011 21:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox 4? Too furry. Internet Explorer 9? Too blue. Google’s Chrome? Just the right amount of shine — or is it? The company introduced a flat new logo for the browser and now that logo is gracing the software’s latest stable release. Chrome 11 is now available, the biggest changes being a number of security and bug fixes, some of which “may be kept private until a majority of our users are up to date with the fix.” The new version also delivers speech-to-text and, perhaps more importantly, text-to-speech. There are other enhancements too, but really you’ve probably already left us to update. Are you still there? Hello?

[Thanks, noob]

Google launches Chrome 11, flat icon is here to stay originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Happy with your shiny new copy of Internet Explorer 9? It’s already out of date — Microsoft just announced Internet Explorer 10 at its MIX developer conference in Las Vegas, and if you’re running Windows you can grab a spoon right now and sample an early taste. You can download the new Platform Preview right now at Microsoft’s Test Drive site and see where the company’s going with this early iteration, which adds support for additional web standards like CSS Gradients and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout. According to the press release, a gentleman named Dean Hachamovitch just revealed the new browser on the MIX stage, but we’re actually watching him speak right now, and… he’s not quite there yet. We’ll let you know what he says.

Update: Video after the break!

Update 2: Dean and Steven Sinofsky (president of the Windows division) are indeed showing it off on stage, but they’re just performing the same Test Drive tests you could run at home — go on, you know you want to dip your toe in that HTML5 fishbowl.

Update 3: Oh, Dean, you’re such a tease — that copy of IE10 (and by association, Windows) was running on a 1GHz ARM chip! Yes, Windows on ARM — photographic evidence after the break.

Update 4: NVIDIA just tweeted that the mysterious ARM chip is in fact a Tegra 2 processor.

Continue reading Microsoft pushes out preview build of Internet Explorer 10 (update: Windows on ARM!)

Microsoft pushes out preview build of Internet Explorer 10 (update: Windows on ARM!) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chrome 11 goes beta with speech-to-text capabilities originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not just desktop web browsers getting hacked at this year’s Pwn2Own challenge — mobile browsers have also been targeted for vulnerabilities, and a fairly big one has now been found in RIM’s browser for BlackBerry OS 6. Apparently, there’s a JavaScript-related bug that could let a “maliciously designed” website gain access to data stored on both the phone’s media card and built-in storage, but not data stored in the storage portion for applications (such as email or contact information). For its part, RIM says that it hasn’t actually seen any evidence of anyone exploiting the vulnerability, but it’s nonetheless urging folks to disable JavaScript on affected devices, and it’s now busy providing IT departments everywhere with guidelines on how to do so. If that proves to be complicated, it’s suggesting that you simply disable the BlackBerry Browser altogether until it can be patched.

RIM issues PSA following Pwn2Own exploit: turn off JavaScript on your BlackBerry originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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