News of the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7, as well as an MSN toolbar for IE that adds tabbed browsing have not stemmed the flow of users converting to the Firefox web browser. Firefox has now been downloaded over 70 million times (71332264 at the time of writing) and according to netapplications.com Firefox is growing between .5 and 1% every month and now accounts for over 8% of the whole worldwide browser market share, far ahead of the growth of other alternative web browsers. Those figures roughly match the growth shown by Onestat and WebSideStory but is lower than what is experienced by tech related sites like ours. Although Firefox has had some security flaws found of late, it is still light years ahead of Microsoft improving your security with regards to exploits, Viruses and Spyware, both because it is not anywhere near as targeted by malicious parties as IE, but also because it doesn’t support lame technology like ActiveX, which has been the cause of many an IE exploit.

With the release of Firefox 1.0.5 and the soon to be released Firefox 1.1 the growth should continue unabated and ensure that the “Internet” isn’t synonymous with “Microsoft”.

Australia has just proven yet again that they’ve been duped via trade agreements into bring in the US’s toughest copyright and IP laws, without the native “Fair Use” laws that protect consumers in the US. An Australian court has just found Stephen Cooper, a man who hosted a site that linked to other peoples content, of copyright infringement. ‘

This seems to mean that in Australia, you need not actually commit any infringement at all. All you need do to land yourself in trouble is link to a site that contains infringing content and you are apparently guilty of doing it yourself. The prospect of accident linking could open a world of litigation for Australia’s which should delight the record companies and lawyers, but dismay everybody else. After all, there is a ton of legal digital music files available on the web and apparently we are all supposed to know the difference.

So there you go folks, in Australia, that great bastion of freedom and democracy down under, it is not only illegal to put your own purchased music onto a digital music player, it might be illegal to even sell such devices over here. Now we have the new idiocy where you can land yourself in court just for linking to another sites content.

We started HTML Fix It dot Com with the intent of trying to help the Internet community at large. We always appreciate receiving feedback and reviews, both positive and constructively critical. Clif Notes gave us a favorable review this week. Some of the more critical people of course need to remember that we are donation based (in an effort to cover our costs — see link at the bottom of each page of our site) and do this with “volunteer” hours of our time. Having said that, we always strive to improve. Thanks Clif for the review.

The Mozilla foundation have released a new version of Firefox, version 1.0.5 to be exact and according to the release file, the only changes are to fix some minor security fixes and stability improvements. This release does not appear to be as critical as earlier versions, but users are encouraged to upgrade anyway. Thunderbird (Firefox’s E-mail counterpart with SPAM filtering and an RSS reader) will be getting the same updates shortly as well.

The hot news with Firefox is the Deer Park Alpha 2 release which among it’s other features is the first Firefox that you don’t have to re-install to update. It isn’t ready for prime time use yet, but neither was 0.7 Firefox and I used it for ages as my primary browser without problem. For those of you that are not sure what Deer Park is about, Firefox 1.0.5 is the latest generation of the old 1.0.x version, Deer Park will be the next generation 1.1.x version of Firefox with more features, more security and more stability.

An email claiming to contain a video of one of the bombings of London instead hopes to lure victims into installing a Trojan Horse program onto their machines thereby handing control of their PCs to malicious parties.

This summary from Sophos seems to sum things up nicely.

Troj/Spexta-A may arrive as an email attachment in emails claiming to be from “CNN Newsletter” with subject line “TERROR HITS LONDON”. The Trojan is included as an attachment with filename “LondonTerrorMovie.zip”.

Every time tragedy reaches the headlines, the writers of these malicious programs use the headlines to try and use peoples curiosity against them (known as social engineering). You should by now know that every file attachment received in an email should be scanned by an up to date anti-virus program before it is run.

Google have opened up their RSS Adsense Beta that allows for Adsense ads to be displayed in a sites RSS feeds. Unfortunately they only appear to be accepting sites with more then 100 RSS subscribers and one of the problems people seem to be having is working out just how many people are subscribed to their feeds. To find out how many people are using our feeds, we’ll be modifying our RSS generator libraries to keep a list of unique IPs that have accessed the feeds and then counting them. Another method would be to write a Perl script to analyse web server log files but if you run a Blog or CMS it’s probably easier to simply write code to keep a list of all visiting IP addresses so that they can’t be counted more then once to get a rough idea of how many subscribers you have.

RSS is quickly growing in popularity as a means to keep track of vast amounts of information without visiting vast amounts of different sites, but thus far very few people are actually making any money from their RSS feeds and in many cases RSS is actually costing them money due to subscribers not visiting the sites as often, thereby affecting on site ad revenue.

According to ABC, we now have something of an “official” definition of Spyware and Adware based on a 13 page report from the recently formed “Anti-Spyware Coalition”. Part of the Spyware problem was defining what is Spyware, what isn’t, and what rides the grey lines. That sort of confusion has led to several lawsuits and much uncertainty from both vendors and consumers alike. Hopefully the new definitions will go some way to alleviating the problems. See also: CNET.

Spyware can slow your computer to a crawl by consuming your CPU cycles and RAM. It can also make Windows unstable and cause crashes and data loss. At present Spyware is a problem limited to the Microsoft Windows platform and there are free tools that Windows users can use to clean out their machines. Internet Explorer is currently the method most spyware gets onto peoples machines so just using Firefox or Opera can make a big difference.