According to a recent comprehensive Web browser report, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is losing market share to Mozilla Firefox. The overall report shows that IE has dropped below 70 percent.

Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer lost more market share to Mozilla Firefox in December. A published report by Net Applications indicates a steady decline in IE while Firefox continues to rise.

Even so, Internet Explorer still has 68 percent of the Web browser market while Firefox increased to 21 percent. Each month since October, IE has dropped a point while Firefox gained a point.

Coincidentally, some Web sites that target specific audiences are showing different results. For example, our Web site shows Internet Explorer with 54 percent while 38 percent of our visitors use Firefox. It seems to vary depending on Web site category and niche.

Internet Explorer's downfall could be as a result of a critical security vulnerability in November and December which took Microsoft engineers longer to patch. This vulnerability was serious enough that it allowed hackers to take control of a user's computer. However, Microsoft confirmed that consumers didn't report any successful exploit attempts to IE.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 15:16

SAN FRANCISCO — A trio of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who found a way to hack into the Boston subway system's payment cards have agreed to partner with transit officials there to make the system more secure.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced the agreement Monday, two months after the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority dropped a lawsuit against the students, who were represented for free by the EFF, a civil-liberties group that frequently takes up cases involving security researchers and computer hackers.

The transit agency had sued to stop the students from presenting findings at a computer-security conference.

The students — Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa — have argued all along they were trying to help the MBTA by giving it advance notice of their planned talk last summer and keeping specific details of their hack secret.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 09:55