News for Friday, 13 May 2005

Firefox 1.04 is available for download. We advise all Firefox users to do this update which solves major security issues.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/all.html

Source : Que Choisir
In the past, lawsuits already happened where people wanted to buy a
computer without the enforced operating system. Often, these consumers
gained. But the separate sale is still not a regular usage.
Christian Jacob, French Trade Minister, comes back, affirming that the
consumer should have the choice to buy or not the operating system
when purchasing his computer. He points out the Consumer Code, which
prohibits tied selling.
If facts follow that assertion, Apple will have to also propose not to
buy Mac OS X if requested. But it will then be a major logistics
concern, knowing that the operating system is now pre-installed on the
hard drives.
But we do not have illusions. Microsoft will lobby to make these good
intentions forgotten. Indeed, many of the sold licences are coming
from new machines.
[T's note : I wish a warm welcome to our new team member, Cri-cri, who
should actually sign this translation as well as that of the news item about mail and certificates. Stay tuned on hardmac.com and enjoy _ K.]

Microsoft has released specs for its next generation game console. As prediction by the rumor the Xbox360 is built around a custom IBM PowerPC featuring three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each! Of course it is probably a "light" version of the current G5, but we can really jealous with our current PMG5 running at max 2.7GHz with a liquid cooling system.
Among other specs, the Xbox360 features 512 MB GDDR3 RAM clocked @ 700MHz, as well as a custom ATI GPU, with 10MB of embedded DRAM (256 GB/s memory bandwidth!).
Last but not least the price: between 299 and 399US$ depending on which version of the Xbox360 you want to buy. For a comparison, an ATI 9800Pro Mac Edition costs 399US$...
Availability is planned for the end of the year, let’s say around Christmas time ...
Next step, SONY's answer to MS Xbox360 with the PlayStation3 and its famous Cell processor...

On Scoub_Lite's website, you will find a PDF explaining how to obtain a free digital certificate for one or more email addresses.

I What is a digital certificate ?
A digital certificate is a unique digital signature. This signature is a file on your computer that contains your identity, validated by an independent and international authority. This file, once acquired, is automatically integrated to the Mac OS X keychain.
II For what purpose ?
The certificate is mainly used for two purposes:
- To digitally sign the mails you are sending in order to prove your identity. This ensures that this mail is really coming from you and not from a Spam or virus.
- To encrypt your mails when you correspond with someone also owning a certificate.
III How does it work ?
The certificate includes a private key that must not be transferred to anyone. This key is your identity and must stay in your computer. It also includes a public key. This one will be sent automatically to your correspondents within your first mail to them.
This public key will then allow you and your certified recipients to exchange encrypted and digitally signed emails.
Don't worry, Mac OS X perfectly manages these processes without any additional software and it is completely "transparent" for the end-user...

Full story :
More about this item HERE

If ever you download a Widget with Safari, the browser is going to open the archive automatically, and install the file without asking. It's dangerous since you're not advertise than some new code was installed. To avoid any trouble, you can change a setting in the General Prefs of Safari: opt-out the "Open automatically trusted files" option. For sure, Apple should propose soon some update to solve this in a more efficient way.