Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Fast-encryption feature arrives in Chrome

Fast-encryption feature arrives in Chrome

Fast-encryption feature arrives in Chrome

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 10:35 AM PST

Google Chrome logo (Credit: Google)

Google has begun shipping a feature called False Start in its Chrome browser to speed up secure communications.

False Start essentially cuts out one set of the back-and-forth conversation needed to set up a secure channel between a Web browser and Web pages. Such secure channels use technology called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security), and a Web site using it shows an address beginning with HTTPS rather than HTTP.

"The latest releases of Chrome now enable a feature called SSL False Start," said Google programmer Mike Belshe in a blog post Sunday. "As of this writing, Chrome is the only browser implementing it."

Belshe's tests showed it cutting off less than a tenth of a second. That may not sound like much, but bear in mind that Web developers strive to shave off any amount they can and that the security handshake often must be completed more than once for a single Web site because of multiple secured elements.

False Start is one of a handful of technologies Google is building into Chrome to try to make the Web faster. Faster encrypted communications are a particular focus, especially with the debut of the Firesheep software that can extract personal data from unsecured Web communications.

False Start is a nice technology because unlike many communication improvements, it requires an improvement to the browser but not to the other end of the line. But there's a wrinkle: some Web sites can't handle False Start, and they don't fail gracefully.

Thus, Chrome has a blacklist to disable the feature for these sites. According to the Chrome source code, that list is 5,106 sites long so far.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Ad-Aware levels up its detection engines

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 06:00 AM PST

In its third update of the year, Ad-Aware receives a hefty change to how it protects you. Lavasoft's Ad-Aware 9 Free, available today exclusively on CNET Download.com, debuts two new detection engines as the company fights to keep its well-known freeware competitive.

Visually, not much has changed in Ad-Aware 9 Free. The engines that power the program have, and publisher Lavasoft anticipates that will make all the difference.

(Credit: Lavasoft)

Lavasoft first started changing Ad-Aware's protection engine more than a year ago in version 8.1, when it introduced Genotype. This heuristics-based technology identified identical snippets of code across multiple threat mutations. In version 9, Genotype receives support from what Lavasoft calls "Dedicated Detection". This tech looks inside files, analyzes the code, and creates a loose pattern for finding families of related malware. The company touts that a single dedicated detection signature can detect hundreds of thousands of threats. More importantly, Lavasoft expects that dedicated detection will lower false positive rates by creating more points of comparison.

The second new engine, MagmaShield, is pro-active. It emulates processor instructions, comparing approved processor-level operations against those that are undefined in the application layer. This means that it aggressively looks at how a file interacts with the CPU and uses that to call out threats faster.

Ad-Aware 9 Free also includes a scheduler for automatic scans, which joins the automatic update scheduler that finally made it into the free edition of Ad-Aware in version 8.3.

However, there are some notable features that Ad-Aware's competitors offer but aren't in Ad-Aware 9 Free. Several competitors, such as Avast and AVG, give users full real-time protection, which Ad-Aware has but limits. Ad-Aware also lacks Web surfing protection and silent or gaming mode which has become standard in most of its free competitors.

A full review of Ad-Aware 9 Free is available on CNET Download.com.

Opera for Android to get HTML5 video, Flash

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 01:22 AM PST

Opera Mobile for Android mascot

Opera is working on Opera Mobile, its full-fledged mobile browser, for Android devices.

(Credit: Opera)

Two significant features are coming to Opera Mobile for Android, the Oslo company's higher-end smartphone browser: playing HTML5 video and accommodating Adobe Systems' Flash Player plug-in.

"New Web technologies aim to replace it, but Flash will be around for some time. If you have Flash player installed on your phone, Opera will support it," mobile team member Pavel Studeny said in a blog post on Saturday.

HTML5 video, one of those technologies that encroaches on Flash's turf, lets developers embed video directly into a Web page, as happens with images. It's also en route Studeny said. He didn't say when the two features will arrive.

Opera Mobile for Android is in beta testing. It competes most directly with the built-in browser that comes with Android, but also with a mobile version of Firefox that's also in beta testing (a third beta of which should arrive soon) and a handful of other browsers. Google permits other browsers to be installed on Android; Apple only permits alternative browser user interfaces that use iOS's browser engine under the hood.

Opera Mobile is written in the C++ programming language, not the Java variant that most Android applications use. That's possible because of a feature called the Java Native Interface (JNI) that enables a hybrid programming approach. Studeny said:

Luckily, Java allows class methods to be loaded from external libraries through a special interface, JNI. The external libraries can be written in any language. That's how we do it. We keep all the browser code in such external libraries and use a tiny Java code that loads them. This works very well, although debugging in multiple programming languages isn't that easy.

Opera also offers a lighter-weight mobile browser called Opera Mini that works with Android, Apple's iOS, and several other operating systems. Opera Mobile has a built-in browser engine, but Mini requires an Opera server to browse the Web page, boil it down to a smaller size, and send it to the Mini browser for viewing. This brings the browser to lower-end phones and is adapted for worse network connections, but it detracts from some browsing experiences such as running interactive Web applications.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Free FTP

Posted: 02 Dec 2010 06:00 PM PST

Built around a gorgeous interface, this free, GPL-licensed FTP browser is a lean, mean, file-managing machine. Cyberduck offers support for both FTP transfers as well as the more secure SFTP and makes it easy to bookmark frequently visited sites for quick file transfers. This latest version fixes several bugs and adds minor interface enhancements.

Also this week, we have the latest version of Skitch, the handy tool for illustrating your ideas using images and annotations, all with an easy-to-use interface. Our game this week is Defenstar, a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up game a lot like the stand-up, quarter-eating machines of classic arcades.

Don't forget to check out our iPhone apps of the week!
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