Fake Firefox Adobe Flash Player »

File this under the ‘Yikes’ category: According to a post on Sophos website, there is a Firefox plugin masquerading as a legitimate Adobe Flash Player add on.

Recently, Sophos analysts have discovered a piece of malware masquerading itself as a flash player plugin for the Firefox browser (detected by Sophos as Troj/FFSpy-A).
When the file runs, it pretends to install the adobe flash player for your browser.

However, instead of giving you a Flash Player, you get a piece of malware that spies on your Google searches, sends that data to a remote server and then displays ads into what you are viewing based on the keywords you entered.
According to the post on Sophos’ website, this malware seems to be spreading via Internet forums.  You probably won’t have to worry about things like this if you download any plugins directly from Mozilla’s website (but you should still be cautious).
On Sophos’ website, there are some screenshots that illustrate the difficulty you would have trying to determine whether or not you were installing a legit plugin versus one containing some type of malware.
If you want to test your installed version of Flash, you can visit the test page setup on Adobe’s website and you can download the current version of Flash from Adobe’s website as well.

Opera Web Browser Version 10 »

Despite only having a 3 percent share of the web browser market, Opera remains undaunted by Internet Explorer and Firefox (60 percent and 30 percent respectively).

Opera Version 10 has been in Beta since June and now it is ready for prime time Internet Browsing. It boasts new technology called Opera Turbo and it is designed to speed up browsing experience for slower connections, up to 8 times faster according to Opera.

I like Opera, but must admit that it is not as easy for me to customize as Firefox, which is what I use 99% of the time. Opera is very popular in Europe and they also have a great mobile browser, Opera Mini. You can download Opera here and can download Opera Mini here. I really like Opera Mini.

Rockmelt: Yet Another Web Browser »

Just when you thought the web browser market was saturated, someone found a spot where another one could be squeezed in.

Make a little room between Google Chrome and Opera and you can shoehorn RockMelt into the mix. Yes, another way for people to view web pages and possibly another set of standards for which web designers have to prepare.

Rockmelt does have some pretty good backing, however. Do you remember the Netscape browser from the 1990s? The founder of that company, Marc Anderson, is a backer of Rockmelt.

Not much is known about Rockmelt at the moment and their website only has a spot where you can provide your email address to be sent more information. So we will have to wait and see.

At any rate, it faces a pretty packed market that already includes the likes of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Flock and a few others.

No Blogging For Six Months »

Today it has officially been 6 months since we created a post on this blog. We intentionally stopped blogging just to see how much blogging REALLY helps our rankings across the different search engines.

During this blogging sabbatical, we noticed some interesting patterns relating to comment spam, visits from other countries as well as visits from the United States and we plan on using this traffic data to make our sites even better going forward.

Internet Technology and Web Design has taken some interesting turns over the past few months. It was nice to take a step back and just watch the metamorphosis unfold – seeing the bigger picture. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting about a few of the more interesting things we discovered, so stay tuned.

Microsoft Plans Stores To Tranform PC Buying »

In an attempt to change their image as not being appealing directly to consumers, Microsoft plans to open up stores around the U.S. in an attempt to create a environment where they can have trained retail associates on duty to better help the buyers get what they need from the computer. Alongside selling computers we can expect them to have all the latest Microsoft Zune players and accessories all in one place which will help for those who do not like dealing with Best Buy.

Really appealing directly to the consumer is the main concern for Microsoft here, in recent market changes they lost a full percentage of the market two months in a row while Apple grew to have 10% of personal computer sales. This is not the first attempt by Microsoft to open a retail store in 1999 they had a store in downtown San Francisco however it closed not long after due to the blue screen on death, er, I mean to say due to other shops in the area closing down as well (area desirability?.)

Personally I am excited to see what the stores will look like, Apple has unveiled some pretty cool stores and now it is Microsoft’s turn. I expect to see Xbox 360′s blaring and Zune advertisements everywhere and hopefully on the desktops of the latest of what Microsoft has to offer in the handheld/personal computer category. Microsoft has already hired a retail lead to head the project, David Porter, who is a dreamworks exec with 25 years under his belt as a Wal-mart’s VP and general merchandise manager of entertainment. All I can say is lets hope the service received at the Microsoft store chains is better than finding out what all these error codes mean in Vista.

p.s.  I am new to the staff here you can check out my personal blog the details (wip) for the latest in the blogging community, or my bloggersbase for more posts by me.