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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. After gaining access to the account, the self-described hacker wrote, he had searched without success for incriminating e-mails, and posted the new account password to the board so others could do the same. He soon realized that “if this sh*t ever got to the FBI I was f—ed, I panicked.” The author of the post used the handle “Rubico,” which was tied to a Yahoo e-mail address easily linked to Kernell via Google searches—though given the penchant for pranksterism at 4chan, this was scarcely definitive evidence.

Law enforcement officials did not appear to have taken an overt interest in Kernell as quickly as bloggers had. But after IP logs retained by the proxy service Palin’s hacker had used pointed to the Commons at Knoxville apartment complex where Kernell lives, FBI agents arrived at the student’s residence early Sunday morning to search the premises, breaking up a party in the process.

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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 new malware and phishing protection helps protect from viruses, worms, trojans and spyware to keep people safe on the Web. Firefox 3’s one-click site ID information allows users to verify that a site is what it claims to be. Mozilla’s open source process leverages the experience of thousands of security experts around the globe.

Customization. Everyone uses the Web differently, and Firefox 3 lets users customize their browser with more than 5,000 add-ons. Firefox Add-ons allow users to manage tasks like participating in online auctions, uploading digital photos, seeing the weather forecasts, and listening to music, all from the convenience of the browser. The new Add-ons Manager helps users to find and install add-ons directly from the browser.

For more information about Mozilla Firefox 3 and how it delivers an easier, faster, and safer online experience, visit http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/features.

Firefox 3.0.2 contains the following updates:

* Fixed several security issues.
* Fixed several stability issues.
* Official releases for Sinhala and Slovene are now available.
* Beta releases for Bengali, Galician, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Marathi, Telegu, and Thai are available for testing.
* Fixed a number of minor issues with the layout of certain web pages.
* Fixed several theme issues that affected right-to-left locales.
* Fixed issue that caused some users with customized toolbars to have their Back and Forward buttons go missing (bug 426026)
* Add new Extended Validation (EV) roots to Firefox 3.0.2.
* On certain IDN sites, the password manager would not fill in username and password details properly.
* Fixed several hangs and crashes that occurred when using screen readers.
* Fixed Mac-specific issues:
o Keyboard shortcuts would stop working in some cases.
o Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters can not be entered (using IME) into text fields in Flash objects (bug 357670)
o Firefox 3.0.1 could not be used when the user profile is stored on an AFP directory (bug 417037)

Mozilla Firefox 3 is available now for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems as a free download from here.

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.
* Animated GIF export now fails with an error if the current output format is
compressed or otherwise not supported.
* JobControl: Fixed crash when one machine attempts to run a job in
distributed mode right when another machine deletes it.
* JobControl: The filter crop mode saved in jobs was opposite from selected.
(This only affected YCbCr cropping.)
* Capture: Fixed crash when capture driver sends audio samples when
DirectShow graph is not running.
* D3D: Fixed sporadic crash on lost device.
* D3D: Fixed Direct3D errors when display debug information is enabled and a
video filter fails to initialize.
* Frameserver: Frame rate adjustments weren’t always propagated correctly.

[regressions fixed]
* Fixed crash when using fast/normal recompress mode without a video codec.
* Fixed divide by zero crash when loading video and a video filter in the
list is unable to initialize.
* Changing the “source rate adjustment” option no longer invalidates the
current selection.
* Rendering would loop endlessly if an error occurred during video
compression and threaded compression was disabled.
* Disabling the “directly decode YCbCr formats” option works again.
* Filters: lMicrosecsPerFrame and lMicrosecsPerSrcFrame were reporting
milliseconds (broken since 1.8.0).
* JobControl: Fixed case where a non-distributed “load job list” command can
fail due to erroneously running distributed-mode code.
* JobControl: Fixed problem where dialog would suddenly close when editing
job names.
* Script: Fixed crash when removing video filter from filter chain.
* DV: Audio decoding works again with NTSC DV files (broken since 1.8.4).

Download VirtualDub 1.8.6 32-bit
Download VirtualDub 1.8.6 64-bit