Avencius

Ben Goodger, lead Firefox developer, announced in his blog that he's leaving the Mozilla Foundation's pay roll, for Google. He'll continue leading the Firefox project and releases, but will increasingly leave the Mozilla Foundation for Google business. Exactly what he'll be doing at Google is unknown.

Asa Dotzler and Ben Goodger updated their blogs with more information regarding the future Firefox 1.1 release. In this versions users are not to be expecting any new features, but rather overall increased stability, rendering and better Mac-platform browser migration.

Update: Ben Goodger blogged some more about the upcoming Prefwindow V, including a new sanitize function (read: a simple version of Opera's Delete private data) and a page full of screenshots.

Alaska-based biologist, Dr. Victor Van Ballenberghe, has drafted a report commissioned by Defenders and supported by 123 scientists and academic wildlife professionals, which states that Alaska's current program of killing wolves from the air is scientifically flawed. Along with the report, the scientists sent a letter stating their opposition to Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski and the Alaska Board of Game on January 6. At press time, 63 wolves had already been killed by aerial gunners this season, and hundreds more are slated to die.

Defenders' Alaska office records a weekly audio message about the aerial gunning program that can be heard online. You can also view a video about aerial hunting of wolves (caution: it's fairly graphic) and sign a petition to Gov. Murkowski at www.wolfcampaign.org.

Opera Software published a press release stating that over 500 schools responded to their recently announced free site licensee for the higher education.

Education community embraces Opera's free site license: More Than 500 Schools Respond
Oslo, Norway Jan. 18, 2005

Within hours of announcing the free Opera site license for higher education institutions, hundreds of schools responded, eager for a safer Internet browsing alternative. Though only a few days have passed since the announcement, more than 500 universities and colleges are on the way to deploying the Opera browser on school-owned computers.

Opera has offered free site licenses to primary and secondary schools, Web design schools and organizations for the physically disabled since 2002. Until now, higher education schools were subject to fees for an ad-free version of the browser. Now all schools receive the ad-free version free of charge on any school-owned machine.

See? Watching anime can be a good thing. After discovering Steve Conte singing talents in the Wolf Rain's OST, I googled for his other works, and got two (rock) bands: Crown Jewels and The Contes.

The Contes is their most recently formed band, and consists mostly of the same people. Though produced by somebody else, the most distinct difference is the style of music. Crown Jewels is definitely from a former age, the music is rougher, though still very good, especially the lyrics and composition. Going back on topic, Bleed Together is their latest album and contains rougher and calmer music. The best part is each song seems distinct from every number on the disc and offers a music experience that will not become boring anytime soon. Expect reviews of each album in the distant future!

Asa Dotzler points in his blog to this interesting article at ZDNet Australia. In this article they interview Mitch Kapor, who is both president and chair of the OSAF and chairman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Why is that? Why should it take something like Firefox to improve IE?

Microsoft does not respond and improve products otherwise. The Mozilla Foundation does not have financial goals, so it can take credit for whatever improvements happen in the browser, whether they're in Firefox or not. By the standards of the project itself, to the extent that the net result is that IE's fundamental security problems get addressed, that, too, is a victory. As for the analysts who look at this, I doubt that's their criteria for success.

The other thing is that enterprises are not, in many cases, very satisfied with a single Microsoft alternative. This is a known and longstanding problem. They have been held back by a lack of alternatives that are comparable and satisfying in all the ways important to enterprises.

With Firefox, which begins to pass the threshold for enterprise acceptance, the question is, How will they respond? It's not a question of the economics of it, but will it help them to manage their computing infrastructure better? As for whether Firefox is overhyped, we'll have to see how this plays out.

The Mozilla Foundation has released the sixth alpha of the Mozilla Suite. After this work will begin on the first beta build. Mozilla 1.8 will also become the base of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and, therefor it's important to test and stabilize this platform.

Currently the website does not host a what's new section, but a rough changelog (generated from Bugzilla) is available for viewing.

Secunia has posted a new advisory detailing a "data:" URI handler spoofing vulnerability, which is deemed moderately critical, in the latest Opera 7.54u1. The Opera Beta (8.00b1) wasn't tested, but might be vulnerable as well.

Description:
Michael Holzt has discovered a vulnerability in Opera, which can be exploited by malicious people to trick users into executing malicious files.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the processing of "data:" URIs, causing wrong information to be shown in a download dialog. This can be exploited by e.g. a malicious website to trick users into executing a malicious file by supplying a specially crafted "data:" URI.

The vulnerability has been confirmed on version 7.54u1 for Windows. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution:
Do not open files from untrusted sources.

This popular Mozilla Firefox extension to view the weather has been updated to version 0.5.9 and offers a large list of fixes.