Mozilla is building an army of volunteers in Indonesia to help customize Firefox and recommend add-ons, as the U.S.-based non-profit organization seeks to retain its massive share of the browser market in the country.

Community groups in eight cities and drawing about 1,000 tech-savvy volunteers, with more expected, are meeting this month to brainstorm ways Firefox can be further localized, said Gen Kanai, Mozilla’s contributor engagement director for Asia. They will do some of the work themselves in line with Mozilla’s tradition of using inputs from its users, Kanai said.

Mozilla wants that input so it can retain the high market share that Firefox already has in the country. Web statistics company, StatCounter, puts the share at 75 to 80 percent, the browser's highest in Asia. The worldwide share of Firefox, which competes with Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, is just over 30 percent.

Outreach matters because technology spreads fast by word of mouth in Indonesia, a possible cause of Firefox's market share, Kanai said. Technology favorites can also lose ground very fast in the country, as was seen in the mobile phone market, he added.  

Mozilla does not fully understand why Firefox has caught on in Indonesia, Kanai said. But analysts and users say local Web developers benefit from Firefox's do-it-yourself plug-ins and extensions, which other browsers may not offer except for fees that not everyone in the developing nation of 238 million can afford.

"It's because people can design it however they want, however they need to," said Yofie Setiawan, a web designer and member of a community group in the capital Jakarta. "Then they will tell their friends, who (will) use it also."  

Word of mouth as well as hands-on design options may explain why so many Indonesians use Firefox, said Ray Valdes, an analyst with market research firm Gartner.

"Often the reason (for popularity) is not technical but social," Valdes said. "The other possibility is that the ecosystem is propagating it."

Although nothing will be decided until the community group meetings, the 13-year-old Mozilla may try to solidify its position in Indonesia by encouraging new browser add-ons, such as toolbars, expressly for Indonesian websites and web services.

It is also considering new localized versions of Firefox in languages such as Sundanese, which is used by some 30 million people in the western part of the Indonesia island of Java.  

"More Indonesian Mozilla developers could lead to new localizations," Kanai said. "These would be developed by Mozilla community members in Indonesia."

Source: IDG News Service

The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) has run out of all but a handful of IPv4 addresses that it is holding in reserve for start-up network operators.APNIC is the first of the Internet's five regional Internet registries to deplete its free pool of IPv4 address space.

APNIC's news is another sign that CIOs and other IT executives need to begin migrating to IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol known as IPv4.BACKGROUND: IPv6 Tutorial

"For anybody who hasn't figured out that it's time to do IPv6, this is another wake-up call for them," says Owen DeLong, an IPv6 evangelist at Hurricane Electric and a member of the board of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the North American counterpart to APNIC.

Any CIO who isn't planning for IPv6 is "driving toward a brick wall and closing your eyes and hoping that it's going to disappear before you get there," DeLong says. Ignoring IPv6 "is not the best strategy."Most IPv4 address space is expected to be handed out by the regional Internet registries by the end of 2011.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and supports a virtually unlimited number of devices -- 2 to the 128th power.The Asia Pacific region has been gobbling up the most IPv4 address space in recent years; APNIC has apparently distributed more than 32 million IPv4 addresses to network operators in this region in the last two months alone.

APNIC has depleted its IPv4 address space "dramatically faster than people expected," DeLong says. "My guess is that a lot of operators in the Asia Pacific region realized the time of IPv4 depletion was drawing near and they rushed to get their applications in.

"DETAILS: The 6 biggest misconceptions about IPv6 

APNIC is holding 16.7 million IPv4 addresses -- dubbed a /8 in network engineering terms -- in reserve to distribute in tiny allotments of around 1,000 addresses each to new and emerging IPv6-based networks so they can continue to communicate with the largely IPv4-based Internet infrastructure.

ARIN, which doles out IPv4 and IPv6 address space to companies operating in North America, predicts that it will run out of IPv4 addresses this fall."RIPE [the European Internet registry] is going to be the next one to run out. I wouldn't count on them making it until July," DeLong says. "I think ARIN will make it to the end of this year; maybe we'll run out in October or November."

"RIPE [the European Internet registry] is going to be the next one to run out. I wouldn't count on them making it until July," DeLong says. "I think ARIN will make it to the end of this year; maybe we'll run out in October or November."

PANIC TIME QUIZ: Are you prepared for IPv6?

One wild card is whether Asian network operators who also do business in North America will begin requesting IPv4 address space from ARIN now that APNIC has none to give.

"This will probably accelerate consumption in the ARIN region slightly and in RIPE for the same reason because there are a very large number of companies that have operations in Asia, Europe and the Americas," DeLong says.

Source: Network world

The European Commission, including the body's diplomatic arm, has been hit by what officials said Thursday was a serious cyberattack.The attack was first detected on Tuesday and Commission sources have said that it was sustained and targeted. 

External access to the Commission's e-mail and intranet has been suspended and staff have been told to change their passwords in order to prevent the "disclosure of unauthorised information," according to an internal memo to staff. Staff at the Commission, the European Union's executive and regulatory body, have also been told to send sensitive information via secure e-mail.

The event came just days ahead of the European Council summit being held on Thursday and Friday. The summit brings together the leaders of E.U. member states and crucial decisions will be made on economic strategy, the war in Libya and the future structure of the E.U.

This led to early speculation that the source of the attacks may be Libya, but the Commission was quick to rule this out. The attack is thought to be similar to the cyberattack on the French government in the run up to the G20 Summit in February 2010. That assault involved malware and targeted e-mail, with some of the related stolen information redirected to China. 

Commission administration spokesman Antony Gravili said officials would not speculate on the source of the attacks in such a sensitive security matter. He did, however, confirm that the attackers targeted the information of some Commission officials, in particular at the External Action Service, the body's foreign diplomatic arm.

"We are already taking urgent measures to tackle this. An inquiry's been launched. This isn't unusual as the Commission is frequently targeted," said Gravili. He added that there was no concrete evidence that the attack is linked to the E.U. summit.

There's a new version of the Firefox browser coming out this week, and it's so good you may want to adopt it instead of either Microsoft's IE or Google's Chrome. Indeed, I've already made the switch using an almost complete version of Firefox 4; the finished product will be ready to download on Tuesday, March 22.

Having said that, the three major browsers these days are all very good and it's a certain amount of trouble to switch; you've got to move your bookmarks and get used to a somewhat different environment. So when I say I'm moving back to Firefox, it's no slam against Chrome. (Microsoft's new IE 9 is getting good reviews, but I haven't had a chance to try it out.)

The main reason I like Firefox 4 so much is a feature called Panorama. Essentially it's a way of visually grouping tabs as if they are running in a separate instance of the browser, a real asset for inveterate multitaskers. In fact, a number of Firefox 4's tab-related features work much better than Chrome's. That may seem like a small point, but for me at least, tabs are a reflection of what I'm doing on the Web at any give time. I don't want them to get in my way.

Firefox 4 has a different look than earlier versions and it's somewhat cleaner, though unlike Google and other browsers it still maintains separate bars for navigation and search. Some elements have moved around to give Firefox a more svelte look, but it's still not as minimalist as Chrome - though I'd say thats altogether a matter of taste.

Say I'm working on a project about health care and have six or seven sites open that I'm using as references. At the same time, I like to have my Google calendar and contacts showing and maybe a news page. I'm also looking at material for a column on iPhone apps and that's another four tabs. Now I've got 14 or so tabs crowding the top of my screen and because the tabs are squeezed, it's hard to tell which is which. Very annoying.

Of course, I could stop and bookmark some of those pages, but if I'm really multitasking I like to have everything at my fingertips. I could also open another instance of the browser, but that takes time and eats up system resources such as memory.

With Panorama you click a small icon in the upper right hand corner that says "list all tabs" as you roll over it. When you enter the Tab Groups view for the first time, you'll see thumbnail previews of all of your tabs. To make a group, simply drag one tab out of the group and then drag a second one on top of it and so on. Firefox then draws a box around them. Then do another group. Like any other windows, they can be moved around and sized. You can also give them a name, say health care, iPhones and Info.

When you click on one of the boxes, you go back to your ordinary browser page, but only the tabs in the group you've selected are showing. Want to switch back? Simply click on the icon, and select the group you want to see and voila, you're working with it. Another helpful tab feature allows you to search for a tab. In the tab view simply start typing the name of the tab and Firefox will find it for you and highlight it.

If you've used Chrome, you've probably familiar with the pin tabs feature, which is handy, but Firefox does it better, particularly for apps and add- ons. You pin a tab by right-clicking on it, and selecting, "pin." That tab, or app, is then represented by its icon on a corner of your screen. Unlike Chrome, in which the pinned material goes away when the session ends, Firefox apps remain pinned until you unpin them.

If you pin a page that changes, like Gmail or Twitter, the little icon will change color when that page has been updated. Very handy, though it does lend itself to getting distracted from the task at hand, a fault of the user not the browser.

Finally, I want to mention one other feature called Switch to Tab. It's a little subtle but reduces clutter and drain on resources. Say I'm looking at the CIO home page for a while and then switch to something else.

If I've forgotten that I have CIO.com open and start to type the url again, Firefox will recognize it and ask me if I want to "switch" to that tab instead of opening it again. Smart.

As far as speed goes, I've seen a few benchmarks that say Firefox is now a bit faster than Chrome, but in the real world I'm not at all sure you'd notice the difference. Similarly, it appears that Chrome scores a little higher on some compatibility tests, but I'm not sure if that really matters.

In at least one important area, Chrome remains ahead: search. Because it is so closely integrated with Google's search engine, Chrome works better in that department, and makes it easier to add non-standard search engines to your repertoire.

The best news of all is that browser wars are back with a vengeance. All of the major vendors are conducting an arms race, doing their best to leapfrog the competition. In this battle for market share, we users keep getting a better product. How's that for a nice change?

With so many new browser releases coming out in such rapid succession, it stands to reason that at least some users are going to need some help figuring out which now works best for them.

Toward that end, I had a chat earlier today with Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's director of Firefox development, to get a sense of what the final release of Firefox 4 will bring. Here are some of the highlights of what we can expect.

 Tabs are now given top visual priority in Firefox 4 so as to enable more efficient and intuitive browsing. In addition to its new "tabs on top" layout, however, the software now also offers a number of other features to make it simpler and more streamlined.A Switch to Tab feature, for instance, helps reduce tab clutter by automatically calling up an already-tabbed URL rather than duplicating it all over again. "It took my tab list from 80 to 90 down to 50 or 60," Nightingale said.

"The slowest part of browsing is often the user," he explained. "If you have 200 tabs open and you can't find the right one, that's the slow part."Then, too, there are App Tabs, which allow the user to take sites they always have open--such as Gmail or Twitter--off the tab bar and give them a permanent home in the browser. Then, no matter where the user visits, those tabs are always visible on the browser's left-hand edge. Not only that, but each App Tab's icon glows to indicate when there's been activity on that site, such as new mail coming in.

When Firefox gets reloaded, it boosts loading speed by focusing first on the active page and App Tabs, and then loading other tabs in gradual succession after that, Nightingale explained.Further reducing clutter is Firefox 4's Firefox Button, meanwhile, which displays all menu items in a single button for easy access.

 Though it began as an add-on, Firefox 4's new Panorama feature is another one designed to battle tab clutter. Using it, Web surfers can drag and drop their tabs into manageable groups that can be organized, named and arranged intuitively and visually.

In previous versions of the browser, users with 20 tabs, for example, didn't have an easy way to separate out the ones that were related. "Some people would put tabs in different windows, but that just moves the clutter," Nightingale explained.Panorama, on the other hand, now provides a visual canvas on which tabs can be logically organized into groups representing work, home, hobbies or research, for example.

Another new feature that started life as an add-on is Sync, which synchronizes an individual's multiple copies of Firefox across various platforms. So, a user might look up directions to a restaurant from their work computer, for example, and then be able to easily find and pull down those same directions from their Android phone on the road, Nightingale explained."Wherever you are, Firefox knows you," he added. "It gives you so much freedom."

For privacy, all such information is bundled on the user's local machine and encrypted before it goes onto the network, he added.

With a single check box, Firefox 4 users can ensure that any time the browser requests a Web page, it will send along a header specifying that the user does not want their browsing behavior to be tracked.In theory, advertisers and Web sites could disregard such requests, Nightingale noted--as they could equivalent mechanisms in other browsers as well. On the other hand, enforcing them is not a technical problem, he noted. "It's a matter of trust--enforcing on the technical side doesn't help."

What Nightingale hopes is that advertisers and Web sites will use the new capability as an opportunity to show respect for consumers' wishes and to demonstrate leadership when it comes to privacy. In beta versions of the software, he noted, most wanted to learn more about how to comply and get involved."I'm keen to see how ad networks and content sites respond," Nightingale concluded. With the new technology enabled, "everyone you're interacting with knows your intent."

A number of other features--some visible to users, others not--will also appear in Firefox 4, including support for the WebM format for HD-quality video; 3D graphics via WebGL; elegant animations through the use of CSS3; and multitouch support.Then, too, there's super-fast graphics acceleration with Direct2D and Direct3D on Windows, XRender on Linux, and OpenGL on Mac enabled by default on supported hardware.

With HTTP Strict Transport Security, or HSTS, sites can now make sure information is always encrypted, thereby preventing attackers from intercepting sensitive data. Previously, a hacker sitting in a Starbucks (SBUX) store, for example, could potentially watch Web surfers enter a bank's home page, which is not encrypted, and hijack them from there, Nightingale noted.

With Content Security Policy, or CSP, meanwhile, Firefox 4 ensures that cross-site scripting attacks can't infect a site such as through its comments section, he added.I should also note that because Firefox's code is open, it's not subject to any vendor's preset patch schedule. Rather, its security is constantly being reviewed and improved.

Firefox 4's new HTML5 parser and full support for Web video, audio, drag & drop, and file handling mean that it's capable of supporting the latest Web environments.

Whereas Microsoft's IE9 can be used only on Windows--and only Vista and Windows 7 at that--Firefox, as always, is multiplatform. So, whether you're on Windows, Linux or a Mac, you can enjoy its powerful new features.

Last but not least, whereas proprietary browsers such as IE9 are developed by Microsoft's team of paid developers to reflect their own vision of what users want, Firefox has been shaped significantly by the people who use it. In fact, between 30 percent and 40 percent of its code was developed by the community, Nightingale told me. It's hard to imagine a better way to make sure a product delivers what users want.

With so many exciting new capabilities, Firefox users have a lot to look forward to in this new release. So, for that matter, do the legions of Internet Explorer users who will sooner or later make the switch

Thank's for reading.,please leave a comment..

When e-mail providers like Google came on the scene the amount of spam in our inboxes fell, not because there was less of it about, but because more intelligent measures were being taken to identify and block it. Levels of spam circulating the Internet always seem to be on the increase and new measures required to block it, but this week those levels fell dramatically.

The reason for the sudden fall was a coordinated attack on one of the most successful botnets out there called Rustock. Multiple servers used by the botnet were taken offline simultaneously on Wednesday crippling Rustock’s 26 command and control networks and therefore stopping them sending out around 30 billion spam messages every single day.

Those networks were thought to be controlling in the region of 815,000 Windows PCs around the world infected with Rustock’s rootkit and doing its dirty work. Unless those command networks can be brought back online, which nobody wants, those infected machines become useless to the spammers.

Security experts are seeing this as a major breakthrough in cutting down on levels of spam. Rustock remained prevalent due to a number of tactics it used to remain undetected making it very difficult to shutdown. Unless you cut off all its heads at once it will come back, and this time it looks as though it may hopefully remain offline.

While it is unknown who planned and coordinated this takedown of the botnet, everyone agrees that whoever did it certainly knew the botnet well and took measures to counteract any backup techniques Rustock used to re-establish itself and its connection with the infected Windows PCs.

The adult entertainment industry now has a home on the Internet: It's called .xxx.The group that manages the Internet's top-level domains -- the .com, .org and .net that we all type at the end of e-mail messages and Web addresses -- said Friday that it will establish a .xxx domain, a move that it hopes will add a measure of predictability and security to the wild world of Internet websites. 

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) signed off on the process at a meeting in San Francisco this week.Pornography is often used to lure Web surfers to dangerous or fraudulent sites. By regulating .xxx, ICANN hopes to make things better. 

Anyone who wants to register a .xxx domain will first have to go through an application process that's approved by the International Foundation for Online Responsibility. This procedure is intended to ensure that .xxx domains don't engage in fraud, child pornography and other practices. At the same time, having a domain set aside specifically for adult websites would make it easier for users to block such sites from their browsing experience. 

The move gives consumers "reassurance they are more protected from the risk of viruses, identity theft, credit card fraud and inadvertent exposure to child abuse images," ICANN said Friday in a statement announcing the decision.However, critics say established porn sites are unlikely to give up their .com domains just because there's a .xxx option. That means anyone who thinks he's filtered porn by filtering out all .xxx domains from his network is due for a nasty surprise. In addition, porn site operators won't be forced to get .xxx domain names and go through the vetting process. 

ICANN has been toying with the idea of introducing .xxx for about a decade. The board had approved the new top-level domain in June, but now the decision is final.Longtime .xxx proponent ICM Registry will be the .xxx registrar. The company says it has received applications to pre-register more than 200,000 .xxx domains.

Mozilla on Wednesday announced it would ship the final version of Firefox 4 on March 22.The upgrade will be available for downloading at approximately 7:00 a.m. PT next Tuesday.

Originally scheduled to ship last November, Firefox 4 will wrap up a development cycle that started in February 2010 with several developer previews, but began in earnest last July when Mozilla released the first of what would eventually be a dozen betas.

Wednesday, Mozilla developers called the current Release Candidate, or RC build of the browser , good enough to ship as the final. Traditionally, it has run through multiple release candidates before settling on the latest as the shipping code. More than a year ago, for example, Mozilla issued two release candidates of Firefox 3.6.

"Today's triage session concluded with all systems go for a Firefox 4 launch on March 22," said Damon Sicore, Mozilla's senior director of platform engineering, in a message on a company forum .Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs congratulated the troops on the same forum.

"We set a goal in December, we stressed toward the goal. At times, many thought we, I, us, were crazy, or too aggressive ... but in the end, we were able to get it done in March," Kovacs said.Firefox 4 will reach users eight days after Microsoft issued Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).

Before it began cranking out Firefox 4 betas, Mozilla had set an aggressive schedule that was to end with a final edition no later than November 2010. Last October, however, the open-source developer admitted it had underestimated several bugs, and said it was delaying the release until 2011.

Firefox 4 features a new tab manager, dubbed "Panorama," supports GPU acceleration to boost page composition speeds, and boasts an overhauled interface that resembles Chrome's and IE9's minimalist designs.Mozilla is already prepping for the next version of Firefox. According to plans now circulating among developers, the company is considering an ambitious schedule that will ship a major upgrade every three or four months.

Firefox 4 is Mozilla's best shot at reclaiming some of the browser usage share it's lost in the last year. Recent statistics from Web analytics company Net Applications had Firefox's share at 21.7% in February, down from 24.5% 12 months before.Anyone running Firefox 3.5 or 3.6 can grab the upgrade March 22 by selecting "Check for updates" from the Help menu. Users running Firefox 4 RC, however, won't need to download anything next week because Mozilla deemed that build identical to the final.

 

Japan's Internet infrastructure has remained surprisingly unaffected by last week's devastating earthquake and tsunami, according to an analysis by Internet monitoring firm Renesys.Most Web sites are operational and the Internet remains available to support critical communication functions, Renesys CTO James Cowie wrote in a blog over the weekend .

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake off the Japanese coast, about 100 of Japan's 6,000 network prefixes -- or segments -- were withdrawn from service. But they started reappearing on global routing tables just a few hours later. Similarly, traffic to and from Japan dropped by about 25 gigabits per second right after the Friday quake, but returned to normal levels a few hours later. And traffic at Japan's JPNAP Layer 2 Internet exchange service appears to have slowed by just 10% since Friday, according to Renesys.

"Why have we not seen more impact on international Internet traffic from this incredibly devastating quake? We don't know yet," Cowie wrote.

An unknown number of people were killed and whole cities devastated by what was one of the worst earthquakes in over 100 years. The quake, which initially measured 8.9 on the Richter scale, generated a huge tsunami that inundated parts of Japan and put almost the entire Pacific coastline on a tsunami alert.

The effects of the quake, in terms of human loss and economic damage, are expected to be huge. The quake also disrupted electricity supplies and knocked two nuclear power plants out of commission . One reason Internet connectivity appeared to fare better could be that undersea cables remained relatively untouched by the quake, unlike in 2006 when an earthquake in Taiwan resulted in a large number of major cable breaks, Cowie said.

This time, the only noticeable breaks were in two segments of Pacnet's EAC submarine cable system, Cowie said. The system, which is owned by a consortium of six companies, is designed to provide up to 1.92 terabits per second of capacity across the Pacific. The breaks led to outages in several networks in Japan, the Philippines and Hong Kong.Sections of the Pacific Crossing undersea cabling system connecting the U.S to Asia also appear to have been damaged. A note posted on Pacific Crossing's Web site this morning noted that two of the cables are currently out of service.

Pacific Crossing's cable lading station in Ajigaura, Japan was evacuated as a result of the tsunami. No information is available about when restoration efforts will resume, Pacific Crossing said.

Renesys noted that "lingering" problems with landing station equipment could generate new problems over the next few weeks.

Even so, "it's clear that Internet connectivity has survived this event better than anyone would have expected," Cowie said. He noted that Japan's attempts to build a "dense web" of domestic and international Internet connectivity appears to have paid off. "At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty."