Top ten: Firefox 3.0, Yahoo leavings, 'Net and politics
Mozilla servers were overwhelmed Tuesday after the company encouraged Firefox fans to download version 3.0 and help set a world record for the number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. Once problems were fixed, Firefox users complied, with more than 8 million downloads of the Web browser. No word yet from the Guinness Book of World Records about whether the effort will be declared a record. Meanwhile, the first vulnerability was verified within a few hours of the new version's availability. In other news, the list of top supercomputers was released with energy-efficiency calculations for many of the machines, more Americans than ever are using the Internet for information about the 2008 presidential campaign, and more executives left or are leaving Yahoo.
1. Firefox 3.0 released, servers overwhelmed and Mozilla logs 8 million-plus Firefox downloads in a day: Mozilla released Firefox 3.0, the latest version of its popular Web browser, declaring Tuesday "Download Day" with the aim of setting a world record for the most software downloads in a 24-hour period. At the start of that endeavor, Mozilla got a lesson in watching out what it asked for as company servers were overwhelmed. Once the problems were rectified, though, Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8,349,074 times within a 24-hour period. The company hopes that will lead to an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, which apparently does not yet include a record for software downloads. As expected by anyone who has ever downloaded a new software version, we arrive at the next entry in this week's news, the first Firefox 3.0 vulnerability ...
2. Firefox 3 vulnerability found: Five hours after Mozilla released Firefox 3.0, security researchers at Tipping Point verified the first vulnerability with a "high" severity rating, but they declined to say just what the problem was so that Mozilla could work on fixing it. Once a fix is ready, Tipping Point will put an advisory about the vulnerability on its Web site.
3. A misconfigured laptop, a wrecked life: This week's cautionary tale comes from Massachusetts, where Michael Fiola was fired from his job as an investigator with the state's Department of Industrial Accidents after he was accused of downloading child pornography onto his work-issued Dell Latitude laptop. Prosecutors recently dropped criminal charges against Fiola because they had insufficient evidence to show he downloaded the porn. Initially, state investigators found such evidence, but Fiola hired an independent forensic investigator to help defend him against the charges. What she found is enough to give all of us who use computers for work a bad case of the jitters -- the Microsoft SMS (Systems Management Server) software that was supposed to keep Fiola's laptop up to date wasn't functioning, nor was anti-virus software. The laptop was full of malicious programs that probably were responsible for the pornographic files his former employer says it found on the laptop.
4. How power-hungry are the Top500 supercomputers?: The twice-yearly Top500 list of supercomputers was revealed this week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, with an interesting twist -- energy-efficiency calculations were provided for many of the machines. "Power consumption is becoming one of the most important aspects of computing," said Jack Dongarra, a co-creator of the Top 500 List and a distinguished professor at the University of Tennessee. "It will be the most important driving force for supercomputing in the future. Without focusing on that, building bigger machines will be prohibitive. We're trying to understand which machines are more efficient, why they're more efficient, and understand the trends in high-performance computing."
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