Download our latest podcast here.
No IE9 for Windows XP users
The next version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, IE9, will not run on Windows XP, either now or when the software eventually ships. The move makes Microsoft the first major browser developer to announce it will drop support for Windows XP, the world’s most popular operating system, in a future browser release. Windows XP won’t run either Microsoft’s Platform Preview version of IE9 or the final version because it doesn’t include support for some graphics hardware acceleration APIs used by IE9.
Google coming to the TV
Google is working with Intel, Sony and other partners to develop Google TV, a service aimed at putting the Internet search giant’s Web offerings in people’s living rooms, according to The New York Times. Software for the service, including Google’s Android operating system, will run on set-top boxes containing Intel Atom chips, the report said, adding that Google will develop a new version of its Chrome browser for the TV project. Android was designed to work with Arm processing cores, the most popular cores in smartphones, but some companies have ported Android to other chip processing architectures, including MIPS and the x86 processing architecture used in the Atom.
Estonia expects more cyber attacks
Three years after a widespread cyberattack temporarily shut down the Estonian digital economy, Estonia’s defense minister said such incidents will only continue to grow. The distributed denial-of-service attacks and Web defacements that disrupted the tiny Baltic country hurt Estonia’s economy. At its worst point, traffic in and out of Estonia was 400 times peak levels, overwhelming banking, online news and government communications in one of the world’s most wired countries.
Twitter suffers 30 minutes downtime
Users of popular micro-blogging service Twitter were unable to access the site for almost 30 minutes early Thursday, pushing up Twitter’s downtime this month to 41 minutes, according to Pingdom, a service that measures the reliability of Web sites. That’s almost double the downtime recorded during March last year but still some way off August 2009, Twitter’s worst month in the last year, when the site was down for a total of more than 6 hours.