I give up. I can’t keep up. Mozilla Firefox has upgraded their browser to version 10.0. Didn’t version 4.0 come out in March of 2011?!

Most of the updates surround the handling of extension auto-updates and the refinements around the Orion code editor/scratchpad with new page and style inspectors, WebGL anti-aliasing and enhancements, CSS3D transforms and an easier thank you lord! method to sync with other browsers including the updated Android Firefox – also at version 10.0 today too which adds multi-touch gestures and other enhancements.

Simply put, this is a slight upgrade on Mozilla’s new 6 week or so upgrade path. But it’s on the path to an updated tab system in version 12 and leaner memory usage. So far, it is a good update for me. Click the bottom links to download your proper version for your desktop. Download via the Android Market for the upgrade for Android based tablets and phones.

[ Links: Firefox 10 PC, Firefox 10 Mac ]

January 18th marks a day that huge sites like Reddit, Wikipedia and many others – just noticed that OSNews.com is also protesting as well as a black bar over Google’s logo at Google.com – plan to shut down their sites in protest of the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. Why should you care?

(SOPA) would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. After delivering a court order, the U.S. Attorney General could require US-directed Internet service providers, ad networks, and payment processors to suspend doing business with sites found to infringe on federal criminal intellectual property laws. The Attorney General could also bar search engines from displaying links to the sites.

Effectively, all it would take would be a complaint from somebody in the MPAA and RIAA, or some intellectual property (proven or not) holder will be able to complain that your website is an agent of some form of piracy. This is an oversimplified look at what these bills provide and attempt to do; however it’s an attempt to stop foreign websites from pirating American software, movies and music. And to do so, it grants these rights holders the ability to influence your ISP to block sites as well as disallow search engines to display results that they deem are infringing on their rights.

To date, DNS/ISP blocking has been removed from these controversial bills. But there’s still a lot of “teeth” in the bills that allow intellectual property and copyright holders the ability to point their finger and have a website deemed a website that’s committing piracy.

You don’t have to imagine where this is going. Go to YouTube now and you will not being able to hear some more music since the Universal Music Group (UMG) has disallowed uploading any of their catalog. Now imagine that power Internet wide. That’s just the start. And there are no provisions against false accusations. The burden of proof is on the site to prove their innocence.

So what is piracy? We all know websites that allow wholesale downloading of movies, music and software *cough*PirateBay*cough* but with highly visible sites like YouTube being monitored already, imagine the entire Internet under that type of scrutiny. Love a song, link to a YouTube video that’s not yet censored, you might be considered contributing to piracy. That’s a bit extreme, but who’s saying that it will not end there. Sure, some sites do nothing but link to pirated material. There’s no use for those sites other than assisting piracy. Fine, go after those sites.

But SOPA and PIPA are structured mainly to restrict access to the Internet based on rules, accusations and the lawyers that they employ that are always shifting to support their agendas. And that agenda is simply to make money from what they consider lost sales to piracy. In many cases, historically, it’s been proven that those that will pirate were not going to buy the software/music/movie anyway. And in the end, those that are paying customers walk away with the feeling that they are being treated like criminals.

Bills like this have existed in one form or another for the last decade. Ten years ago, SSSCA was another attempt at such a law that empowered the film and music industry and regulate all digital media via restricting and downright crippling copy restriction preventative measures. Think DRM on a much more invasive level – but not as invasive as Sony Music putting a rootkit on your PC.

Learn more about PIPA and SOPA. Write your representatives, even the ones that do not support PIPA/SOPA. Boycott the companies that support SOPA and PIPA. Make your voice and opinion known. And find out why Lamar Smith (Republican – Texas) is so damn hung up on this bill.

[ Links: SOPA, SOPA and PIPA: Just the Facts ]

Man, this is getting ridiculous! From March of this year when 4.0 was released, Mozilla has hit a new high gear and released version 8.0. Yes… 7 months, 4 major versions and Firefox is not hitting version 8 – something that took Microsoft almost a dozen years to do.

Firefox 8.0 adds the following improvements:

• Add-ons installed by third party programs are now disabled by default
• Added a one-time add-on selection dialog to manage previously installed add-ons
• Added Twitter to the search bar for select locales. Additional locale support will be added in the future
• Added a preference to load tabs on demand, improving start-up time when windows are restored
• Improved performance and memory handling when using
• Added CORS support for cross-domain textures in WebGL
• Added support for HTML5 context menus
• Added support for insertAdjacentHTML
• Improved CSS hyphen support for many languages
• Improved WebSocket support
• Fixed several stability issues
• Fixed several security issues

So far, I’ve seen improvements in memory. And knowing that it’s also more secure, I’ll rest easier. You know where to get it, but just in case: Download Firefox 8.0 from Mozilla.org

Also updated for Android too.

[ Links: Mozilla Firefox 8.0 Features ]

We all have credit cards, debit cards, passwords and other stuff we’d love to keep secure someway, somehow. OneSafe for all of the iOS devices – iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch – can do just that.

Lunabee Pte Ltd is proud to announce the release and immediate availability of oneSafe app, a reliable and secure password manager and data vault that securely stores confidential information relating to credit cards, bank accounts, logins as well as various types of documents and images. With a great interface and functionality, the powerful and feature-rich application is truly the place to store anything private or in need of high security.

OneSafe delivers a broad range of possibilities, enabling users to securely store passwords and logins, bank account numbers, loyalty cards, access codes, IDs and may more. The app protects the sensitive information using 256-bit AES encryption and locks the data behind a four-digit unlock code, visual pattern or an alphanumeric code. With unique browser technology, oneSafe automatically logs users into websites where they used those passwords. Ready-made templates are designed to enter the details and keep them in order. The data can be organized by categories, marked as favorite and easily searched.

The guys over at Lunabee have crafted OneSafe to be as easy to use and secure as you can be on your iOS device with an easy to use and remember pattern or alphanumeric code as well as browser integration for ease of automatic sign-ins.

Best of all, it’s free. But if you want additional capacity, you will have to purchase that via an in-app purchase.

[ Links: OneSafe via iTunes Music Store, OneSafe ]

I’ve been using Linux for almost 13 years. I’ve been answering folks questions about Linux for almost 13 years too. And if you asked me to give you an answer how to find something on your Linux server via Twitter in 140 characters, I’d not be able to do it. In fact, I’d not even try it. No friggin’ way.

Well, thankfully a much smarter and much more experienced person did just that. Found a way to answer questions about Linux in 140 characters or less for most anything you could want to find in Linux.

Dead serious.

One of the biggest challenges we face in using Linux and UNIX on servers is how to find files or small strings of text lost in the labyrinthine file system of a server. “Where was that executable?” “PHPMailerHost? Where’s that?”

Fortunately, most Linux (and UNIX) systems provide two powerful tools for searching.

IT veteran Don R. Crawley says that you can almost always find anything you want in the file system with either the “find” or the “grep” commands. These are just two of the commands he explains in his new book, Tweeting Linux, 140 Linux Configuration Commands Explained in 140 Characters or Less.

Tweeting Linux: 140 Linux Configuration Commands Explained in 140 Characters or Less is a straight-forward approach to learning Linux commands. Each command is first explained in 140 characters or less, then examples of usage are shown in screen captures, and finally more details are given when necessary to explain command usage. You’ll see the most commonly-used commands, plus a few gems you might not know about.

Don R. Crawley writes from experience and has an informative blog too. The book is on sale at Amazon for $30.00 and well worth the peace and quiet information that your forgetful friends will gain from this book. Give it a look!

[ Links: Tweeting Linux: 140 Linux Configuration Commands Explained in 140 Characters or Less ]

Apple, CNN and many other news outlets have announced that Steve Jobs has lost his battle to pancreatic cancer and has passed away.

Known for his innovative spirit, terse responses to e-mails that were sent directly to his well-known e-mail address and for single handedly reviving Apple from the brink of death back to where they have sold 250 million (plus) Apple iPhones, sold over 16 Billion iTunes songs and gained share and have become a force to reckon with in the music and video industries as well; Steve Jobs will be missed.

[ Links: Apple - Remembering Steve Jobs ]

In a move that more than likely should’ve caused a black hole or a rift in time, finally got the (yesterday) released Microsoft Windows 8 Developer’s Build to work on Apple OS X 10.7 via VMWare Fusion. The kicker was that VMWare Fusion 3.1.3 wouldn’t work; luckily enough, VMWare Fusion saw fit to releasing their $49.99 update to VMWare Fusion 4.0.1 today, one day after Windows 8 was made available for download and guess what?

It works!

Even though Microsoft stated that Windows 8 will work on an Intel Atom with only 1gb of RAM, I truly suggest giving it way more RAM than that. And the final install of everything is a shade under 7.5gb in total, with the Windows folder being around 4.93gb of space used. Off the bat, Internet Explorer 10 is included in the install. The new Start Menu is what looks like the Windows Phone 7 interface of oddly shaped squares that are somewhat interlocked together. But the regular, “looks like Windows 7″ desktop is still in there.

I’ll definitely have to give this a more in-depth look in a bit. But so far, this is only adding to my anticipation for Microsoft Windows 8.

[ Links: MSDN Windows 8 Developer Edition Downloads, VMWare Fusion 4.0 ]

Just 5 months ago, Firefox 4.0 came out. Just 2 days ago, Firefox 6.0 came out. And scarily enough, they’re already testing in the nightly builds version 8.0. Damn Mozilla, slow down. I can’t update and test fast enough!

App Tabs: Take sites you always keep open—like Web mail—off your tab bar and give them a permanent home in your browser.
Organize your Tabs with Panorama: Too many tabs? Reclaim your browser from tab clutter! Panorama lets you drag and drop your tabs into manageable groups that you can organize, name and arrange in a fun and visual way.
Scratchpad: One of our new, built-in developer tools, Scratchpad lets you build and test snippets of JavaScript code right in the browser, saving you time and precious keystrokes.

I’m already a fan of Scratchpad. And so far, it seems like Firefox 6.0 is a tad bit faster and also seems to use less RAM.

[ Links: Firefox 6.0 Download, Features ]

Looks like the guys over at Neowin must have been refreshing the nightly builds like mad (I know I have) but Mozilla has released the final build of Firefox 4.0 for Linux, OS X and Windows today. Boasting a faster rendering speed, an improved UI and so far in my personal usage lesser memory usage, it seems like the next round of browser wars has already started – Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 was released last week and Opera 11.10 was just released a few days ago.

Firefox 4.0 for Windows
Firefox 4.0 for Linux (x86, x64)
Firefox 4.0 for Mac

Mozilla has yet to update their website, but the install so far has been good!

[ Links: Neowin, Mozilla Firefox ]

France was one of the first countries to impose laws that require ISP’s terminate the service of users who repeatedly engage in copyright infringement. Under the rules, the entertainment industry tracks offenders and submits infringement claims to a specifically-created government agency named Hadopi. Hadopi then works with ISPs to obtain personal information and send out warning letters or kick people off the Internet. By October, the industry was already making 25,000 requests per day, a daily total they’d like to see at around 50,000. However, according to the Record Labels, Hadopi isn’t sending out warnings fast enough for their liking, only sending out about 2,000 per day.

Techdirt correctly wonders about any kind of accuracy in the claims process when you’re working at that speed:

Think about how many mistakes are being made when you’re sending 50,000 notices per day. Over the course of about five years, the RIAA apparently sued less than 20,000 people and still made a lot of mistakes. US Copyright Group got a lot of attention for accusing a few thousand people of file sharing particular movies and also appears to have made a lot of mistakes. Yet, here, with Hadopi, the labels are accusing 50,000 people per day, and are upset that Hadopi isn’t just rubber stamping all the notices? It appears that the record labels don’t care at all about what happens if they accuse totally innocent people.

Of course the goal of the record labels with any of these campaigns has never been accuracy or fairness. The goal has long been to generate media coverage and create fear, something that’s easier to do with the government’s help. Of course this is all a rather expensive taxpayer and ISP funded game of whack-a-mole, where non-infringing users can easily get caught up in the wash. Meanwhile, France piracy rates remain stable or growing as people simply move to less-watched alternatives like direct downloads.

Link to the original article…

Last week it was discussed at length how the investment community would like the public to believe that the shift to low cap and high overage broadband pricing is “inevitable.” We also discussed how cable industry lobbyists would like the public to believe that such a shift isn’t about making more money, it’s about helping the poor. Not only is the metered billing push absolutely about making money, it’s about artificially constricting the pipe to protect uncompetitive carriers and TV revenues from Internet video. But instead, there’s a very concerted effort afoot to portray this shift as necessary, inevitable, and even altruistic.

Most consumers prefer the simplicity of flat rate pricing, and understand that ISPs are perfectly profitable under the flat-rate pricing model. They also understand that this is a pipe dream forged by never-satisfied investors, and once implemented ends with ever soaring per gig fees and ever shrinking usage caps.

The PR campaign continues this week, with Hewlett-Packard’s Joe Weinman claiming at GigaOM that not only is such a pricing shift “inevitable,” but that it’s a shift that actually originates with consumers, not investors or ISP executives. Weinman starts out on the wrong foot immediately, by confusing “pay per use” with low cap and high overage pricing models:

For the record, I like unlimited Internet access just as much as anyone else. However, such plans appear to be on their way out, and here s why. As explored in “The Market for Melons”, pay-per-use is not an evil plot by greedy robber barons, but a natural outcome of independent, rational consumer choice. Consider a town with an all-you-can-eat (flat rate) buffet and an a la carte (pay-per-use) restaurant. Smart shoppers on diets will save money by patronizing the a la carte restaurant, whereas heavy eaters will save money by visiting the buffet…. Bottom line: it is not the proprietors driving this dynamic, but the customers themselves acting out of pure, rational self-interest

Except for the thousandth time, ISP’s are not interested in real pay per use plans because the majority of their users (who simply check e-mail a few times a day) would downgrade to $5 tiers and cost carriers billions. What ISPs are proposing is flat-rate pricing with costly per gigabyte overages (completely detached from any real-world costs, which for ISPs are fixed or dropping) layered on top. Meanwhile, the suggestion this is a consumer driven push is absurd. This is an investor driven push for obvious reasons, and you have to wonder if Weinman saw the consumer reaction when Time Warner Cable proposed charging consumers up to $5 per gigabyte then insisted such pricing was for their own good.

Weinmen offers up a second post in which he hallucinates a laundry list of supposed benefits that will occur from this change in pricing paradigm. Most of them revolve around technology platforms designed to aid this monitoring and metering of usage and billing, which we’ll go out on a crazy limb and guess is precisely what Weinman is selling at HP. Unfortunately, Weinman begins his sales pitch just like the cable industry traditionally has by pretending this is an inevitability consumers want, and that such a pricing shift is financially necessary. Neither are true.

Link to the original article…

Verizon today unveiled more detail about their LTE wireless broadband launch, announcing that they’ll be offering the 5-12 Mbps service in 38 markets and 60 airports starting December 5. Most importantly, Verizon finally unveiled their pricing for the new service, which after a year filled with endless hints by executives about wanting to try something new winds up being somewhat underwhelming, traditional, and expensive.

The base pricing for LTE laptop connectivity via USB modem (there will be no smartphones at launch) is significantly more expensive than the 3G pricing they unveiled in October, though the caps are obviously higher. Verizon’s current EVDO USB modem plans come in two flavors: $40 for 250MB of usage and $60 for 5GB of usage. Verizon’s LTE pricing will now be $50 for 5GB of usage, or $80 for 10 GB of usage, with $10 per each additional GB. Sayeth big red:

Verizon Wireless customers can choose from two 4G LTE Mobile Broadband data plans: $50 monthly access for 5 GB monthly allowance or $80 monthly access for 10 GB monthly allowance, both with $10/GB overage. For laptop connectivity, two 4G LTE USB modems will be initially available: the LG VL600 is available at launch and the Pantech UML290 will be available soon, each $99.99 after $50 rebate with a new two-year agreement. Both USB modems provide backward-compatibility with Verizon Wireless’ 3G network. If laptop users travel outside of a 4G LTE coverage area, they will automatically stay connected on the company’s 3G network.

It’s interesting to note there’s not even really an entry level LTE plan (say $25 for a gig of use) after literally dozens of Verizon executive comments claiming usage-based pricing was going to be the future. We’ll assume this pricing may evolve as the company begins offering LTE smartphones, which Verizon today announced will arrive sometime in “mid-2011″. Verizon also again today confirmed these devices will initially use 3G/CDMA for voice until LTE voice standards are hashed out. As an added aside: the service will only support MS Windows based PC’s at launch.

Link to the original article…