Google, in its latest move to organize all information on the globe and make it more palatable to the average Joe, has recently released Google Finance. The homepage in its current form displays a stock ticker as well as financial news. The site is set to release more features in the near future, including areas for financial discussions.

This adds to the amount of information that Google is keeping indexed on its servers, which already concerns many people.

Although not an official release, Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 is available for download from Mozilla’s FTP Site. This alpha version contains a few new features such as searching your browsing history as well as being able to close tabs in a different way. The Beta version is scheduled for release in the 2nd Quarter of this year, with a final release sometime this summer.

The Department of Homeland Defense contracted Standford University, Coverity, and Symantec to do a bug analysis against an open source development environment referred to as LAMP (Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL, and either PHP, Perl, or Python). The project found that this combination of open-source GPL software had the least amount of bugs and security risks per 1000 lines of code than 32 other open-source projects that were also analysed. Results of the study are hosted on Coverity’s website, and registration is required to view it. No Windows32 or Microsoft products were tested to compare against, only other open-source projects.

A 14 year old known only as ‘Anthony’ has found a rather large hole in Google’s popular Gmail internet mail client. The vulnerability involves Gmail improperly compiling Java Script code that is designed to appear in the preview pane. This comes on the heels of a vulnerability discovered in Internet Explorer that allowed access to Google Desktop, Google’s popular searching utility.

’"’Brokeback Mountain":http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/,’ a film about the lives of two homosexual cowboys, has spawned much controversy since its initial release on the 3rd of September 2005. Much of the talk has ranged from the motives of the creators of the film to its inappropriateness. The expected slew of jokes and jibes has now hit the internet including parodies of past films such as ‘Brokeback to the Future’ and ‘Top Gun: Brokeback Squadron.’

Yesterday, German BMW website bmw.de was effectively banned from the Google search engine for using a blackhat search engine optimization technique called ‘doorway pages.’ This method involves hiding additional content behind an actively scripted page that mentions key words by which the site would like to be found. In this instance the word ‘Gebrauchtwagen,’ which means ‘used car’ in German, was found 42 times in the hidden page, while only two of those were visible with javascript active. As a result, bmw.de’s pagerank was reduced to 0, which causes a search even for the domain name to return no results from Google.

Not so long ago, browsing to Wikipedia’s entry on Senator Tom Coburn would have revealed that he was a ‘douche-bag’ or had ‘sever brain damage’. Browsing to the entry on President George Bush would show that it had been temporarily locked as a result of repeated vandalism. While not a surprising move since the trolls of the internet will find things to destroy and Wikipedia is a favorite target, an investigation by Wikipedia shows that many recent edits have originated from IP Addresses in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Since then, ‘Congressional edits’ have been blocked, as Wikipedia attempts to maintain legitimacy in the face of increasing criticism.

A hacker by the name of cocoruder has released details on two additional flaws in Microsoft’s Windows Picture and Fax Viewer’s handling of WMF image files. These two vulnerabilities are not as voracious as the previous, only allowing the attacker to crash the explorer.exe process instead of completely taking over the machine. The short-term fix until Microsoft releases an official patch is to unregister Shimgvw.dll, which is the main DLL for the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.

Father Enrico Righi, an Italian priest, has been told by the Italian courts that he must prove the historical existence of Jesus after being charged with ‘abuse of popular credulity.’ The dispute arose three years ago when Father Righi made some negative remarks in a newsletter at his church about Luigi Cascioli, a ‘militant atheist.’

Is there a historical basis for the existence of Jesus other then those found in the New Testament of the Bible? Can his existence be cross-referenced through alternate sources?

Ilfak Guilfanov, a Russian programmer living in Belgium, has released a third party patch for the recently discovered ‘WMF Flaw’ affecting Microsoft Operating Systems. The flaw, first released in a 28 December Microsoft Security Advisory, involves an error in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (shimgvw.dll) file that could allow malicious code to be run after visiting a specifically configured web page.