Supergeekblog

Well it seems to be the week of virus alerts.  This one from Slashdot popped up and caught my attention pretty quick.

“Researchers have discovered a new type of malware that collects passwords for banking sites but targets only Firefox. The malware, dubbed ‘Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A,’ sits in Firefox’s add-ons folder, registering itself as ‘Greasemonkey,’ the well-known collection of scripts that add functionality to Web pages rendered by Firefox. The malware uses JavaScript to identify more than 100 financial and money transfer Web sites, including PayPal, collecting logins and passwords, which it forwards to a server in Russia. Trojan infection can occur via drive-by download or download duping.”

I guess the old “know what you are installing” really kicks in here as well.  I use Greasemonkey for a few minor scripts.

BitDefender has updated its products to detect it, and other vendors will likely follow suit quickly, Canja said. Users could avoid it by only downloading signed, verified software, but that’s a measure that restricts the usability of a PC, he said.

The malware is not present in Mozilla’s repository of add-ons, Canja said. Mozilla had taken steps to ensure that its official site hosting add-ons — also called extensions — are free from malware.

So it boils down to, keep your antivirus definitions updated and only download from trusted locations as much as possible.  If a download looks fishy, just don’t.

Mark over at the Geeks are Sexy has a nice writeup on how the German Government is warning people against Google Chrome.  It seems the big issue is having a single vendor with all of that information.  (Cal, email, search, and now web browser.)

Click here to read the GaS writeup.  (Great blog btw.)

This really isn’t much of a shock, but has taken the net by storm.  Google has released it’s own browser.  Before getting into any specifics, I will give some first impressions.  I use IE6 at work (requirement), and Firefox3 with various extentions.  (FF being my browser of choice at the moment.)  That being said – Chrome is impressive.  I have seen massive speed improvements in my normal sites.  (Google Reader being the most impressive speed difference, though I should have expected that.)

There has been some dissention out there.  Chrome is too basic, doesn’t yet support Extentions, new version of Firefox (3.1) will make this pointless, the Default EUAL, etc.  Some of these have a valid point.  On the other hand – it is a rock solid beta application.  How many other betas have we gotten from MS that crashed repeatedly.  FF has been pretty good about this in its newer versions.

Follow some of the links above for more information, I will also be posting some resources links below.  I would encourage people out there to try it for themselves and form their own oppinion.  I for one am looking forward to seeing what it becomes, though not ready yet to make a full switch from Firefox.  (The process per tab works really well.)

Google Chrome Comic Book

Google Chrome Download

ArsTechnica Review of Chrome

This post is a follow-up to the initial post I did right after installing the Firefox plugin called ScribeFire.

I must say – I love this firefox plugin. ScribeFire has really helped me breath new life into my blogs. I have been working on posting more in general, but I find myself really making use of it. I read a good post, I link to it in a post of my own via the in browser interface. I find this to be a sharp contrast to when I had tested MS Live Writer a while ago. I just never used it. Maybe the key difference is this is in Firefox, my personal browser of choice.

Anywho – I do recommend it to other bloggers. My intial impressions were spot on. It is easy to use and so handy I find myself blogging more than I used to.

Great extension for Firefox that adds prefetching, link caching, dns caching, and a bunch of other speed tweaks to make firefox surf faster.

Fasterfox – Performance and network tweaks for Firefox.