Friday, July 28, 2006

Mozilla and Valve have been busy.

Unlike me.
by AC - permalink


Yesterday Firefox was updated to version 1.5.0.5. It's another incremental security/stability update, fixing several flaws rated critical. As always,
If you already have Firefox 1.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu within at any time.
And this morning, the corresponding update to Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 was released. The auto-upgrade patch for both apps is around 500K. All of my extensions carried over without any problems.

And speaking of Firefox extensions, if you happen to have one called "Numbered Links 0.9," you might want to look into better anti-virus software because it might be a trojan horse. This isn't an extension sneaking a virus into your system via Firefox. It's actually installed into the browser by Downloader-AXM as a delivery vehicle for a virus known as FormSpy or, to the cool kids, Troj/FireSpy-A. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time the extension system of Firefox (or Thunderbird, or Moz Suite) has been used to install malware. The doom squad has been predicting that this could be a problem since day one, and it's always been an inevitability. But this particular horse doesn't look to be much of an issue, and Firefox's extensibility is still nowhere near as vulnerable as, say, ActiveX.

Valve has been busy as well, churning out update after update for Steam games and Steam itself. There have been a total of four updates and four new Steam games released in the past week, plus the availability of the Sin Episodes: Emergence SDK. That last bit is good news for anyone who might like to try actually making an interesting Sin episode. Anyway, among the updates is a major content package for Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. At the same time, it was announced that RO: Ostfront will be available for free via Steam for five days, beginning August 2nd.

I've thought about getting this game, after tinkering with the original RO mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. A major issue with that mod was the dimwitted bot AI, which makes playing it offline not much of an option. RO: Ostfront is supposed to have the same problem, and that makes it hard for me to put down the money. Making things worse, for some reason the game is $25 via Steam but $30 at retail, at least where I've seen it. I know that with Steam acting as download manager, I can actually incrementally download something the size of Ostfront, even with dial-up. I did manage to download Lost Coast and several demos and massive patches. And you can back up games purchased over Steam onto blank CDs or DVDs. But I just like buying games in boxes. The problem with Ostfront is, I don't want to pay five bucks for that box.

And I'm still having all kinds of problems with Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. I left this game alone for a while, and now I remember why. It's just a massively unpolished release. Thanks again, EA. I'm still troubleshooting and figuring this shit out, and if I can get it going smoothly, I'll write a post on it. The game was just twenty bucks when I bought it, and so far it's hasn't been worth ten.

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