Mozilla has released Firefox 14, a modest update with some small new features and support for encrypted searching, which will keep your Google queries safe from anyone snooping around your network.

The most visible change in this release — at least for those who keep an eye on the URL bar — is the new secure search feature. The change means that Firefox’s built-in search bar now sends searches to Google’s SSL-encrypted HTTPS address by default.

Hours after the Syrian regime suffered its greatest setback in the yearlong civil war, the U.S. and U.K. defense chiefs feared that dictator Bashar Assad might use his stockpile of chemical weapons — the results of what may be the largest active chemical program on the planet.

There is little appetite in the U.S. military for taking on that challenge. Globalsecurity.org estimates Syria possesses “hundreds of liters” of Sarin, mustard gas and VX.

They’re manufactured all over Syria, so destroying the factories will require a major bombing campaign — and Assad has sophisticated air defenses, maybe including Russia’s powerful S-300 missiles.

When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD in 2007, he discovered his music being used in the anti-piracy ad without his permission. In fact, it had been used on dozens of DVDs both in the Netherlands and overseas.

In June, Stemra paid Rietveld another 31,000 euros but this week the Amsterdam District Court ruled that Stemra had indeed been negligent in their handling of the case. They were fined 20,000 euros, ordered to pay Rietveldt’s legal costs, and told to continue efforts to pay all money due to the composer while keeping him fully informed of developments.

A major UK internet service provider (ISP) said peer-to-peer (P2P) activity on its network returned to just below normal only a week after the measures were enforced earlier this year.

"We saw a fall at the time of the block," the source said, "made more dramatic by the increasing amount of such traffic in the weeks leading up to it.

"But volumes are already pretty much back to where they were before."

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?"

Streaming music now accounts for 89% of digital music sales in Sweden, according to figures released by GLF, the local arm of music industry body the IFPI.

Mark Dennis, CEO of Sony Music Sweden, makes the same point: “One of the most gratifying consequences of this is that it gives us the opportunity to sign more artists, and record more new Swedish music than ever. In fact, for most of our artists, streaming music now represents the majority of the revenue.”

“Our studios are constantly partnering and innovating new ways for audiences to watch the movies and TV shows they love: Hulu, HBO Go, Vudu, Crackle, UltraViolet, Epix, MUBI – and that just barely scratches the surface,” said Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman at the MPAA. “There are more legitimate avenues available today to watch movies and TV shows online than ever before, and our studios are continuing to innovate every day to bring audiences even more options.”

“At the end of the day, stealing shows and movies out of convenience still harms the people who work hard to make them,” Bedingfield added.

Wales told reporters Thursday that he had trouble accessing the latest season of the HBO series “Game of Thrones” at home in London even though he was willing to pay for it.

The review follows numerous investigations that have cast doubt on the validity of most forensic methods. Firearms and bullet analysis, for instance, can wrongly place innocent people at a crime scene.

But even DNA evidence is fallible: different labs can return very different results for the same sample.

Growing concern over copyright infringement has resulted in an extremely strict and in some cases privacy-violating set of requirements being laid down by the payment processing company.

Just how far PayPal is prepared to go is explained by Putlocker. The UK-based company had its PayPal account frozen three months ago after it refused to allow the payment provider to snoop on files uploaded by its users.

“They basically wanted access to the backend to monitor all the files being uploaded, and listing all files of users if they wanted, regardless of the privacy setting that the user might have selected,” Putlocker told TorrentFreak.

The extradition hearing for MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom has been postponed to next year over questions about the legality of evidence seized with search warrants later declared invalid.

The legality of the evidence seized was called into question last month when a New Zealand judge ruled that the warrants did not adequately describe the offenses alleged and as such were invalid. She also ruled that it was unlawful for the data confiscated in the raid to have been copied by the FBI and sent offshore.