ICANN and IANA sites hacked by Turkish group

"You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"

Two of the world's most important internet regulatory web sites – ICANN and IANA - were hijacked by a Turkish group called "Netdevilz" and briefly redirected to another site which screamed the above message, according to researchers at Zone-h.

IANA is the organization responsible for managing the DNS (domain name system) root zone and assigning the DNS operators for the Internet's top-level domains. DNS, which translates the domains and URLs into IP addresses, is a critical component of the Web's traffic-guiding infrastructure.

ICANN, which oversees IANA, also allocates IP address space and manages the Web's top-level domain naming system.

The zone-h researchers said the redirected domains included icann.com, icann.net, iana.com and iana-servers.com. They were hijacked to atspace.com, according to zone-h.

"We reached the defacers by e-mail but they refused to tell us how they changed the DNS records, however a cross-site scripting or cross-site request forgery vulnerability might have been exploited," zone-h said.

Firefox 3 released

Mozilla Firefox 3 has been released. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in approximately 50 languages , the new version has over 15,000 improvements.

What’s New in Firefox 3:

The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features to deliver a faster, more secure and customizable Web browsing experience for all.

User Experience. The enhancements to Firefox 3 provide the best possible browsing experience on the Web. The new Firefox 3 smart location bar, affectionately known as the “Awesome Bar,” learns as people use it, adapting to user preferences and offering better fitting matches over time. The Firefox 3 Library archives browsing history, bookmarks, and tags, where they can be easily searched and organized. One-click bookmarking and tagging make it easy to remember, search and organize Web sites. The new full-page zoom displays any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.

Performance. Firefox 3 is built on top of the powerful new Gecko 1.9 platform, resulting in a safer, easier to use and more personal product. Firefox 3 now uses less memory while it’s running, and its redesigned page rendering and layout engine means users see Web pages two to three times faster than Firefox 2.

Security. Firefox 3 raises the bar for security. The new malware and phishing protection helps protect from viruses, worms, trojans and spyware to keep people safe on the Web. Firefox 3’s one-click site ID information allows users to verify that a site is what it claims to be. Mozilla’s open source process leverages the experience of thousands of security experts around the globe.

Customization. Everyone uses the Web differently, and Firefox 3 lets users customize their browser with more than 5,000 add-ons. Firefox Add-ons allow users to manage tasks like participating in online auctions, uploading digital photos, seeing the weather forecasts, and listening to music, all from the convenience of the browser. The new Add-ons Manager helps users to find and install add-ons directly from the browser.

Download Firefox 3

Internet Explorer 8 Sneak Peek

Internet Explorer 8 Features:

The new Activities feature attempts to save a lot of time by cutting down on the number of separate sites that you have to visit to accomplish a task. In essence, the Activities feature allows you to invoke the essential services offered on separate sites without ever leaving the page you're currently on. For example, a user can highlight an address on a Web site and, then in one click, call up a map of that location.

Another new feature, automatic crash recovery does a good job of isolating instances of the IE browser -- or separate tabs within the same browser -- so that one stalled browser or tab can be terminated without affecting any other. If a crash does bring down the entire browser, automatic crash recovery will attempt to restore the browser to its previous state -- including all open tabs -- the next time you open it.

Another time-saving feature of IE 8 is called Web Slices, which are designed to allow you to subscribe to frequently-updated portions, or "slices," of certain websites.Instead of spending your time visiting three or four websites to get updated information from a portion of each of those sites, you would simply use Web Slices to pull that information into a single location in IE 8.

Clicking the Web Slice icon adds a new button to a Favourites bar that appears above your browser tabs. Clicking the newly-created Web Slice button on the IE 8 Favourites bar will pull the latest data from your subscribed page and show it to you in a preview window.

The new version comes with built-in Developer Tools. The new Developer Toolbar enables developers to quickly debug HTML, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript in a visual development environment that comes with the web browser. Developers can quickly identify and resolve issues because of the deep insight the tool provides into the Document Object Model. The Developer Toolbar also allows the layout to be changed on the fly so that each rendering scenario can be tested thoroughly.

Top 3 online meeting tools

1) Dimdim

'Dimdim' is a free web-based conferencing service. Here you can start the meeting and invite others via e-mail, directly from the browser. Apart from offering collaboration tools such as whiteboard, chat (text/audio/video), ‘dimdim’ has some additional unique features.

An advantage of ‘dimdim’ is the desktop sharing facility by the presenter to share her desktop with the attendees.

Once the presenter shares her desktop (using the ‘Screen’ option), the desktop screen will immediately be visible to all the participants. This could be useful in product demonstration and co-browsing.

Another feature of ‘dimdim’ is the facility to make live presentations with PowerPoint and PDF files.

2) Twiddla

To start an online meeting with a couple of mouse clicks, try out Twiddla. To initiate a meeting, go through the one-time registration process and click on the ‘Start meeting’ button.

You can make the meeting public or password-protected invite-only. When you initiate a meeting, you get a meeting URL for sharing with potential attendees. The service offers facilities for co-browsing, text/audio chatting and the like.

While browsing with others you can insert comments, and place coloured marks on the page being viewed. In addition, it provides a whiteboard that enables the participants to collaboratively write, and draw pictures.

3) Palbee

It allows you to conduct unlimited videoconference (with five people) sessions.

To enliven the video session, the service lets you run slideshows along with a whiteboard.

A great advantage of this service is the facility to record the sessions for sharing them with others later.