In a twist of irony, Microsoft Internet Explorer, the browser everyone loves to deride for being insecure, is immune to a recently-discovered security flaw. Cnet has this to say:

A security weakness in a standard for handling special character sets in domain names could let an attacker spoof Web sites on non-Microsoft browsers, a researcher has warned.

The problem arises because certain browsers support a standardized way of representing domain names in the letters or characters of any language, security expert Eric Johanson said at the ShmooCon hacker convention this weekend. Called Internationalized Domain Names, the standard allows companies to register domain names that appear to be the same in different languages.

Safari, as well as Opera and Mozilla-based browsers are affected. No official fix has yet been released.

click here for my review.

The Mac Observer reports a patent Apple filed in 2000 was granted earlier this week. The patent indicates that Spotlight development started long before Longhorn’s announcement.

A patent granted to Apple January 25th, 2005 appears to reveal that Apple had a multiyear head start on Microsoft for Spotlight, the company’s search technology that will be released later this year in Tiger. Many had seen Spotlight as a quickly developed, me-too technology intended to compete with Microsoft’s long-delayed Longhorn update to Windows, but the patent application shows that Apple began working on the technology in January of 2000, years before Longhorn was announced.

link to article

Thanks go to Electronic Punk at OSNN for this one.

As I expected just the other day, Windows XP x64 edition Release Candidate 1 has been released to the General Public - you can get it here if you don’t mind giving Microsoft your ‘personal details’

I highly reccomend you download it and give it a go if you own an AMD64 product

Linkies:
OSNN
Windows x64 order page

According to a report on The Inquirer, “sources close to Microsoft” say that the new 64bit version of their flagship desktop operating system designed to take advantage of the added capabilities of AMD’s line of Athlon64/FX and Intel’s up-and-coming line of 64bit-enabled CPUs will be released on April 29.

This is a little later than the anticipated date of “Sometime in March” but at least it’s not another delay of twelve months, or several years in the case of Longhorn

Microsoft also released a “Release Candidate 1” (build 1289) version of the OS to beta testers, and it has been widely speculated that they will shortly be releasing this to the public as part of their Customer Preview Program.

Here’s hoping they do, as the version they have available to the general public right now is getting rather old.

The Inquirer article