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August 27, 2009 11:50 AM PDT

BOL 1051: Firefox 3.5, now safe for porn

by Tom Merritt
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Yes. Snow Leopard reviews are out, and I have my favorite. But the more interesting story is Mozilla finding out that people didn't want to upgrade because they're afraid of the awesome bar exposing their porn. So they introduced private browsing mode fast. We also welcome Jon Strickland from HowStuffWorks to the show and he helps us understand how we can turn any story into an Apple story.

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Episode 1051

Best OS X Snow Leopard review I saw
http://twitter.com/rstevens/status/3582198132

Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard
http://reviews.cnet.com/macintosh-os/apple-mac-os-x/4505-3673_7-33676737.html
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/27/snow-leopard-the-reviews-are-in/

Snow Leopard could level security playing field
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10318943-245.html

Google now offers over a million free e-books in EPUB format
http://mashable.com/2009/08/27/google-million-free-ebooks/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10318843-265.html

…and is on fire
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6100080/Google-fire-in-London-Jokes-erupt-as-the-flames-die-down.html

New attack cracks common Wi-Fi encryption in a minute
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20090827/tc_pcworld/newattackcrackscommonwifiencryptioninaminute

Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/26/porn-collection-put-people-off-upgrading-to-firefox-3/

Microsoft finally catches up with rumor, drops Xbox price (yawn)
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-console-price-wars-microsoft-drops-xbox-elite-down-to-299/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10318991-17.html

Linux-based OS drives new Nokia N900
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10319133-94.html

Global gaming's Pirate Bay deal approved by shareholders
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-global-gamings-pirate-bay-deal-approved-by-shareholders/

…don’t believe it
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10319152-93.html

Unchain the office computers!
http://slate.com/id/2226279

Astrophysicists find “impossible” planet
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/08/27/1237251/Astrophysicists-Find-Impossible-Planet

TechStuff
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/category/techstuff/

Voice mail
Ashwin from Redondo Beach has theory on Google Voice app

E-mail
2^32 = 4,294,967,296 (4 GB)

That means, a 32 bit system (application or OS) can address a maximum of 4 GB. To alleviate this limitation, Intel designed PAE (Physical Address Extension). Thus, this change alters the hardware addressing from 32 bit to 36 bit.

2^36 = 68,719,476,736 (64 GB)

Linux was the first to adopt PAE, as far as I knew. Then Windows added support for PAE, but only in Server versions of Windows. Home system versions are not supposed to support it even within the Vista line. As of SP1, though, Microsoft may have inadvertantly rolled out PAE into Vista allowing for addressing of up to 64GB of RAM.

Note, however, that even though Windows may support 64GB of RAM, the 32 bit applications themselves are limited to 4GB of operating space. So, for bigger games and memory intensive applications, PAE doesn’t address this 4GB application limit. So, even though the hardware can use 64GB of RAM and the operating system sees it, applications (including operating system apps) are limited to a maximum of 4GB per application in 32 bit version of an operating system.

I do not know of MacOS X 32 bit supports PAE.

Thanks.


Brian Wright

**********

Hi Buzz Crew,

Just thought I would share… Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is using Facebook, Twitter and is planning to use YouTube to communicate with the troops and the public, with a virtual town hall. As a military member I think it is good that he is trying to communicate with the junior officers and enlisted. I just wonder if he knows that YouTube is blocked on all Department of Defense computer networks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vN-S89bAlo
http://www.facebook.com/admiralmikemullen
http://twitter.com/thejointstaff

Trevor

PS His staff does know that YouTube is blocked and Military members can e-mail their video to have it added to the town hall.

**********

Hey Tom,

In episode 1049 you talked about Microsoft Oneapp for dumb phones which will be available worldwide in 2010 (when these phones may not exist any more).

There is an application named SNAPTU that provide access to Facebook, twitter, flickr, picasa albums, RSS feeds, Weather, live scores, Google calender and some other stuff too and its cool.

its only like 500KB and it runs on mobile phones supporting Java (J2ME).

and yeah it have a Sudoku too.

Thank you and a nice show.

Mohammed Ibrahim
Pakistan

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by stigmattaman August 27, 2009 12:34 PM PDT
Funny story related to the Firefox story. A friend of mine was giving a WebEx demo to a client and sharing his desktop, unfortunately in the corner search bar was the phrase "Japanese egg di ldo."
A good time was had by all.
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by gidiyup1 August 27, 2009 1:17 PM PDT
In reference to the Firefox story. I did not like the fact that Firefox displayed me browsing history so openly. Although I'm not looking at porn, its sort of weird to see all the things you've searched for right there in front of you. It makes you wonder who else has access to this information. Also, I stopped using Firefox so much because it hogs way to much memory. Just last night I left my browswer up and came back to my computer and noticed it was acting weird. I looked at the memory usage for Firefox and it was at 444,000K. This is definitely still a problem with this broswer.
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by edwenn August 28, 2009 6:05 AM PDT
Yo! It turns out that the Nokia N900 is in fact a phone as well as an Internet tablet...or at least the Nokia UK site gives that impression. I have an N800 and love it to bits. Was excited about the N900 news even before I read that it was a phone too...am now even more excited, although concerned about that price tag as there's no way I'll be spending £500 on a new phone/tablet. I bought my N800 for £125 (a total steal) about 2 years ago. When the N810 was released a lot of retailers seemed to reduce the price on their N800 stock; I suspect they thought the N810 was a replacement model and that the N800 would be phased out. Not the case initially, although I think it's been withdrawn now (or it's certainly hard to find a new one for sale online in the UK). Anyway, the N900 looks amazing.

I just wanted to point out that it IS a phone not a standard N Series Nokia device as I think your review on show #1051 said it wasn't a phone.
Reply to this comment
by aristotle_dude August 29, 2009 10:34 AM PDT
How many remote exploits are there for OS X? None. Zero. Macs out of the box are safe on any network. The default configuration is secure. Every single operating system is potentially vulnerable to malware in the form of Trojans. Does windows now have some security features to combat malware? Yes, but the weakest link still is the user and windows is still easier to write exploits for. Do you want examples? ActiveX is one of the main culprits folks. No plug-in architecture should have that much access to the OS.

Pundits seem to forget that OS X is UNIX. It is certified as UNIX and that heritage is seen all over the place in the OS.
Reply to this comment
by aristotle_dude August 29, 2009 11:03 AM PDT
Regarding virtual workstations, companies could provide virtual locked down virtual workstations and allow you to connect via either Remote Desktop Connection or Citrix client. Where I work, I have a development environment running Windows 2008 Server 64bit server which I connect to via RDP. Visual Studio 2008 runs much faster on the fast server than it would on my local workstation.

There are obviously some applications such as Photoshop which would not work well virtualized but applications such as Office and developer tools should work fine on a VM.
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Buzz Out Loud features Tom Merritt, producer Jason Howell, and a rotating roundtable of CNET's top tech experts reviewing the day's tech news. Each episode, five times a week, the crew analyzes, interprets, and argues about what all this technology means and what it's doing to us. Fans can join in the show by calling 1-800-616-2638, e-mailing at buzz@cnet.com, or commenting on the blog.


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Tom Merritt Tom Merritt appears on CNET TV, specializing in help and how-to and the ever popular Top 5 lists. He also co-hosts CNET's The Real Deal podcast. See profile
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