In a boon for Open Source software, Nokia have announced that users will soon be able to browse the web using a browser based on KDE’s Konqueror and Apple Safari browsers. Apple choose the KDE browser core (KHTML) for their Safari browser for it’s clean design, speed and standards (“Rich Web browsing experience” in Nokia speak). That same reasoning is behind the decision to create a smart phone browser for Nokia phones. The core of the browsers is Open Source, indicating that the base Operating System is not the only place Open Source has on smart phones. The new browser will be available for all Series 60 phones and is due in the first half of 2006. This isn’t limited to just Nokia phones as the series 60 Symbian Operating System is used by many manufacturers and the fact that the code is Open Source means it can be used by any of them.

It will be interesting to see what Opera makes of this as they are currently the mobile browser champions.

Richard Stiennon VP of Threat Research at anti-Spyware company Webroot Software, Inc earlier this year announced his predictions for 2005 in relation to security vulnerabilities and Spyware problems. Most of the predictions were fairly predictable like:

The number of new Microsoft vulnerabilities will grow.

Which isn’t a surprise to anyone in the IT industry and probably a good many people that aren’t. Other predictions like: The US and European nations will pass anti-spyware laws, and the number of different types of spyware will double to 3,000 are not exactly unexpected either.

However at least one of the predictions causes a pause for further thought. In short one prediction that RSS syndication will soon be used as a tool to distribute advertising, Spyware and other malicious code. RSS is basically just XML so the medium isn’t potentially dangerous by itself, but flaws that target specific RSS readers could conceivably result in the transfer of Spyware. RSS is already being used to distribute advertising so that one isn’t a surprise either. RSS has most of the benefits of E-mail and that means it also has most of the problems. One of those problems is that malicious parties can use social engineering tricks to get people to follow links in RSS to download malicious content, which is probably what Mr Stiennon meant. The problem with that theory is that a user must first subscribe to an RSS feed to be at risk at all, which makes it considerably less reliable a method of transferring malicious content then E-mail or web pages.

One other prediction Mr Stiennon made was that Firefox would become the target of Spyware sometime in the first half of this year. I’m not so sure about this one because it is mostly the more techie users that have become hooked on Firefox and they would not be particularly good targets for Spyware since they are also the kind of users most likely to have anti-Virus and anti-Spyware software running, if they are using Windows that is.

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is one of the many high visibility Open Source programs and is included with nearly all Linux distributions. It has also been ported to Windows and is available for free to anyone with the desire to download it. Some believe that the GIMP suffers from usability problems and isn’t quite at the same level as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, however that is a matter of much debate.

In an effort to remove at least one of those complaints, one enterprising developer took it upon himself to make Adobe Photoshop users feel at home with the GIMP by re-arranging the menus and naming conventions to match Photoshop as much as possible. The result is GIMPshop and thus far the only complaint related to the work seems to be the desire that the official GIMP follow the same conventions.

GIMPshop was written initially for the Macintosh architecture, but has since been ported to both Linux and Windows.

If you are an old Photoshop hand, but don’t have the money or desire to purchase a new copy, or you might just be somebody looking for a powerful free Image editing program, you could do worse then to try GIMPshop, (Or the official GIMP if you are not fussed with the Photoshop related changes).

It’s been official for a while now, but for anyone that hasn’t already heard, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved the .xxx TLD (Top Level Domain) for online porn sites. The problem is that it isn’t obligatory that such sites use only .xxx domains so the result will be that many of the sites will buy their xxx domain and keep their existing domains as well. The porn industry seems to rely to some degree or another on the “impulse buy” where people find them without meaning to and decide to have a closer look. If all porn was under a xxx domain the days of finding yourself at such a site by accident would be long behind us. Since that is likely to significantly hit the profit margins of such sites, they will fight tooth and nail, any move to make xxx the only domain porn sites are able to use. Since xxx is useless as a filter of un-requested porn unless it’s uniformly used and enforced, this raises the question: What good is it then?

On the upside, a certain movie series that initially starred Vin Diesel would be able to register xxx.xxx for their next release. 🙂

The Sunday Times have an article about the forthcoming new Office release from Microsoft and talk about the level of software bloat that plagues Office now. They also discuss alternative software like OpenOffice.org and Mellel and how Microsoft’s software loses with regards to startup speed by significant margins. Well worth the read.

According to the Seattlepi, a federal judge has cleared the way for Novell to go after Microsoft regarding anti-competitive claims that Microsoft unfairly blocked out sales for Novell’s Wordperfect Office suite.

One quoted email from Aug 1997 mentioned in the above article from Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes to investor Warren Buffett sums the reasoning behind the judges decision nicely.

“If we own the key franchises built on top of the operating system, we dramatically widen the ‘moat’ that protects the operating system business. We hope to make a lot of money off these franchises, but even more important is that they should protect Windows royalty per PC.”

Microsoft are not having much luck in the courtroom of late, they lost a patent infringement case worth 9 million in the last week and they just settled another case with Novell for half a billion dollars for “alleged” previous transgressions. Who can guess how much they will have to pay before they realise it’s cheaper to play nice with competitors.

Not exactly new news, but Searchengineworld’s article entitled “26 steps to 15k a Day” is well worth a read to anybody hoping to make a living from their web presence. Most of the advice is common sense but there are a few gems in there as well. The theme of the whole thing is “Content is king”, create tons of useful content and then create some more. Add new content every day and make sure your pages are valid and display correctly on every browser and designed with SEO in mind. Not exactly brain surgery but it’s surprising how many people don’t follow that path correctly or at all. Not only would site owners benefit from following this advice, but search engine results would be considerably more accurate were webmasters to follow the rules outlined in the article.