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As of yesterday, the first Release Candidate (RC1) of Internet Explorer is now available from Microsoft's web site. Much of the publicity for the latest (and potentially last edition ) of Microsoft's Internet Explorer has surrounded the browser's ... usability features, which promise to make surfing easier than ever before. But it's the added security elements that deserve the most attention. It's already been proven that Internet Explorer 8 is not unbeatable by hackers . But the new security options will make more of a difference in the long run than usability features such as Web Slices and ... (view more)

Nielsen.com reports that social networking and blogging have overtaken email to become the world's fourth most popular online sector after searching portals and PC software applications. Online networking sites are used to post gossip and other ... details about peoples' lives, but they have also become a crucial means of communication during disasters as they unfold. Time accounted for by 'Member Communities', or Facebook-like sites, has more than doubled in most of the countries monitored. 51% of Germans now access the sector, compared to 39% a year ago, giving Germany the strongest growth rate ... (view more)

The American armed forces have launched their own video-sharing site. TroopTube is designed to allow military personnel and their loved ones to exchange messages without the drawbacks of mainstream sites such as YouTube. The move follows a decision ... last year to block overseas military sites from accessing a dozen of the leading online video sites. That wasn't down to content concerns; rather military bosses felt streaming video was too much of a burden on the network links between the US and foreign bases. It was rumoured that at one stage the bandwidth was so clogged that it affected the ... (view more)

Think the Internet is all about freedom of speech? Not Facebook. After a number of complaints from mostly European sources, the popular social networking site has pulled and banned several Neo-Nazi groups. The European Parliament lodged the most ... significant complaint with the California-based Facebook. Martin Schulz, Socialist leader within the EP, told the media, "The existence of these groups is repulsive." Officially, Facebook removed the sites because they conflicted with its terms of use. Although the site "supports the free flow of information," representatives felt that the Neo-Nazi ... (view more)

As part of its Trustworthy Computing Initiative, based on building the concept of "End to End Trust" proposed by Microsoft in April at the RSA Security Conference, Microsoft reportedly wants to create "digital playgrounds", sites where visitors have ... to prove their age using digital identity credentials. Microsoft is hoping its measures will make the Internet safer for children and adults wanting to conduct business, make transactions, and communicate confidently with people who are who they say they are. Part of the challenge concerns how to add more identity authentication without ... (view more)

Prism Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on the desktop. http://labs.mozilla.com Download Mp3s From Streaming Music Sites Have you ever been annoyed that playlist-based music ... sites don't let you download songs? And once the player moves on to the next song, that song is gone. Or, is it? Most services like the ones above rely on Flash or JavaScript to obfuscate URLs and make it difficult, though not impossible, to download the actual files. In this guide, we'll show you how you can grab just about any file you want by ... (view more)

There are now more than a trillion web pages...and those are just the ones Google knows about. Google's index of web pages has grown from 26 million in 1998 to a billion (one thousand million) in 2000 and now to a trillion (one million million) in ... 2008. The search engine firm announced the statistic as a way of publicizing its position as the market leader (ahem, gloating). Writing in a post on the company's blog, software engineers Jesse Alpert said that the Google system reprocesses the entire index several times a day, each of which is equivalent to checking every road intersection in a ... (view more)

Yahoo is to follow Google's leads in highlight potential security risks in sites which show up in its search results. There are several differences between the two systems. Google highlights the most serious cases -- sites which exploit flaws in ... browser software and automatically download viruses -- with a warning. In Yahoo's case, the sites will automatically be deleted from the list of results. Yahoo will also highlight pages which appear to include downloads which are likely to include viruses, spyware (programmes which collect information from a user's computer without their knowledge) ... (view more)

Is "racial profiling" the best way to compete with Google? It would seem that InterActive Corp (Nasdaq: IACI), the owner of Ask.com, thinks so. The company has introduced a new search engine site called Rushmoredrive.com to provide more relevant ... search information for the African-American searcher. The new search engine was created using behavioral targeting techniques. Researchers analyzed the results of the most popular search terms used in geographic areas that have large black populations. The site then catalogues the 'click-throughs' from those results to determine the sites of most ... (view more)

Gotta get your Milwaukee Bucks score every morning? Apparently, so do hackers. MSNBC Sports' web page was recently the victim of a major hack attack, compromising more than 26,000 pages. It's set off alarm bells for legitimate web sites, and ... highlights a new trend being forged by the web's most elite hackers. The MSNBC attack was reported this past Tuesday by San Diego-based Websense Inc. The security company has been tracking the exploit for about a month, stumbling upon the MSNBC invasion while performing one of their many web scans. Other major sites that appear to be hit include TV.com, ... (view more)