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The ongoing investigation into the hacking of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account now appears to center on the son of a Democratic state legislator in Tennessee. A federal grand jury convened Tuesday morning in Chattanooga to hear testimony from friends of David Kernell, a 20-year-old economics student at the University of Tennessee whose apartment was raided by the FBI early Sunday morning, but ended their session for the day without issuing an indictment.

Kernell, whose father is Tennessee State Representative Michael Kernell, is the target of widespread speculation in the blogosphere. The attention came after a post appeared on the online chat board, 4chan, describing how it “took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info” needed to access the Alaska governor’s personal e-mail account using Yahoo’s password reset feature. (A Yahoo spokesperson indicated that the company is continually reviewing its security procedures, but had not planned any specific changes yet.)

According to the 4chan message, the author’s curiosity had been piqued by press reports concerning Palin’s alleged use of another, more public, Yahoo account, to conduct state business.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.02

What’s New in Firefox 3:

The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features to deliver a faster, more secure and customizable Web browsing experience for all.

User Experience. The enhancements to Firefox 3 provide the best possible browsing experience on the Web. The new Firefox 3 smart location bar, affectionately known as the “Awesome Bar,” learns as people use it, adapting to user preferences and offering better fitting matches over time. The Firefox 3 Library archives browsing history, bookmarks, and tags, where they can be easily searched and organized. One-click bookmarking and tagging make it easy to remember, search and organize Web sites. The new full-page zoom displays any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.

Performance. Firefox 3 is built on top of the powerful new Gecko 1.9 platform, resulting in a safer, easier to use and more personal product. Firefox 3 now uses less memory while it’s running, and its redesigned page rendering and layout engine means users see Web pages two to three times faster than Firefox 2.

Security. Firefox 3 raises the bar for security.

The release candidate 2 of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now ready for testing. This test release is made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production use at this stage.

OpenOffice is a great free alternative for opening and creating office documents. OpenOffice 3 series is compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 documents. OpenOffice 3 will open Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents, allow you to edit them, and also save them back in Microsoft’s format, where other users of the Microsoft Office suites can open them.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 RC2 Release Notes

Download OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 RC2

VirtualDub 1.8.6 is out and is a stable release containing bug fixes for issues reported by users. Notable bug fixes include errors handling audio in NTSC DV type-1 files, several crashes, and a few glitches in batch mode (job control).

Those of you on the forums know that I’ve been pushing out experimental features as “1.8.X2″ test releases. Chances are at this point that I will rename that to 1.9.0, because there is enough in it that I wouldn’t want to pollute the 1.8.x branch in case there are enough fixes to warrant 1.8.7. After that I’m kind of screwed with respect to major version numbers, although I guess I’ll deal with that when I get there.

Build 30009 (1.8.6, stable): [September 21, 2008]
[bugs fixed]
* Wheel scrolling in the Set Text Information dialog closes the edit control.
* Save Segmented AVI now works with VBR audio.