* Astronomy

The Web browser is the most basic common unit of the Internet experience for much of the global community. It's also one of the most attacked. And it's not just the bad guys breaking the browsers anymore, but also the browser vendors.
On Wednesday, Mozilla will take a massive step forward and explain to an audience at the annual Black Hat show in Las Vegas how to break the browser using tools that Mozilla has developed and is expected to release.
In a session called Building and Breaking the Browser, Mozilla's Chief Security Officer Window Snyder is expected to discuss a number of security tools, including protocol fuzzers for HTTP and FTP and a fuzzer for JavaScript. While the intention is to make Mozilla's Firefox technology even more secure, the tools could potentially also put millions at risk.
Fuzzing is also known as fault-injection testing and is a widely used technique in security circles to try and break down applications and expose flaws. The Black Hat session abstract indicates that at least one of those tools will be released at the Black Hat event.

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According to a message posted over the weekend on the Full-Disclosure mailing list, the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.5, contains a password management vulnerability that can allow malicious Web sites to steal user passwords. If you have JavaScript enabled and allow Firefox to remember your passwords, you are at risk from this flaw.

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Firefox 2.0.0.5 has been released

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Flock has released a preview of a major update to its social web browser. As I noted in a recent post where I did a Q&A with Flocks CEO, Shawn Hardwin, when Flock first launched, timed perfectly to coincide with a wave of web 2.0 hype, it seemed like a fresh and bold attempt to make a web browser that truly embraced the social web. The browser wasnt a passive application designed for reading web pages, but instead could write to the web with support for emerging social web services through built-in a blog editor, drag n drop access and publishing of photos on Flickr (and later Photobucket), and integration with social bookmarking service, Delicious. But then things went astray.
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