Google celebrates eight years of toolbar with new IE version

If you've used a computer in the last decade, no doubt you've come face to face with the Google Toolbar. A Dell computer I bought a few years back came with both the toolbar and Google's desktop search program pre-installed. Also, an obscene amount of software comes with it as an optional add-on in the installation process since Google pays referrers a fat $1 per new user.

Next month, Google's toolbar turn eight years old and to celebrate, the company has launched a brand-new version for Internet Explorer, which brings it up to speed with last month's beta release for Firefox users.

Of all of the features, my personal favorite is the updated autofill system. This lets you have separate autofill profiles, which can be changed on the fly. This is useful if you're planning to use the toolbar at work, since you can keep one set of information for personal use (e.g. usernames, addresses, phone numbers), and another for business. It can also follow you from browser to browser as long as you're logged in with your Google credentials. Other big changes include the introduction of gadgets, which users can affix to the top of their browser and summon with a click. It also throws in Web bookmark sync, and the updated sharing button, which lets you send entire pages to friends via SMS or without having to use an e-mail account.

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Microsoft issues mega-patch to crush 20 bugs in Windows, Office, IE

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday patched 20 vulnerabilities, more than half of them rated critical, in 11 separate security updates for Windows, Office, Internet Explorer (IE), Active Directory and the Host Integration Server.

Also for the first time, the company predicted the likelihood that hackers would come up with exploits for each bug.
"The count's big," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. Eleven of the 20 flaws were rated "critical," the top ranking in Microsoft's four-level threat scoring system, while eight were pegged as "important," the next step down, and one was listed as only "moderate." Today's update was the largest since August, when Microsoft issued 26 patches in 12 bulletins.
Storms identified two general themes in the latest round of patches. "First, there's still a pervasiveness of client application updates that doesn't seem to be diminishing at all, and second, Microsoft's newer software is still less vulnerable than its older."
On the first point, Storms ticked off updates that addressed three critical vulnerabilities in Excel and six critical bugs in IE, while for the second he listed several security bulletins that tagged Windows 2000 or older editions of Office as vulnerable, but gave newer versions of its operating system or applications either a pass or lowered the threat for users.
"Today's patches really continue to hammer the idea that the newer [Microsoft] software is more secure," said Storms. "If there was ever a reason to update to newer software, this is it. There's no reason not to update, for example, to IE7."
Storms highlighted two other updates that he thought should receive special attention, particularly by enterprise IT professionals. One, spelled out in MS08-060, affects Active Directory, while the other, MS08-059, affects Host Integration Server (HIS), a little-known corporate product that connects Windows-based networks to IBM mainframe and AS/400 systems. Microsoft marked both bulletins as critical.
"The attack surface is low for MS08-059, but the potential impact is high because HIS interacts with the critical back-office infrastructure that can't be down," said Storms. Today's patch was the first ever for HIS, a fact that didn't escape Storms. "Now there's an update that will affect administrators who probably wanted nothing to do with Microsoft," he said.
"And there will be a lot of discussion about the Active Directory vulnerability as well as the SMB bug, mainly because these are remote exploits," Storms said. "They're in the classic style, where just some data packets can compromise systems. For that reason, I think they will garner a fair amount of respect, and researchers will probably exploit that."
Microsoft also used today's updates to launch its "Exploitability Index," a new effort announced in August. The index, which can be found in October's summary, lists each vulnerability along with the company's exploit rating. Microsoft settled on a three-step system that, in descending order of severity, predicts that researchers or hackers will come up with a consistently working exploit, develop an exploit that works only some of the time, or fail to craft attack code at all. 

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Source- computerworld 

Required toolbar 'phones home' some user search data back to Microsoft

Microsoft Corp. today on 1 Oct 2008 launched a rewards program to entice consumers to its Live Search site, but it requires Internet Explorer and bars users of rival browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.
A toolbar required for participation also collects some search behavior data, including the number of searches on rival engines, and transmits the information to Microsoft daily.
One search expert questioned the restriction to IE, as well as Microsoft's decision to gather a wide-ranging amount of data from users, though he wouldn't go so far as to describe the company's newest attempt to get users to try its search site as "desperate."
"Why take this approach?" asked Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the Search Engine Land Web site. "I think that Microsoft would do better if they pretended they didn't own IE. But paying people to try [Live Search] doesn't mean that they're desperate. I think it's an interesting way to get people to break the Google habit."
Google, in fact, paid site owners pennies per search as far back as 1999, Sullivan said, "and no one called Google desperate then."
Dubbed SearchPerks, the program awards users up to 25 "tickets" a day for each completed search at Microsoft's Live Search. Then tickets can be redeemed for prizes after the program ends next April. Among the rewards Microsoft touted on the SeachPerks site: free music downloads, clothing and frequent flyer miles on American Airlines, Delta and US Airways.
The program, which is available to U.S. residents 13 and older who have a Windows Live ID, also requires users to download and install a small toolbar, called Perk Counter, that keeps track of the number of Live Search searches and thus the number of reward tickets.
Perk Counter will install only in Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser. Competitors -- including Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome and Opera Software's Opera -- cannot be used with the SearchPerks rewards program. Attempts to visit the program's Web site with any of those browsers, in fact, are greeted with the message: "To earn value for your searches and join the SearchPerks! promotion you must have Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher to participate."
According to Microsoft, the Perk Counter tallies more than the number of Live Search searches. In the terms and conditions for the program, as well as in a separate FAQ, Microsoft spelled out what the counter records and sends to its servers daily.
"The software records and sends to Microsoft the number of Web searches you do each day on different search engines; the types of searches you complete, such as for news or images; and the number of online ads you click on," states the SearchPerks' terms and conditions।
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Prevent Explorer from Freezing with Large Zip Files on Vista

Windows Vista has built-in handling for zip files - you can create, extract, or even browse right down into them as if they were a folder. But if you have very big zip files sitting on your hard drive, bad things can happen unless you disable the zip handler.
Today, Me and friend were trying to restore one of my files from a previous backup. We grabbed the enormous zip file off my network drive and saved it onto the desktop. From there, a little bit of WinZip magic grabbed me the one, 35 MB directory I really wanted out of the whole 11 GB zip file.
When I finally got back to my host desktop later that evening, I found to my utter shock that things weren't working properly. For example, I opened up the file explorer and tried to expand a folder in the tree pane on the left-hand side. Instead of nicely expanding, showing the sub-folders, it just started spinning its wheels. When I came back to it ten minutes later, it was still chugging away.
I killed the explorer.exe process, restarted explorer and went on with my workflow. At least, until WinZip started having issues. I hit the "Extract" button on a reasonable sized archive (150 MB) and the app froze. Just like explorer, it was eating my full cpu and doing absolutely nothing with it.
Recognizing I was out of my league, I fired up a conversation with "The Geek" and we started troubleshooting. An hour and a half later, after pouring through mountains of log files, downloading tools I didn't even know existed, and wading through pages of output from SysInternals "procmon", we finally found the problem.
It seems that Windows Vista file explorer (by default) attempts to recurse into any zip archives in a direct subdirectory, allowing users to view the contents of the zip file directly in the sidebar. Windows XP had the same "feature", but it waited to enter the zip file until you actually expanded the node in the sidebar. In principle, Vista's method is a good idea. XP always suffered from long delays whenever you expanded a zip file, particularly over a network connection. Grabbing a file list in the background seems like a good idea, until you take into account extremely large archives.
By trying to recurse into that 11 GB zip file sitting on my desktop, Vista pretty much started a processor-intensive task that it had no chance of completing in a reasonable timeframe. Thus, killing performance across the board with no tangible return.
Disabling Zip Handling
The obvious solution to this problem is to just turn off Windows's built-in zip file handling, since I'm using WinZip anyway. The quickest way to do this is to use the excellent ShellExView application to disable the explorer shell extension. (you don't have to install it, just in case you're leery about that sort of thing)
Open up ShellEx in Administrator mode by right-clicking the file and choosing "Run as Administrator". Select all of the "Compressed" items, right-click and select "Disable Selected Items".
Now that the extension is taken care of, you can either logout, or you can be a bit smarter about things and just restart the "explorer.exe" process. To do this, open up Task Manager (right-click on the task bar and select "Task Manager", or use that good ol' three fingered Vulcan nerve pinch, Ctrl+Alt+Delete) and find the "explorer.exe" process. There probably will be more than one process in the list named "explorer.exe", so be sure to sort by CPU and select the one farthest toward the top.
Once you've selected the explorer, click the "End Process" and confirm in the ensuing dialog. The taskbar will disappear, along with all of your file explorer windows.
Now select "New Task (Run…)" from the File menu. In the "Open:" text box, enter "explorer" and hit OK. After a moment, the taskbar should reappear and everything should be hunky-dory. After this, you shouldn't have any more problems with large zip files locking up the system.
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Related Link:-
How to improve browsing performance in internet explorer
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