Jeff Rivett has worked with and written about computers since the early 1980s. His first computer was an Apple II+, built by his father and heavily customized. Jeff's writing appeared in Computist Magazine in the 1980s, and he created and sold a game utility (Ultimaker 2, reviewed in the December 1983 Washington Apple Pi Journal) to international markets during the same period. Proceeds from writing, software sales, and contract programming gigs paid his way through university, earning him a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) degree at UWO. Jeff went on to work as a programmer, sysadmin, and manager in various industries. There's more on the About page, and on the Jeff Rivett Consulting site.
At least seven security issues were fixed in version Firefox 30.0, released yesterday.
The release notes for version 30.0 show several other changes in this release, but only one is worth mentioning. A new ‘Sidebars’ toolbar button was added, presumably based on complaints that version 29 made it more difficult to toggle the bookmark sidebar on and off. But toggling the sidebar still requires two clicks as opposed to the single click that was required before version 29. So that’s not exactly progress.
For those of you keeping score, the release notes pages for Firefox are still a mess.
I’ve been using Feedly as my main RSS feed reader for several months now, having tried several other alternatives to the now-defunct Google Reader.
Unfortunately, as I write this, Feedly is down. A Denial of Service (DoS) attack began when the site’s operators refused to pay extortionists to avoid the attack.
Feedly staff are working with their Internet Service Provider to mitigate the attack and hope to have service restored soon.
Another new version of Flash was released today. Version 14.0.0.125 closes six security vulnerabilities found in previous versions.
If Flash is enabled in your web browser, you should update it as soon as possible.
As usual, the embedded Flash in Internet Explorer on Windows 8.x is updated via Windows Update, while the embedded Flash in Chrome will update itself automatically.
This month there are seven bulletins, with related patches affecting Internet Explorer, Windows and Office. A total of sixty-six security vulnerabilities are fixed with these updates.
Note that Microsoft is recommending upgrading to the latest version of Internet Explorer. IE 11 contains security features not found in previous versions and is therefore somewhat more secure than those older versions. Anyone still using Internet Explorer would do well to follow this advice.
Two new vulnerabilities were recently discovered in widely-used security software OpenSSL and GnuTLS.
The OpenSSL vulnerability is not as dangerous as the infamous Heartbleed bug, but can allow attackers to pull private information from communications between unpatched systems, including passwords.
The GnuTLS vulnerability can be used by malicious persons to execute arbitrary code on devices accessing specially-crafted web pages.
As with Heartbleed, these vulnerabilites mainly affect servers, although client software and operating systems that use the GnuTLS and OpenSSL libraries are also at risk. Patches are expected to be made available soon.
The new vulnerability is similar to one that was discovered, then patched, in the major browsers several years ago. The new technique uses a different approach to accomplish the same thing.
Browser developers are working on fixes for this vulnerability, but in the meantime, anyone concerned about their browser history potentially being revealed should get into the habit of clearing their history frequently. Alternatively, you could switch to a privacy-oriented browsing solution such as the Tor Browser Bundle.
boot13