Apologies for the limited blogging yesterday. Work was hectic with a celebration of the team’s last successful public code release and preparations for a move to a new space over the weekend both falling on the same day.
- Sandboxed plugins in Firefox to arrive with hang detector
The Register has the details of what version 3.6.4, now due next week, will deliver. I’ve been running the beta builds and been very happy. I haven’t seen anything in the beta release notes about the hang detector so that will be a very nice improvement coming with the final version in addition to the browser running plugins in isolated processes that I written about before. - Computing without decrypting data has been improved
I first talked about homomorhpic encryption in June of last year. The idea was a class of encryption where some calculations could be run on data without decrypting it. Now Technology Review has news of improvements on Craig Gentry’s original scheme. Nigel Smart and Frederik Vercauteren have found comparable operations to what the original idea required but that are more easily computable hence actually implementable in software. - WIPO study on the public domain published
HT Glyn Moody. A major thrust of the paper appears to be building a case for a positive protection of the public domain rather than continuing to regard it as the mere lack of copyright protection. This is very consistent with my reading and research on the public domain. - Microsoft explains mystery Firefox add-on, provides fix and workaround
Emil Protalinski at Ars Technica has an explanation from the Redmond giant of what the add-on was meant to do but not of how they screwed up installing an update for components that were not installed. They have revved their update to fix this oversight and also provided pretty simple instructions for removing the add-on. Protalinski tested Microsoft’s claims about the fix and workaround, successfully, for what it is worth. - Alleged WikiLeaks source describes crisis of conscience leading to leaks
- Pentagon undertakes search for WikiLeaks founder over recent leaks of military info
- WikiLeaks hires lawyer to defend alleged Army source
- Armenia decides it needs stricter copyright laws