An update earlier this week to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1 antivirus software for businesses caused some Windows XP-based computers to crash repeatedly with a "blue screen of death," the company revealed on its Web site.

"This whole episode is a joke, had the issue been a conflict with a random device driver then I could maybe slightly more sympathetic," the customer said. "But for it to conflict with its own Symantec related drivers and cause this issue is a total farce. Who tested it before release? Was it even tested?"

DiCarlo has a long and well-argued post on how and why Firefox’s attempts to ape Google Chrome have not only made the browser less usable, but done the very thing Mozilla was trying to prevent — driving people to switch to Chrome.

"Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn’t want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent."

DiCarlo also calls out Mozilla’s user interface designers, arguing that using the rapid release cycle to constantly change Firefox’s interface compounds the problem and user frustration.

Part of the problem is that standalone desktop email clients such as Thunderbird have largely fallen out of favor. Thunderbird may claim more than 20 million users, but Gmail alone boasts 425 million active users worldwide, and Gmail isn't the only web-based email service. In light of those numbers, developing Thunderbird probably hasn't been much fun for a while – and now, Mozilla has seemingly decided it isn't worth spending resources on.

Reg reader Chris discovered the feature after opening a new tab only to be "greeted by my earlier online banking and webmail sessions complete with account numbers, balances, subject lines etc.

Firefox 13 was released on 5 June, adding new features including updated new tab and home tab pages. The updated new tab page feature is broadly akin to the Speed Dial feature already present in other browsers and displays cached copies of a user's most visited websites.

Kaspersky says that a module from Stuxnet, known as "Resource 207" is actually a Flame plugin that allows the malicious code to spread via USB devices. "The code of the USB drive infection mechanism is identical in Flame and Stuxnet," says Kaspersky.

A coding error (the US reportedly blames Israel and vice versa) allowed Stuxnet to escape into the wild and reveal its existence - which a secret cyberweapon should of course not do.

Simurgh is an Iranian stand-alone proxy software for Microsoft Windows. It has been used mainly by Iranian users to bypass censorship since 2009. The downloadable file is less than 1 MB and can be downloaded within a reasonable amount of time even with a slow internet connection, which makes it convenient for many users in Iran.

This Trojan has been specifically crafted to target people attempting to evade government censorship. Given the intended purpose of this software, users must be very careful if they have been infected by this Trojan. Additionally, they should be cautious about installing software, especially circumvention software, from untrusted sources. Where possible, software should be downloaded from trusted official websites over HTTPS. If checksums or cryptographic signatures are provided by the software vendor, these should be checked prior to installation.

The OEMs are paid by a variety of software makers to install crapware onto systems. The OEMs don’t disclose how much money they receive from this, but sources tell me that it works out at a few dollars per PC.

Consumers are expected to take their new PC to a Microsoft Store — though there are currently only 16 of them in the United States — and pay Microsoft $99 to remove the crapware that the OEMs were paid to install.

It seems there is a critical security hole that will allow attackers to execute arbitrary code in the context of the user running the affected application. Adobe's fix? You need to pay to upgrade to Photoshop CS6. For users who cannot upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe recommends users follow security best practices and exercise caution when opening files from unknown or untrusted sources.

While I can understand why developers feel the need to conform to Apple's sometimes ridiculous (and often arbitrary) rules for iOS development, sometimes it really seems like Apple goes to highly questionable (and potentially legally questionable) lengths to reject certain apps.

Reason for rejection is the fact that if the user does not have Dropbox application installed then the linking authorization is done through Safari (as per latest SDK).

It seems developers are eventually going to recognize that, even with Apple's giant market, it might just be easier to focus on more reasonable and open platforms.

Moving forward, Firefox (on Windows) will automatically (and silently) update, and — praise be — the Find function is now a lot better at centering the page on any matches.

The ability to silently update very closely mirrors Chrome, and really it’s a surprise that Mozilla has taken so long to introduce this key feature, after switching to the six-week rapid release cycle almost a year ago, with Firefox 5.

When you install Firefox 12, Windows UAC will ask you to approve Firefox Software Updater — and after that, you should never see an update dialog ever again.

In other news, the latest Nightly version of Firefox 14 has removed favicons from the address bar; the icon will now simply display a globe, or a padlock if the site is SSL-secured — just like Chrome.