Technology in your hands.

Microsoft has released a second test version of Internet Explorer 8, delivering a feature-complete upgrade to the world’s most widely used web browser.

The world’s largest software maker said the latest version – beta 2 – of Internet Explorer, which has a market share of about 75 per cent, comes with new features to enhance privacy, ease-of-use, and security.

Microsoft first released a test – or beta 1 – version of IE 8 in March, but that was aimed at letting web developers take a first look at the new browser. This latest version is aimed at a broader consumer audience…

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With customized physics effects, developers can design trees that bend in the wind, water that ebbs and flows naturally, and include objects in the environment that dramatically impact the gaming experience. To deliver this level of interactivity, developers are rapidly taking advantage of NVIDIA® PhysX™ technology, interactive entertainment’s most pervasive physics engine, already used in more than 140 shipping titles for Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. With today’s release of the GeForce Power Pack, a compilation of games, demos, and mod packs for the PC platform that is available for free at www.nvidia.com/theforcewithin, NVIDIA is now bringing this new depth of gameplay to PC gamers everywhere…

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AMD on Tuesday announced dual-GPU versions of the HD Radeon 4850 and 4870, pushing graphics performance – and prices – into the upper high end of the market.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 is currently shipping for $399, while the 4870 X2 is available for a whopping $599, more than the price of some low-end PCs.

But according to Neal Robison, director of global ISV relations for AMD, both chips will capture the “super high end” of the market, where price is much less important than performance. AMD claims the HD 4870 X2 is roughly 80 percent of the performance of the single HD 4870, allowing for some overhead lost in duplicating the effort of a single chip.

For now, AMD claims the HD 4870 X2 is the fastest graphics card in the world, recording a score of 17743 in 3DMark06, the highest ever…

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About all those fancy security measures Microsoft put into Windows Vista… well, they’re now pretty much useless, according to security experts from IBM and VMware presenting a new attack methodology at this week’s Black Hat security conference.

The details of the latest attack are complicated to explain, but they essentially outline ways to use .NET, Java, and Microsoft’s ActiveX system to bypass Vista’s security via a web browser. Any browser can be used, but Internet Explorer makes the security bypass even easier, letting an attacker insert data into a running machine at any place he chooses. The researchers note that the attack doesn’t exploit any new vulnerability in Vista but rather takes advantage of the architecture of the OS and the way Windows tends to trust code fragments. In broad terms, if one component of Windows trusts a piece of code, for example, and passes it on to another component, then that second component will often automatically trust the code too, and so on. Browsers are increasingly being seen as the easiest “way in” for malware.

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A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Cuil Inc (pronounced “cool”) is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement…

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Just because a “friend” sends you something on Facebook or MySpace doesn’t mean you should trust it.

A new worm is spreading via Facebook and MySpace, turning victims’ computers into zombies on a botnet, Kaspersky Lab said on Friday.

Basically, infected machines are propagating the worm by sending messages via the social networks to friends in the network.

The messages look like they contain links to video clips. When clicked on they prompt the recipient to download an executable file that purports to be the latest version of Flash Player. Instead, it is the worm itself, infecting yet another victim.

When infected machines log onto the social networks the next time their computers automatically send the malicious messages out to new victims grabbed from the friend list, said Ryan Naraine, security evangelist at Kaspersky…

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At the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas next week, researchers will demonstrate software they’ve developed that could steal online credentials from users of popular Web sites such as Facebook, eBay and Google.

The attack relies on a new type of hybrid file that looks like different things to different programs. By placing these files on Web sites that allow users to upload their own images, the researchers can circumvent security systems and take over the accounts of Web surfers who use these sites.

“We’ve been able to come up with a Java applet that for all intents and purposes is an image,” said John Heasman, vice president of research at Next Generation Security Software Ltd…

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Only hours after it fixed nine vulnerabilities in several of its programs, Microsoft Corp. late Tuesday confirmed that attackers are exploiting an unpatched bug in Word.

In a security advisory it issued shortly before 10 p.m. EST, the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) said attackers were exploiting a flaw in Word 2002. However, MSRC spokesman Bill Sisk downplayed the threat. “At this time, Microsoft is aware only of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to use this vulnerability,” Sisk said in an e-mail.

As is its practice, Microsoft provided few details of the vulnerability other than to say that it could be triggered by rigged Word documents if the user opened them. The company did not say how the in-the-wild attacks were delivering the malicious .doc files, but if the past is any indicator, criminals are sending malformed files as e-mail attachments…

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