Thanks to TorrentFreak, the release of the Mac version of uTorrent is made known publicly, although it is yet to be officially released. Despite made available, this application is still considered to be an early alpha release and is still in heavy development by the uTorrent developers team.

Given a very mac-like interface, Mac fans can now have something to cheer for, especially uTorrent is widely popular amongst Windows users and such progress is beneficial to the community. It was also mentioned in the TorrentFreak that it is better than its Windows counterpart.

The downside is that it’s not available for direct download from the website; it was made known when someone posted a torrent file on The Pirate Bay. You can definitely try downloading the application to use, but at your own risk. Since it is still in alpha development stage, there are likely to be some bugs that has yet to be suppressed. So, enjoy.

In less than 3 days, Mozilla released the next version of Firefox 3.0.3. According to the release note, the developers have found and fixed a problem where users were unable to retrieve saved passwords or save new passwords.

This bug has been filed under bug 454708. There is no any other changes. For more information on this new release, you may want to check out version 3.0.2, which was more of a major update from the previous version.

I did not realise the existence of this bug since I never save my passwords using the browser. I’m glad that Mozilla managed to turn this over within 72 hours.

Download Firefox
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3

Just a moment ago, when I logged on to my laptop to use Mozilla Firefox, I found that Mozilla has released the next version of Firefox - Firefox 3.0.2. So, catch the latest version to update your Mozilla Firefox browser now.

Over the last few weeks, I’m sure you have been stormed by Google’s release of its own web browser - Google Chrome. A lot of comparison has been made on the speed improvement on the Javascript, benchmarking the Chrome’s V8 against Mozilla’s TraceMonkey. However, do note that this version does not include TraceMonkey, which was rumoured to be much faster than Google Chrome.

Anyway, users are advised to update to this latest version, as it contains several bug fixes.

Download Web Browser
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.2

According to Dave Merten, there is a security bug existing in QuickTime that may be used as a vector to attack the system. Available on both Mac OS X and Windows, the latest version of QuickTime 7.5.5 has been reported that the ” ” tag fails to handle long strings, which can lead to a heap of overflow in QuickTime Player, iTunes or any other programs that utilise media using QuickTime plug-in.

Such programs include, but not limited to, browser, Mail or even when a user attempts to view a file with Quick Look. The outcome results in crashing the programs, but the malicious code could be added to such files, and may be executed with no user interaction.

Detail are as follow:

Exploit: OSX.Exploit.QT755-1
Discovered: September 18, 2008
Risk: Low 

No patch is yet to be released.

The latest release of Google Chrome version 0.2.149.30 still considered as a beta software, albeit it might be running stable for 99% of the time. Google is very cautious at using the word “stable” as they did not want to perceive a release version to be buggy at any point in time.

To me, this latest version of Google Chrome works like a charm for me. However, to be adventurous, I suppose there must be some developing releases that we can try out, especially we know that Google Chrome is an open source web browser and users can even build them on their own.

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The latest release of VLC Media Player 0.9.2 is now available for public to download. To-date, it has already achieved close to 1 million downloads for this version, averaging about 2-3 downloads per second (Quite curious myself too, as if that’s really the case). The VLC Media Player is both a cross-platform multi-media player and a streaming server.

As a media player, it is highly portable, supporting various audio and video formats, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, etc. Furthermore, the VLC player also playbacks DVDs and VCDs. In addition, it also works equally well as a streaming server to support unicast or multicast in IPv4 and IPv6 on high-bandwidth network.

The application is also available in many operating systems, thus making it ultra-portable. Download VLC Player here.

News for WordPress users! The next release of WordPress 2.6.2 is now available and released for your installation or upgrade, as mentioned in our previous post. According to Ryan in his blog, a critical issue that is being resolved in this version pertains to blog owners allowing open registration to the public. This was basically due to the dangers of SQL Column Truncation and weakness of mt_rand() function, as pre-warned by Stefan Esser.

Prior to this version, it is possible for anyone to create a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly-generated password in an open registration WordPress blog. Although not disclosed to the attacker, the problem itself is rather annoying. However, when coupled with a weakness in random number seeding in mt_rand() function, it is a security exploit as attacker is able to utilise this to predict the randomly-generated password.

Besides this, WordPress 2.6.2 also consists of several other bug fixes. All users are highly advised to upgrade to this version, for security purpose.

Download Software
WordPress 2.6.2 [tar.gz version]
WordPress 2.6.2 [zip version]

Since the last introduction of Firefox 2 Vista Black theme last year, the Firefox 3 Vista Black theme for Firefox is now made available - with an all Black (Vista Style) Navigation and Bookmarks toolbar.

How to Install?
Install Stylish for Firefox, Thunderbird, Flock, Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey, or Songbird. If you have Stylish already, make sure you’re using the latest version and have JavaScript enabled.

Download Area
Vista Black Theme site

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multi-platform, multi-threaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter or ripper. Made especially for Mac OS X fans, the software is also available in Windows and Linux environment; although it was originally available only on BeOS.

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WordPress 2.6.1 was released just a couple of minutes ago. In the past, I would always mention “… users are advised to upgrade to the latest version…“, well not this time. According to Ryan, users need not upgrade to the latest version of 2.6.1 if version 2.6 is working fine for you.

The release of this sub-version is simply to continue the trend of releasing a maintenance release shortly after a major release, to get fixes for the bugs that might be present in the official release.

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