12-year-old finds serious Firefox flaw

The security researcher who found and reported this critical buffer overflow and memory corruption vulnerability in Mozilla’s Firefox browser is none other than Alex Miller, a 12-year-old boy who earned a $3,000 bounty for his discovery, according to a ZDNet blog. By Alex’s estimation he spent about 90 minutes each day for about 10 days until he spotted it–a flaw in the memory of the running program. The vulnerability, which can be exploited to crash a victim’s browser and potentially run arbitrary code on their computer, was patched this week in Firefox 3.6.11 and Firefox 3.5.14. It also affects Mozilla’s Thunderbird 3.1.5, Thunderbird 3.0.9 and SeaMonkey 2.0.9.

Facebook and privacy: Hara Kiri?

INTERNET
"I hate Facebook! There, I said it!" exploded Prospero. When he was rescued from doing something silly, we found out that he had just read a ZDNet blog by Jason Perlow, who, although more technical than we monkeys can usefully put into practice, writes about the increasing issues regarding Facebook, the 'social network' that is currently under attack from them wot know. We know that the only reason Prospero has a FB account is to find out what his eldest daughter is doing in the USA (it looks like party, party, party, he says). We here do not ask you to follow us on any of these things, except Google Friend Connect - much tamer - which you may like to do at the bottom of the sidebar.