Free Republic

For Google Chrome and its two-billion-plus desktop users, May will go down as a month to forget: four zero-days and emergency update warnings inside ten days, launched a tidal wave of wall-to-wall headlines that were hard to miss. The US government has warned federal employees to install May’s emergency updates or to cease using Chrome. And they have issued a June 3 deadline for the first of those updates to be applied. It’s now June 1, and so this is a timely reminder that you should ensure you have updated Chrome inside the next 72 hours. Others organizations should do...

Google and Microsoft are butting heads over the disclosure of vulnerabilities. On Monday, Google revealed a critical flaw in Windows after it gave Microsoft a ten-day window to warn the public about it.Google posted about the zero-day vulnerability on its security blog, saying Microsoft had yet to publish a fix or issue an advisory about the software flaw."This vulnerability is particularly serious because we know it is being actively exploited," Google said. It lets hackers exploit a bug in the Windows kernel, via a win32k.sys system call, to bypass the security sandbox.The search giant originally told Microsoft about the problem...

Google's Chrome OS does not run local applications or store local data. Everything is handled inside the browser. But when the much-hyped operating system debuts on netbooks at the end of next year, you can bet it will execute native code on behalf of online Google applications such as Gmail or Docs and Spreadsheets. In other words, Google apps will tap directly into the netbook's processor in an effort to close the performance gap that separates them from the local software offered by its bête noire, Steve Ballmer's Microsoft. And this being Google, they won't use Java, Flash, or Silverlight....

Google engineers have been beavering away at a 64-bit version of the company’s Chrome browser for the Linux platform. According to Chrome developer Dean McNamee, Mountain View’s V8 team has been tinkering with a Chromium Linux 64-bit for several weeks now. V8, in case you were wondering, is the web kingpin’s JavaScript engine. McNamee said in a mailing list post yesterday that Google had done “some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port.” Google has shared instructions with programmers to build a 64-bit version via Chromium, its open source browser project. Some might be surprised to see Google...