safari 4
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Safari exploit gives your contact info to malicious websites
In a report on security in the first half of 2010 Apple has claimed the top spot in the number of security vulnerabilities in their OS and software. According to a report from the security company Secunia, Apple is followed by Oracle and then Microsoft in the number of security flaws reported. It's worth noting that this report does not weigh the severity of these vulnerabilities, only the overall number of them. Safari itself ranks slightly better in the number of vulnerabilities found in 3rd party applications, taking the number two spot right after Mozilla's Firefox. It may not come as any surprise then that a major Safari exploit was publicly reported yesterday by Jeremiah Grossman, the founder of WhiteHat Security. The exploit lets malicious sites retrieve your personal data from your Address Book in both Safari 4 & 5 if you have enabled the option to allow Safari to AutoFill web forms with your Address Book info. The exploit does not require the user to even see the forms, it can all happen automatically without you having any idea that you just gave the site your name, company, city, state, country, email and other form data you may have added to your Address Book entry. It's important to note that this vulnerability does apply to Safari for Windows as well, but it will only grab the personal information you've explicitly typed into Safari directly. Jeremiah also mentions that he did report this vulnerability privately to Apple on June 17th. [Hat tip Techmeme & Ars Technica]
3D animations coming to Safari
Charles Ying over at satine.org has put together an impressive demo using Safari's forthcoming CSS 3D transform features. There is a YouTube video of the demo (you can watch it in the 2nd half of this post), as a nightly build of WebKit or the Snow Leopard version of Safari is required to render it.The demo, titled Snow Stack, displays a wall of photos in three dimensions and allows you to navigate across the wall using your arrow keys. The wall of photos seems to go on into infinity while it dynamically loads the photos from Flickr as you travel across it. The animation style is similar to the browser plug-in Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens), but it was written entirely in HTML and CSS, with some JavaScript to pull in the photos from Flickr. The animations are so amazingly smooth animations it's hard to believe that only CSS was used to create them. Surprisingly, Safari on iPhone has supported CSS 3D transforms for sometime now, but the animations have yet to make an official debut on the desktop.If you are running Leopard and want to see the demo running on your Mac you will need to download the nightly build of WebKit to render it in all of its 3D splendor. If you have a pre-release copy of Snow Leopard installed you can simply use the built-in version of Safari to view it. Until Apple releases a public build of Safari with these features those are your only options. A post today on the Surfin' Safari blog over at WebKit features another demo of CSS 3D transforms called Poster Circle. I've posted a video to YouTube of this demo in action.Some of the options developers will be able to use with the new CSS 3D tranforms include: scaling, perspective, rotation, and standard 3D positioning. Apple has submitted a specification detailing these features to the W3C. Hopefully as time progresses other browser vendors will implement the spec as well. In the meantime Safari users will have these beauties all to themselves.
Software Updates: And the hits keep coming, Bluetooth Firmware Update
I guess the iPhone 3.0 update and Safari 4.0.1 weren't enough for Apple. Along with the just released update to Safari, Apple has just tossed in one more Software Update:Bluetooth Firmware Update"This update provides bug fixes and better compatibility with the Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse and Apple Wireless Keyboard. It installs on all Macintosh systems with Bluetooth based on the Broadcom chipset."This update is only applicable to certain hardware configurations (as noted above), so if you don't see it, you don't need it. After running, the Bluetooth Firmware update will provide you with an installation screen and require a reboot when it's done.I wonder if Apple will throw us any other new surprises today.
1Password 3 beta nears, TUAW readers get a chance to participate
Update: The Agile Web Solutions guys have been nice enough to extend beta invites to another 100 TUAW readers. Those that don't make it into the first round, don't worry, the guys said they will be putting you on a waiting list and accessing that over the next couple of months, so with any luck, everyone can get in on the fun! Check out http://switchersblog.com for details in the coming weeks. Once again, send an e-mail with the subject "I want my 1P3 beta!" to 1P3Promo [at] agile [dot] ws! I am a huge fan of Agile Web Solutions's 1Password. It's always one of the first applications I install on a freshly formatted Mac, and I use it countless times a day to manage my logins to various web sites, forums, shopping sites and more. I used to be really, really bad about using the same few passwords for every login, but the strong password generator coupled with support across browsers (and on the iPhone and iPod touch) makes it easy for me to have distinct and secure logins all over the web. Last night, the Agile Web Solutions team released the 2.9.19 beta (with support for Safari 4), and if you subscribe to the 1Password newsletter, you know that 1Password 3.0 is gearing up for testing before being released later this year. We've got some juicy details about what to expect in 1Password 3.0 and a chance for current 1Password fans to get in on the private 1Password 3.0 beta! Read on... %Gallery-65551%
Safari 4 hidden preferences
There's quite a debate going on in the Mac web over Safari 4's new user interface. Personally, I think the new tab implementation is hideous, so I was glad to see that Caius Durling has discovered a bevy of hidden preferences for Safari 4.With a few quick Terminal commands you can restore sanity to your tabs, bring back the old URL completion behavior, remove CoverFlow from the Bookmarks view, and few other neat tricks. On the other hand, if crazy tabs float your boat, they're easy enough to restore in the same way.[via Download Squad]
Apple seeds developers with Safari 4.0
Apple has seeded developers with a copy of the new Safari 4, which adds some new features and is based on a newer version of WebKit. Apple is also rumored to be using the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine which allows for faster Javascript processing.New to this version of Safari is the ability to save webpages as "Web Applications." This new feature allows Safari to save pages similar to the way Fluid does. You also have the ability to choose how new windows will open (i.e. with your favorite bookmark, blank page, etc.). One of the biggest "features" is the fact that Safari 4 (along with the new version of WebKit) scored a perfect 100/100 on the Acid3 test. If you are inclined to see what the new version looks like, World of Apple has placed some screen grabs on their blog for your viewing pleasure.
