“Java is a plugin for web browsers that is installed on approximately 66% of all computers. However there are very few websites that still rely on the features that it provides, leaving those 66% of computers vulnerable to attack when the dated technology is exploited. This has unfortunately happened several times in the past few months.” — Examples of why you should disable Java Continue reading
Internet Explorer 10 launches on October 26, 2012 along with Windows 8. The Google Apps team announced that it will no longer support Internet Explorer 8 (and lower) on November 15, 2012. After that date those using Internet Explorer 8 will see a message recommending that they upgrade their browser. — Supporting modern browsers: Internet Explorer 8 support discontinued Continue reading
Formulated by the White House, Federal Trade Commission and the Digital Advertising Alliance, Do Not Track will allow Internet users to add a Do Not Track header from browsers such as Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. This will tell Websites not to track them across the Web. Continue reading
Danny Sullivan blogs on a new report by Chitika, which analyzed a week’s worth of traffic across its ad network sites from July 20 to 26, 2011, for North America. Bing Users Are From Internet Explorer; Google Users From Firefox, Chrome & Safari.
IE [Internet Explorer] Flaw Could Allow Hackers Access to your Facebook, Gmail, Twitter Accounts - A security researcher discovered a ‘cookiejacking’ flaw in all IE versions that could allow an attacker to steal your session cookies and then log onto your password-protected sites such as Gmail, Facebook or Twitter.
Microsoft claims even though Valotta said it was easy to do there is little risk a hacker could succeed in a cookie jacking scam like that and the issue is not one the company calls a high risk.
Guest Post by Richard
There is a lot of buzz around Microsoft’s beta release of Internet Explorer 9, and it even rated a (sponsored) fawning on the official WordPress.com blog, but there are issues that people are running into trying to use it on WordPress.com and I suspect on self-hosted WordPress blogs as well.
One issue is that you cannot add or move widgets around on the widgets admin page, or rearrange them in the sidebar panel. IE9 in this respect has resurrected the ghosts of IE past. IE 6 had this issue as did IE7 when first released.
The important word to keep in mind is “BETA” as in not finished. It still has missing and loose nuts and bolts. WordPress is highly unlikely to address any IE9 compatibility issues till the browser goes full public release. If they did, they might end up chasing shadows as MS changes this and then changes that and then changes both of those again.
Never use a beta release browser as your main browser. If you want to download it and try it out, fine, but always keep the latest stable release around for your main work.
From looking at the new features and improvements though, IE9 promises a greatly improved user experience. As with any software though, only time will tell.
In light of the “private browsing” claims being made, 
Stanford University conducted research to investigate the privacy of the “private browsing” feature on some web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). Apparently, many popular browser extensions and plugins undermine the security of private browsing and many kinds of information can be leaked by browsers when using the “private browsing” mode.
Privacy mode, sometimes informally referred to as “porn mode”, is a term that refers to privacy features in some web browsers. Historically speaking, web browsers store information such as browsing history, images, videos and text within cache. … en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_browsing
An Analysis of Private Browsing Modes in Modern Browsers (Gaurav Aggarwal and Elie Bursztein, Stanford University; Collin Jackson, CMU; Dan Boneh, Stanford University) will be presented at the USENIX security conference and it suggests that the these browser tools aren’t really private after all.
We study the security and privacy of private browsing modes recently added to all major browsers. We first propose a clean definition of the goals of private browsing and survey its implementation in different browsers. We conduct a measurement study to determine how often it is used and on what categories of sites. Our results suggest that private browsing is used differently from how it is marketed.
We then describe an automated technique for testing the security of private browsing modes and report on a few weaknesses found in the Firefox browser. Finally, we show that many popular browser extensions and plugins undermine the security of private browsing. We propose and experiment with a workable policy that lets users safely run extensions in private browsing mode. PDF file (15 pages)
1. Do you use “private browsing”
2. If you do use “private browsing” which browsers and add-ons, extensions, plugins, etc. do you use?
3. Did you place any confidence in the “private browsing” claims previous to reading about this research?
