bug

Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it is looking into an issue in which users of Internet Explorer 6 are forced into having Bing as their default search engine.

"We are aware of the issue with Bing on machines running IE6 and are investigating a solution," Microsoft said in a statement. "This issue is not impacting IE7 and IE8 users."

Although it is only affecting its older browser, many people still use IE6 and Microsoft has faced a lot of regulatory scrutiny over how default search preferences are set and changed within Internet Explorer.

The issue crops … Read more

Microsoft warned on Friday of a significant bug in the latest version of its SharePoint portal product.

The bug, in a service pack update to the product, improperly activates an expiration date, so SharePoint will expire as though it were a trial installation 180 days after the service pack is deployed.

Microsoft says the bug will not affect SharePoint performance until the ersatz expiration date passes. The company also said customer data will not be affected, even if the product does expire but that it will render SharePoint inaccessible for end users.

Microsoft says a manual fix is out now … Read more

Canon released a service note detailing a notable but infrequently and randomly occurring artifact in photos shot with certain PowerShot G10s: lines. If you've seen these and wondered at them, wonder no more, and contact Canon for your free repair. It turns out our evaluation unit fell into the relevant serial number range, but none of my test photos displayed this problem. Whew.

How dangerous is your commute? The answer may depend on the weather.

In addition to speed traps and red light cameras, Njection.com is now offering people the option to view the traffic accident history of a route based on past weather conditions using the Njection Mobile iPhone application.

Njection took five years of accident data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and merged it with global weather conditions from WeatherBug.com. Using Microsoft Virtual Earth, this mashup enables people to see what accidents have occurred in a particular area, and if they want, filter the data to show … Read more

Correction and update:This post was updated at 1:53 p.m. with a corrected headline (the word "patched" was missing) and additional and winnowed information on the security holes.)

Mozilla published a critical security upgrade for Firefox Friday evening. Version 3.0.8 for Windows, Mac, and Linux fixes two security holes listed as "critical."

One patched an arbitrary code execution hole through an XUL element, and the other corrected an XSL stylesheet exploit. Both fixes patch crash-based security holes in which remote codes could have been run.

The release notes for Firefox 3.0.… Read more

Some researchers claim that Intel has a serious chip bug on its hands. But that all depends.

Security experts who are into the arcana of chip security may find "CPU cache poisoning" riveting and serious stuff. Others, however, may simply scratch their heads and move on.

But let's not move on too quickly. First, a quote from an abstract of the paper (PDF) that has some of the chip world abuzz. "In this paper we have described practical exploitation of the CPU cache poisoning...This is the third attack on SMM (system management mode) memory our … Read more

Perhaps you, too, have friends who go nowhere without their hand sanitizer. Perhaps you, too, laugh at them beneath your clenched top lip.

However, researchers at Ondokiz Mayis University in Turkey are discovering that germs lurk everywhere. Especially in cell phones belonging to doctors and nurses, according to an Agence France Presse report. In fact, these phones may be a significant source of infections such as MRSA, which seems to have become an increasing danger in hospitals all over the world.

In researching the cell phones and dominant hands of 200 doctors and nurses, the researchers found that 95 percent … Read more

Google has added a patch to its latest beta version and stable version of Chrome to make the browser work better with Microsoft's Hotmail site.

With the patch, Chrome tells Microsoft's site it's actually Apple's Safari browser, sidestepping a compatibility issue that had caused problems using the site.

"While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we're deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com," Chrome Product Manager Mark Larson said in a blog announcement. It also fixes … Read more

I spent some time with a large customer of Alfresco's today, and heard an interesting reason for why choosing open source was critical to them. Granted, it's a large media company, and so its needs may not fit those of most other enterprise customers.

But I thought the importance it placed on open source was enlightening:

Open source is critical for us, because on our old [proprietary] content management system, we were completely dependent on the vendor if something went wrong. Alfresco's open-source CMS enables us to get into the code and start working on a fix … Read more