Creative and cheeky ads by Audi, BMW over here and here.

via paultan.org

Yes, it’s another beta and invite-only product which was added to Google’s ever growing suite of web applications when they acquired the company behind it sometime back. From Wikipedia:

Writely is a web-based word processor currently in beta, and soon to be integrated into Google’s suite of web applications (following a 2006 acquisition). It can be used as a collaborative text editing suite, and features access controls. Writely’s user interface is a WYSIWYG word processor that appears within a web browser. Menus, keyboard shortcuts, and dialogue boxes show up in a way similar to what you would expect on a GUI-driven word processor, such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org.

You can read a review on it here by HMMaster. And if you like it and want to try it out, post a comment here and I will send you one. ;) Once you’ve got an account, you can invite others by following the steps here.

Intel has recently released gargantuan patches for Centrino laptops which have network chipsets as listed here. This issue doesn’t seem to have attracted as much media attention as compared to Dell’s exploding laptops [1], [2], [3].

F-Secure notes that the vulnerabilities involving the drivers are “pretty awful” and that the patch can be troublesome to download and install because of its size, 129MB.

However awful the vulnerabilities are, I don’t forsee the majority of end users to download a patch of that size. Besides that, users generally only update their device drivers when it stops working or is required for something else they want to use to function properly as compared to day-to-day application software which we are all more accustomed to updating it. Furthermore, this patch is to a generic driver which may or may not be compatible with the drivers released by individual manufacturers.

I don’t own a Centrino based notebook as mine’s a generation before it (with an addon WiFi card), but if you ask me whether you should download and install this..

Security experts note there are no known exploits publicly circulating that have been crafted to take advantage of these flaws.

..let’s all wait till one appears and it might turn into a 1.29MB patch instead. :D

_via CNET, Unstrung

_

Looks like the days of counting Monopoly bank notes are over..

It was released earlier today and is noted to have fixed a lot of security vulnerabilities, so I those who are running WordPress blogs themselves should update soon.

Have just updated blogs hosted on spherebox. :)

Edit: You can get only the changed files in a zip which would save the time needed in uploading here.