The Mozilla Enterprise Working Group are considering this proposal at present: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal

This would provide a 42-week 'stable' release of Firefox, with incremental backported security fixes "just like the old days".

Whether this will come to fruition or not is unclear at this stage, but at least it's being discussed.

You _can_ switch off auto-updates for Google Chrome for Business: see http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=187207 although, as they say, they don't recommend it.

I note that using Chrome for Business and allowing auto-updates means that that one can have an auto-updating browser where the end-users are not administrators. This has never been possible with Firefox. It can be done with Internet Explorer too, of course ;-)

We have neither Fall or Summer here in .uk, thank you. :-)

I am hopeful that the government is only raising this to appease those who genuinely believe it's a good idea, while planning to dismiss it later "after consideration" as being unnecessary.

Apart from the fact that it's basically technically impossible to "block Twitter/FB" (or whatever) in any meaningful way - and everyone knows it - I don't think it would have made any difference to the rioting.

After all, there have been riots and unrest for centuries. However, the post-riot organised cleanup could not easily have happened without social media. And that was a good thing. Also those caught up in areas affected by the riots were able to find out what was going on by using social media. And that's a good thing too.

Federal law prohibits websites from collecting personal information from anyone under the age of 13.

'Federal' suggests you are talking about a U.S. law. Many users of Facebook are not based in the U.S. What implications does this have here, specifically to non-U.S. users of Facebook, if any?

Article reports: "There are reports that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks via a Flash (.swf) file embedded in a Microsoft Excel (.xls) file delivered as an email attachment"

*BOGGLE* If that sort of functionality is even possible, then it was just an accident waiting to happen.

However when there was a mass shooting at LAX in 2002, they didn't shut down the airport.

Ah, but shooting is fine. It's much more American for a start. Americans like guns and shooting. It's carrying a bomb that makes you a terrorist, not carrying a gun.

Some extensions I installed use the status bar to display, you guessed it, their status. Could anyone inform me how the hell would that work if the bar is gone???

Don't worry. Those extensions probably won't work with Firefox 4 anyway, so this won't be a problem ;-)

I think "able to brute-force thousands of passwords in an hour" qualifies as a weakness in SHA-1.

Not really. It just shows that 6-character passwords aren't very strong. The hash itself is not the weak point.

German U-boats (submarines) were given deliberately 'inflated' numbers, to make it seem that there were many more than there really were. The strategic/morale effect of your enemy believing that you have hundreds of submerged threats at sea was an important consideration to the Germans.

I guess they didn't see the need to do this with tanks.

For the first time since, well, quite a long time, we have no sizeable opposition in Parliament.

The size of the opposition (i.e. number of MPs) is fairly typical really. The problem is that the opposition consists of MPs who belong to the unpopular former-governing Labour party. People have become too used, over recent years, to disbelieving them ;-)

Seeing 'Hacker' in the same sentence as 'UK' and 'Government' made me think this story was about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Hacker