A worm is circulating that posts spam and malware to some blogs using old versions of WordPress. The organization recommends all users upgrade immediately.

WordPress has responded to news today that outdated versions of the popular blogging software are vulnerable to a new attack. The attack affects only self-hosted versions of WordPress, not those at WordPress.com. The organization’s advice is simple: if you aren’t using the most recent version (2.8.4), upgrade now to avoid problems.

This isn’t really a problem with WordPress: those who have been upgrading regularly, as advised, are not affected. And WordPress has made it increasingly easy to upgrade, now just requiring a single click.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg writes of the vulnerability:

2.8.4, the current version of WordPress, is immune to this worm. (So was the release before this one.) If you’ve been thinking about upgrading but haven’t gotten around to it yet, now would be a really good time. If you’ve already upgraded your blogs, maybe check out the blogs of your friends or that you read and see if they need any help. A stitch in time saves nine.

…WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with in the future to harm your blog, but I do know for certain that as long as WordPress is around we’ll do everything in our power to make sure the software is safe. We’ve already made upgrading core and plugins a one-click procedure. If we find something broken, we’ll release a fix. Please upgrade, it’s the only way we can help each other.

Image credit: Andrew Abogado, Flickr

Tags: attack, security, Wordpress

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has surprised us by unveiling details, specs, pictures and demo video of its forthcoming netbook device nearly two weeks ahead of its Nokia World conflab in Stuttgart. The 10-inch “Booklet 3G” is an attractive, well-specced machine that packs an integrated, hot-swappable SIM card slot.

Nokia has been describing its better consumer smartphones as multimedia computers for some time now. The Booklet, of course, is the closest it has ever got, but still carries over features from Nokia’s mobile heritage - a built-in assisted GPS receiver designed to work with an Ovi Maps gadget.

Indeed, services is a big play here. The Booklet carries an Ovi Suite app for accessing all the services including contacts, picture sharing, calendar, email and Nokia Music Store, also offering sync to a handset. It looks like something of a potential rival to any Android-based netbooks. Also, Nokia is wedded to Android’s mobile rival Symbian, which has no such desktop OS variant on the horizon; hence the strategic alliance with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). This is the most innovation Nokia has gone for a while - but there’s less to get wrong inside an OEM PC running someone else’s OS.

The release materials claim an ambitious 12 hours battery life. Devices EVP Kai Oistamo in the release: “We will create something quite compelling. In doing so we will make the personal computer more social, more helpful and more personal.”

There are no details on carriers for this device; more expected during Nokia World on September 2. Networks have been using the subsidised handset model to tempt contract customers with netbooks for several months. With its existing mobile carrier relationships, Nokia may go in to the subsidised netbook game with an advantage.

Tata Teleservices today said it would charge a flat rate of Re1 for local calls and Rs3 for national calls, irrespective of the time used, ushering in a new pricing regime and instantly becoming the telco of choice for couples in long-distance relationships. The plan is being offered on the telco’s CDMA network Tata Indicom and is currntly available only for pre-paid plans. 

The new plan marks a dramatic shift in airtime pricing, in effect offering unlimited talk time.

The move comes shortly after the dual-technology telco launched the pay-per-second concept on its GSM service Tata Docomo. GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) are competing telecom standards.

In India’s price sensitive telecom market, we think such a plan, with a great value proposition, will find many takers. Rival dual-technology telco Reliance Communications, which, in early years gained market share competing on price, is almost certain to come up with an equivalent plan.

It has been almost a year since Google announced that it was joining in the battle for browser supremacy with its Webkit-based Chrome. In that time, however, Chrome has attracted nothing like the following or public recognition of some of the company’s other products. In an attempt to get the ball rolling, Google has cut its first deal with a computer OEM, which will see Chrome appearing on Sony’s line of Vaio PCs.

According to reports in the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, machines bearing Chrome are already shipping, and may reach consumers shortly. Sony has only a small share of the PC market, so the deal won’t make a huge difference on its own, but there can be little doubt that Google hopes it will be the first of many. In that sense, the agreement may be an important validation that will help ease the way for deals with other, more significant OEMs.

Filed under: Google, Browsers

Remember how we all kind of laughed when Google removed the “beta” label from the Google Chrome web browser after just a few months of development? It seemed funny, given that Gmail stayed in beta for over 4 years before Google was ready for the popular email service to emerge from beta.

But it turns out there was a method to the madness. Google was working behind the scenes to convince hardware manufacturers to bundle the web browser with their computers. And it’s kind of tricky to do that when your software is in beta, implying that it’s unfinished or unstable.

Now about 9 months after Chrome emerged from beta, the Financial Times is reporting that Sony and Google have reached a deal to bundle the browser with Sony computers. Sony Vaio computers are already shipping with Chrome loaded as the default web browser, and Google says it’s working on similar deals with other PC vendors.

The deal could help boost the number of people using the web browser. After all, if we’ve learned one thing by the success of Internet Explorer, it’s that most people will probably just use whatever web browser comes with their computer. Google also produced a video earlier this year (shown above) that shows that a heck of a lot of people don’t really understand what exactly a browser is, which kind of suggests that there are a lot of people who aren’t going to be changing the default browser on their computers anytime soon.

Sony to ship computers with Google Chrome as default browser originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As pretty much everyone expected, the U.S. Court of Appeals has granted Microsoft’s request to keep selling Word while it appeals i4i’s XML patent win. In mid-August, a federal jury had ordered Redmond to stop selling Word within 60 days. The alternative: cough up more than $290 million in damages.

Yeah, I don’t see that happening. More likely is that they’ll figure out a way to remove the offending code before explaining their side of the story on September 23. And that’s the word. [Seattle Pi Microsoft Blog]

Not sure how trustworthy those Wikipedia articles really are? A few months from now, the addition of WikiTrust as a standard feature for the English Wikipedia will give users one more tool to evaluate the trustworthiness of Wikipedia articles and editors. WikiTrust, an extension for MediaWiki, the software as the core of Wikipedia, assigns a color code to each word in an article, depending on the author’s reputation and how often the text has been edited recently.

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We first wrote about WikiTrust in June 2008, though the idea of color-coding recent edits in Wikipedia has been around for much longer. Now, however, the Wikipedia team has decided to make WikiTrust a default feature for the English Wikipedia.

In order to compute an author’s standing within the Wikipedia community, WikiTrust analyzes how long an author’s contributions stayed live on the site before they were changed or reverted. The longer an editor’s contributions last on the site, the higher that editor’s reputation will be. In addition, WikiTrust also looks at the text itself and examines the reputation of all the author’s who edited this portion of the text.

The basic assumption here is that the more people look at an article and decide that it doesn’t need editing, the more trustworthy the text must be. For a more detailed look at how exactly WikiTrust computes an author’s and text’s reputation, have a look at this presentation (PDF) the WikiTrust team gave at the recent Wikimania 2009 conference.

As Wikipedia doesn’t want to deter new editors, the implementation of WikiTrust on the English Wikipedia will not display a user’s reputation but focus on the trustworthiness of the text instead. By default, WikiTrust will also be turned off and users will have to turn it on themselves if they want to see the color-coded version of an article.

If you want to try out WikiTrust today, before the system goes live on the English Wikipedia, you can try out this Firefox add-on. For a slightly different view of who edited an article and how often it was edited, also have a look at the WikiDashboard GreaseMonkey script.

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Google just received a design patent for Google Search’s homepage. It took the US Patent Office over five years to approve this patent (D599,372) for the design of a “graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal,” but Google’s request was finally approved yesterday. The company already owned a patent for its search results pages. In addition, Google also received a patent for a server-based spellchecker yesterday, as well as another one for “collaborative web page authoring.”

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We don’t assume that Google will soon start a patent fight with Yahoo over this, but Yahoo Search’s current homepage obviously looks quite similar to Google’s, though without the two prominent button’s underneath the search box. We are obviously not lawyers, but as far as we know, design patents are basically just a form of making sure the design of a functional item is protected and not so much an acknowledgment that this is a completely new invention. Design patents have to be for a new designs though, and we just have to wonder if somebody else didn’t offer a similarly minimalist search interface before Google.

Tip of the hat to Ryan Tate at Gawker for first noticing this patent.

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Sure, the Pirate Bay was shut down by its ISP two days ago but the story is far from over. After several false-starts, the Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X has approved its CEO’s plans to purchase The Pirate Bay’s domain. The company intends to relaunch the service as a legal file sharing site.

Now, just because the board has approved the purchase doesn’t mean that it will happen overnight. There continue to be questions about the company’s ability to raise money to complete the deal, and the Swedish government is investigating the company.

So does this change anything? Theoretically, maybe, but in reality, the Pirate Bay as it was once known is still gone, if it does come back it won’t be the same service, and users have already migrated out to other BitTorrent sites for their file sharing needs.

Tags: bittorrent, legal, p2p, the pirate bay