Latest Software News

Way back in January 2007, after years of hype and anticipation, Microsoft unveiled Windows Vista to a decidedly lukewarm reception by the PC community, IT pros, and tech journalists alike. Instead of a revolutionary next-generation OS that was chock-full of new features, the Windows community got an underwhelming rehash with very little going for it. Oh, and Vista was plagued with performance and incompatibility problems to boot.

Since then, the PC community has taken the idea that Vista is underwhelming and turned it into a mantra. We’ve all heard about Vista’s poor network transfer speeds, low frame rates in games, and driver issues—shoot, we’ve experienced the problems ourselves.

Numerous patches were released yesterday by Apple which include security fixes for iTunes 8, QuickTime 7.5.5, iPod Touch 2.1, and Bonjour for Windows 1.05.

The iTunes fixes were designed only for Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X Server v10.4.11, and Windows Vista and XP. The latest OS, Leopard, is not affected.

The patch for the QuickTime software were designed for Tiger (versions v10.4.9 - v10.4.11) and Leopard systems as well as Vista, XP SP2, XP SP3. Nine vulnerabilities are fixed when users apply this patch.

The vulnerabilities of iPod Touch includes CoreGraphics, Networking, and WebKit components. All of these were fixed by the latest patch.

Several security vulnerabilities were reported in Google’s Chrome web browser after its beta version was launched earlier this month with much ado. Google has quickly responded with a security update that fixes four vulnerabilities. The update addresses two buffer overflow vulnerabilities, both rated critical by Google, and two other minor bugs. However, the carpet-bombing threat, first brought to light by security researcher Aviv Raff, still looms.

iTunes 8 has been released for download. With the announcement of the new iPods, Apple released a latest version of iTunes along with a new iPod Touch firmware 2.1. On a note if you purchased the iPod touch firmware 2.0, you can update to version 2.1 for free which offers several new features including the new Genius play list feature. You can download iPod touch firmware 2.0 Here for $9.95 US.