Technology news
Opera 11.50 Beta featuring enhanced password security
As you may already know, Firefox recently announced that they would introduce competitive release schedules to their popular browser, Mozilla. This was immediately followed by the release of Firefox 4 which claims to feature up to 6 times the performance of the previous v3.6.
After seeing Google Chrome and Firefox push for faster releases on their respective browsers, Opera has taken a stance – To release at the same speed (gotcha!). Nevertheless, they have managed to reach the 11.5 beta of the next major release which will probably bring joy to users who share bookmarks across computers with Opera Link. Along with the introduction of added support for HTML5 such as the dataset attribute, sessions history and navigation, the classList attribute, Opera is pushing for enhanced password security.
What this means is now Opera will allow Opera Link users to also synchronize passwords across computers as they are able to ensure such information will not be stolen.
This is achieved by using a randomly generated encryption key that is sent along with your password to Opera’s authentication service, where it is then retrieved onto your other computers and accessed by typing in your Opera Link password. When you input your password, it will check it against the encryption key created earlier, and if they match, you are provided access. This means not only are you protected by your Opera Link password, you are protected a second time by the encryption key which is matched against your password.
Aside from this amazing feature, they have also introduced the possibility of using extensions in your Speed Dial (yes, we know, more Opera jargon), allowing you to view weather, email, news as they update dynamically.
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Firefox 4 just released!
So…about two hours ago, Mozilla announced the released of their newest major update to their popular web browser, Firefox.
What’s so special about this update?
Minor modifications
Where are the other features?!
Simply put, we decided all the other new “features” Mozilla brought up in their Firefox 4 release were simply too insignificant to occupy the precious time of our readers.
So we have spared you from having to read a huge wall of text then decide you’ve just wasted your time. If you still wish to see all the other minor “features” implemented in the new update, feel free to see them on the official Firefox website.
I really could care less about the minor modifications…tell me about the speed increase!
As we are well aware, one of the most important things when browsing the internet for most of us is the speed in which the page is displayed. The team at Technewsgalore is no different. So we’ll happily give you some significant numbers from the benchmarks comparing Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 4.
Kraken – Difference: Almost 3.55x faster! (Lower value means faster performance)
Firefox 3.6 - 14,293 milliseconds (ms)
Firefox 4 - 5,072 ms
Sunspider – Difference: 3.2x faster! (Lower value means faster performance)
Firefox 3.6 - 620 ms
Firefox 4 - 206 ms
V8 – Difference: 7.08x better! (Greater value, greater performance)
Firefox 3.6 – 733 ms
Firefox 4 - 5189 ms
Yes those numbers are quite impressive. However, numbers mean nothing if you can not experience it yourself. So go ahead, try out Firefox 4 and tell us how you like it!
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WPA encryption hacked in under a minute!
Computer scientists in Japan say they’ve developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute.
The attack gives hackers a way to read encrypted traffic sent between computers and certain types of routers that use the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption system. The attack was developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, who plan to discuss further details at a technical conference set for Sept. 25 in Hiroshima. Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level, according to Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec security conference where the first WPA hack was demonstrated. “They took this stuff which was fairly theoretical and they’ve made it much more practical,” he said.
The Japanese researchers discuss their attack in a paper presented at the Joint Workshop on Information Security, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan earlier this month.
The earlier attack, developed by researchers Martin Beck and Erik Tews, worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.
The encryption systems used by wireless routers have a long history of security problems. The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) system, introduced in 1997, was cracked just a few years later and is now considered to be completely insecure by security experts. WPA with TKIP “was developed as kind of an interim encryption method as Wi-Fi security was evolving several years ago,” said Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director with the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry group that certifies Wi-Fi devices. People should now use WPA 2, she said. Wi-Fi-certified products have had to support WPA 2 since March 2006. “There’s certainly a decent amount of WPA with TKIP out in the installed base today, but a better alternative has been out for a long time,” Davis-Felner said.
Enterprise Wi-Fi networks typically include security software that would detect the type of man-in-the-middle attack described by the Japanese researchers, said Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security. But the development of the first really practical attack against WPA should give people a reason to dump WPA with TKIP, he said. “It’s not as bad as WEP, but it’s also certainly bad.”
Users can change from TKIP to AES encryption using the administrative interface on many WPA routers.
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