bugs

Facebook has closed a hole that was being used by spammers to automatically post wall messages and direct messages to friends, the company said on Tuesday.

Just clicking on the link to one of the applications that were taking advantage of the bug would allow the auto-posting to happen, Facebook said. The apps, which appeared to be sending people to a survey Web site, were disabled on Monday, the company said.

"Earlier this week, we discovered a bug that made it possible for an application to bypass our normal CSRF (cross-site request forgery) protections through a complicated series of … Read more

Sweden is such a lovely, law-abiding place. No one ever makes false allegations. Everyone respects their fellow person, just as they want to be respected.

So I was suddenly in need of a kneading from a Swedish masseur when I read about two Stockholm schoolgirls who transgressed against their educators in a disturbingly technological manner.

According to The Local (Swedish news in English, rather than an English pub), these two schoolgirls wanted to know what was going on in the teachers' staff room during a grading conference.

Fortune temporarily smiled upon them, as they happened to find a key to … Read more

Google pushed out an update for the stable branch of its Chrome browser Wednesday. The update, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, addresses multiple security bugs including nine tagged as high-level problems.

The high-level security bugs included cross-origin bypass in DOM methods that netted a security researcher $2,000 in Google's ongoing bug-hunting contest, a memory error in table layouts that earned another researcher $500, holes in the wall of the sandbox on Linux computers, HTML5-based geolocation events firing even after the relevant document had been deleted, and multiple memory errors.

This is the first security-fixing release for the stable … Read more

I know that the occasional developer wanders to these pages in order to discover important things, such as whether they should friend Mark Zuckerberg.

Because I feel a great responsibility toward our developing future, I have dedicated some considerable time to understanding developers better.

Here's what I have learned. Developers really, really do not like going to the dentist. They also really, really don't like the thought of having a fender-bender on their way home from work.

However, in their heart of hearts, should you be able to find such a place, they also have some severe problems … Read more

Google has updated the Chrome browser for most of its multiple versions on all platforms in the past few days, although most of the updates have been minor. However, high-priority security fixes have been made to the stable version of Chrome.

Five security fixes labeled "high" have been applied to the stable Windows version of Chrome, including a fix for a bug that was discovered by Sergey Glazunov. He has received the first $1,337 Chromium Security Reward for the discovery. The security fixes include plugging holes in tab sandboxing, memory errors occurring with malformed SVG images, integer … Read more

A bug in Thursday's update to the development build of Google Chrome renders it incompatible with Gmail offline. Users who've had Gmail and Chrome configured for offline use will find that Chrome crashes as soon as you log in to Gmail. The problem affects all development versions of the browser.

Right now there are only two ways around the bug. You can disable offline mode in Chrome by going to Options/Under the Hood and clearing out the Gmail-related entries under ''Change Gears settings''. This will delete all offline data from Gmail that you've saved on your … Read more

Reports are still scattered, but after testing our own PS3, it appears the global 8001050F error that left most non-Slim PS3 consoles essentially unplayable seems to be fixed. We're guessing this issue was corrected on the server side of things, as there was no update or download required; our console just worked.

Even better, all trophy and game save data remains intact, so worries about corrupted information can be put to rest.

We still don't have an official word from Sony, but it looks like the worst is behind us. That said, we'd still recommend waiting for … Read more

It seems that a major worldwide firmware bug has affected most PlayStation 3s, preventing the consoles from connecting to the PlayStation Network and in many cases (including our own) not allowing for offline game play. The problem, whatever it is, comprises all PS3 consoles aside from the newer PS3 Slim.

We've been keeping an eye on the official PlayStation Twitter feed and blog that claims Sony has narrowed down the issue, though 12 hours after the bug (error 8001050F) was first reported most systems remain paralyzed. At first it seemed the crisis centralized around trophy support, while other reports … Read more

Critical security fixes and improvements to the upgrade path from Thunderbird 2 are the key changes in Thunderbird 3.0.2, released today for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Three security fixes, all listed as critical, address an integer overflow that caused crashes in the libtheora video library, a memory safety issue in the liboggplay media library, and crashes caused by memory corruption.

There were also changes made to the in-house upgrade from Thunderbird 2. Thunderbird 3 was released last December, but many users encountered problems including data loss and functionality bugs when upgrading. This fix released today addresses Mac users … Read more