IE8, Safari 4, Firefox 3, iPhone fall on day 1 of Pwn2Own

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/03/ie8-safari4-firefox3-iphone-fall-on-day-1-of-pwn2own.ars

I've always been quite interested in these pwn2own contests, and I'm very surprised that no one even tried to hack chrome on the first day (on windows). As for safari on mac os x looking from previous news I'm pretty sure safari would fall (Charlie Miller seemed pretty confident he would hack it). Regarding safari on iPhone, pretty sure there would be a day where it would be hacked. For IE8 and Firefox 3 I keep hearing of enhanced security features in windows 7, I guess there was a way around it. I hope that all these exploits will be fixed in the near future. Onwards to day 2! We shall see whether chrome falls... And note that for the first day all these exploits were remote, meaning that all the user did was access a malicious site and their computer would be compromised.

Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 beta adds A/V chats

http://www.macworld.com/article/150058/2010/03/messenger8_beta.html?lsrc=rss_main

Well, apparently the beta of messenger:mac finally has AV support. Though I must say, in terms of features the product is very disappointing. Adium is far ahead, but I experience some server errors once in a while (Adium claims it's because of microsoft's servers). Last time I tried messenger: mac I realized that it didn't even have any offline messaging. I also think that the "drawer" concept for the display picture wasn't implemented well. No tabs for chats, and when I moved it between spaces it was buggy. A very feature limited product especially when you compare it to Adium.

Looking at this in a more positive light, Adium doesn't have very good A/V implementation, I hope that this kicks starts A/V conferencing on Adium, even though I mainly use skype for my A/V conferencing needs. Another thing I wish Adium had was drawing support.

Calibre eBook Reader

Just yesterday a thought dawned on me. I wasn't reading books. The last book I read according to my memory was Tuesdays with Morrie last summer. However, it wasn't a new read. I was just rereading a book I've read before. I realized that I need to read new books, and since for a while I haven't been sure of what genre I liked I wanted to restart at the classics, and see how it would go. Now project gutenberg offers a whole collection of digitalized books, including many classics but to my dismay when I downloaded a file it was in the .txt format, and I really don't like reading books through textedit. I need an application that could convert and read ebook formats on my mac. I first read the news and saw that kindle reader for mac was out, but when I downloaded it I realized to my dismay that it only syncs your kindle ebook library with your kindle, which was not what I wanted.

So I searched and found an application called calibre. It's a free application for mac, windows, and linux, that allows you to read ebooks on your computer. With an added bonus, you can even send the formats to your ebook readers such as kindles, etc. The interface isn't the best especially since it's cross platform, but it works. Instead of downloading the books in txt format I used the epub format. That way the reader can display the books and I can read, for example Frankenstein for free. I'm going to include some screen shots as well to show you how the interface and reading experience is. I haven't fully tried out the software, but I can assure you that it works. And as I said before, even better, it's cross platform and free. Happy reading!

This is how the interface looks like when you want to see your library of books.


The ebook reader experience (as you can see I'm going to start Frankenstein first).