Mozilla released Firefox 3.0.2 recently and within 3 days, Firefox gets another update, 3.0.3. This one makes us wonder “why this soon?” !. Pretty simple : “They want to adhere to their motto, faster, safer and smarter than ever before.

The latest update is a single-security-bug-fixing-release, Fixing a problem where users were unable to retrieve saved passwords or save new passwords (bug 454708)

Firefox users can update their version by Help -> Check For Updates.
Else, download a fresh copy.

So, as with any software, it is highly recommended that you update to the latest version as soon as possible so as to enjoy maximum safety. And don’t worry if you ever have any problems or queries; we at HarmlessGeek are here for you.

Mozilla released a maintenance update to Firefox, version 3.0.2, which addresses several security and stability issues.

Mozilla also released versions for Sinhala and Slovene languages, apart from a beta version of the browser with added support for Bengali, Galician, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Marathi, Telegu, and Thai which have been made available for testing.

The complete release notes for 3.0.2 can be found here.

Remember when McLaren employee Mike Coughlan had been caught in possession of sensitive Ferrari information? This is the exact scenario in the tech world.

An ex-design engineer at Intel, named Biswahoman Pani, has been accused of copying Intel design documents when he shifted to main rival AMD.

The man has not been arrested yet, and AMD has been let off the hook as the FBI found no evidence that AMD had encouraged or even knew about the espionage.

From The Inquirer:

According to the filing in the Boston US District Court, 13 files containing over 100 pages of top secret documentation and 19 drawings were found during a search of Pani’s house in July.

The FBI was tipped off by another Intel employee who, on discovering Pani’s planned move to the competition, ordered a log of his system access before he left.

On a side note, I supported the Prancing Horse when the scandal happened. In this scandal, I’m with AMD all the way. What do you think?

Opera, the browser known for its blazing fast page rendering, has just released version 9.6 Beta that includes a few new features that the company says will make Opera even faster than before.

The new ‘Low Bandwidth Mode’ is mainly aimed at the bandwidth conscious users. Users can also choose to ignore threads that will prevent any such threads from appearing in the future, as well as hiding the older threads.

A few of the new features:

Opera Link
Custom search engines and typed history (typed history is only the history you explicitly type or select from the address bar) are now joining bookmarks, speed dial, personal bar, and notes in Opera Link.

Feed Preview
Now you can preview an RSS/Atom feed before subscribing.

Low Bandwidth Mode
Low Bandwidth Mode is a setting on mail accounts that makes Opera Mail use as little bandwidth as possible.

• For IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), this means that Opera will only synchronise new messages and it will not fetch message attachments unless requested.
• For POP (Post Office Protocol), Opera will not fetch more than the first 100 lines of a message unless requested.

The complete change logs have all the new features detailed.

The good people over at WordPress released WordPress 2.6.2 today. And unlike the previous 2.6.1 release, this release is a mandatory release, to fix a loophole which occurs if your blog has registrations open.

From the horse’s mouth:

If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade. With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

So if you want your blog to remain harmless, upgrade to 2.6.2 ASAP! Hey if you don’t know how to upgrade, don’t sweat! Here’s an easy and harmless way to upgrade your WordPress installation