Google has today announced via its “Data Liberation Front” team thats its now provided Google Voice users the ability to export Google Voice data from its service, using the Google Takeout service. Watch the brief presentation video announcing the new data export feature for Google Voice after the break.
Google Takeout has been created by Google to enable users to extract and backup data from its applications and was created by a team of Google engineers named the Data Liberation Front, who have been tasked with the mission to help create ways that users can export data from Google services.
You can find out more information regarding Google’s Data Liberation Front over on their website.
Yahoo Fires CEO Carol Bartz And Maybe Up For Sale?
Beleaguered search engine Yahoo has today fired its CEO Carol Bartz replacing her with Timothy Morse and may now by open for sale. Its been revealed by an email written by Bartz and sent the the AllThingsD website. That Bartz was fired over the telephone, and communicated this to her employees via her last email, which can be viewed after the jump.
In addition to the firing of its CEO, a Yahoo insider contacted the Wall Street Journal suggesting that Yahoo maybe “open to selling itself”. Although no official statement has been made as yet by Yahoo.It will be interesting to see what now happens to search and email company and if a new leader or sale will be able to turn its fortunes around.
Carol Bartz’s final email from Yahoo:
To all,
I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.
Carol
Mozilla pulls password stealer add-on.
By Gregg Keizer
Mozilla on Tuesday warned users that a password stealing add-on slipped into Firefox’s extension gallery more than a month ago had been downloaded nearly 2,000 times before it was detected. The malicious “Mozilla Sniffer” add-on was yanked from Mozilla’s servers Monday, and added to the Firefox “blocklist,” a last-resort defense that uninstalls potentially dangerous browser extensions from users’ machines.
Mozilla also notified users of a critical security vulnerability in another add-on, the popular “CoolPreviews,” which currently sits at No. 21 on the Firefox most-downloaded list, saying it had temporarily yanked that plug-in, too. The Mozilla Sniffer add-on was submitted to the Firefox Add-ons site June 6, Mozilla announced in a blog post yesterday.
“It was discovered that this add-on contains code that intercepts login data submitted to any website, and sends this data to a remote location,” Mozilla confirmed. “Anybody who has installed this add-on should change their passwords as soon as possible.”
Mozilla pulled the Sniffer add-on July 12 after it found out about the plug-in’s extracurricular activities, then added it to the blocklist. “All current [Mozilla Sniffer] users should receive an uninstall notification within a day or so,” the company said. According to Mozilla’s count, the malicious extension had been downloaded about 1,800 times in the last five weeks, and had 334 active users when it was dumped.
Mozilla Sniffer was isolated in the experimental portion of the Add-ons site, where new add-ons are kept until they undergo a public review process. To install experimental add-ons, Firefox users must view and accept an additional warning.
The situation with CoolPreviews was different. That add-on, which is downloaded about 77,000 times each week, contained a critical bug that could have been used by hackers to hijack computers.
“The vulnerability can be triggered using a specially crafted hyperlink,” Mozilla explained. “If the user hovers the cursor over this link, the preview function executes remote JavaScript code with local chrome privileges, giving the attacking script control over the host computer.”
CoolPreviews is billed by its maker, Cooliris, as a Firefox extension that displays previews of web pages when users pause the mouse pointer over any link. CoolPreviews 3.01 and earlier editions included the vulnerability; Mozilla disabled the buggy versions, then posted an update from Cooliris the following day. The revised CoolPreviews, version 3.1.0625, was first offered to Firefox users June 25.
Proof-of-concept attack code that exploits CoolPreviews 3.01 and earlier had been published on a Japanese language blog, but Mozilla said it knew of no in-the-wild exploits. As of Tuesday, approximately 177,000 users were running a vulnerable CoolPreviews add-on, said Mozilla, which said that it would add the bug-containing editions to the blocklist “very soon.”
The Sniffer incident was not the first time Mozilla has missed a malicious add-on.
In May 2008, the company acknowledged that a worm that had gone unnoticed in Firefox’s Vietnamese language add-on for months. In February 2010, it warned users that the Sothink Web Video Downloader 4.0 and all versions of Master Filer were infected with a Trojan horse that could spread to the host PC.
Mozilla admitted that under its current practice, add-ons are only scanned for known malware, but said it is trying to come up with a plan to review add-on source code to catch the future Sniffers of the world. “We’re already working on implementing a new security model for addons.mozilla.org that will require all add-ons to be code-reviewed before they are discoverable in the site,” the company said.
Mozilla on Tuesday warned users that a password stealing add-on slipped into Firefox’s extension gallery more than a month ago had been downloaded nearly 2,000 times before it was detected. The malicious “Mozilla Sniffer” add-on was yanked from Mozilla’s servers Monday, and added to the Firefox “blocklist,” a last-resort defense that uninstalls potentially dangerous browser extensions from users’ machines.
