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Mac browser goes cross-platform, adds several other enhancements
By Rob Griffiths

Apple kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference with the release of a public beta of Safari 3.0; the finished version will be the bundled browser in Leopard when Mac OS X 10.5 ships in October.
But Leopard isn’t the only OS that this Safari update will run on—and I’m not just referring to Tiger. Apple CEO Steve Jobs also announced that Safari was joining the ranks of iTunes and QuickTime to become a cross-platform app that runs on Windows as well.
What follows is a quick look at some of the more compelling new features in Safari 3.0, which I’m running as a beta on OS X 10.4. I also took a quick detour into the land of XP, courtesy of both Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop, to see how well Safari works there.

Speed
During his keynote address to developers, Jobs discussed benchmark results that showed Safari to be the quickest of the “big three” browsers. (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox are the other two.) In my limited time with Safari 3, it certainly seems fast. However, I was hard pressed to note any substantial loading time differences between Camino, Firefox, and Safari 3 on my MacBook Pro—they all handled my selection of test pages just fine.

Greatly improved find-on-page
I’ll admit to having a love/hate relationship with the Find function in most browsers—sure, it’s great to be able to find something on a page, but it’s nearly impossible to see those matches once they’re found. Most browsers simply highlight the matches, and, on a page full of text, that can make spotting the matches very hard.
In contrast, Safari 3 makes it really easy to spot the matches. When you press Command-F and enter your search term, Safari dims the current page, shows matches with a bright white background, and shows the currently selected match with a can’t-miss-it orange background:

This is a great improvement over the blind searching I do in the current version of Safari.

Draggable tabs
You can now drag-and-drop tabs to rearrange them.
You can also drag a tab out of the tab bar to create a new window containing that tab. There doesn’t seem to be a “put tab back” command, however. There is a new Merge All Windows command in the Window menu, though, which will do the trick for all open windows—it will place them all into one new tabbed window, and close the others as it does so.

Resizable text boxes
Don’t you hate those Web sites with tiny little fill-in forms? Seems many places don’t know that monitors are larger than 13 inches now, and that we can type more than 80 characters on a row. The new version of Safari takes care of that problem with its resizable text entry boxes.

Other new stuff
In addition to improvements in find, tabs, and text input boxes, there are some other enhancements in Safari 3. In the Bookmarks menu, there’s a new Add Bookmark For These n Tabs menu item, where “n” is the number of open tabs in your current window. Using this feature, you can surf around to a number of places, using Command-click to open each site in a new tab, and then save all those open pages in one step via this new menu item.
In the View menu, to go along with pre-existing options for increasing and decreasing the size of text on the page, there’s a new Make Text Normal Size option—useful if you’ve been going crazy with the other resizing options and lost track of your starting point, I guess!
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Elcomsoft cracks Quicken “backdoor”

Russian security software firm Elcomsoft announced on Friday that the company’s researchers had cracked the master password that secures encrypted Quicken files and which allows the software’s developer, Intuit, to retrieve lost passwords.

Calling the existence of a 512-bit encryption key a “backdoor,” Elcomsoft said the master key could be used by the federal government to access taxpayer records. Starting with Quicken 2003, Intuit beefed up the encryption of Quicken’s password protection. While the better protection made it infeasible for a cracker to brute force the password to a particular Quicken file, Intuit offers a service to recover the files for people who had lost their passwords.

“It is very unlikely that a casual hacker could have broken into Quicken’s password protection regime,” Vladamir Katalov, Elcomsoft’s CEO, said in a statement sent to SecurityFocus.

Elcomsoft, which specializes in creating password recovery — or cracking — tools, has ruffled feathers in the past for its announcements of security issues in software defenses. In 2001, U.S. law enforcement arrested Dmitri Sklyarov, an Elcomsoft programmer, at the DEF CON hacking conference for circumventing the security measures protecting electronic book formats. A federal jury found the programmer innocent of the charges that he, and Elcomsoft, violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a controversial U.S. law that prohibits the circumventing of security measures except in a few specific cases.

The Russian firm notified the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Coordination Center of the latest issue. Intuit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Source Carl Pei blog. Enjoy!

A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower when the doorbell rings. The wife quickly wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs. When she opens the door, there stands Bob, the next door neighbor. Before she says a word, Bob says, “I’ll give you $800 to drop that towel.” After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her towel and stands naked in front of Bob.

After a few seconds, Bob hands her $800 dollars and leaves. The woman wraps back up in the towel and goes back upstairs. When she gets to the bathroom, her husband asks,…

“Who was that?” “It was Bob the next door neighbor,” she replies. “Great!” the husband says, “Did he say anything about the $800 he owes me?”

Moral of the story:
If you share critical information pertaining to credit and risk with your shareholders in time, you may be in a position to prevent avoidable exposure.

A sales rep, an administration clerk, and the manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp. They rub it and a Genie comes out. The Genie says, “I’ll give each of you just one wish” “Me first! Me first!” says the admin. clerk. “I want to be in the Bahamas, driving a speedboat, without a care in the world.” Poof! She’s gone. “Me next! Me next!” says the sales rep. “I want to be in Hawaii,relaxing on the beach with my personal masseuse, an endless supply of Pina Coladas and the love of my life.” Poof! He’s gone. “OK, you’re up,” the Genie says to the manager. The manager says, “I want those two back in the office after lunch.”

Moral of the story: Always let your boss have the first say.

A priest offered a lift to a Nun. She got in and crossed her legs, forcing her gown to reveal a leg. The priest nearly had an accident. After controlling the car, he stealthily slid his hand up her leg. The nun said,”Father, remember Psalm 129?” The priest removed his hand. But,changing gears, he let his hand slide up her leg again. The nun once again said, “Father, remember Psalm 129?” The priest apologized “Sorry sister but the flesh is weak.” Arriving at the convent, the nun went on her way. On his arrival at the church, the priest rushed to look up Psalm 129. It said, “Go forth and seek, further up, you will find glory.”

Moral of the story: If you are not well informed in your job, you might miss a great opportunity.

A crow was sitting on a tree, doing nothing all day. A rabbit asked him,”Can I also sit like you and do nothing all day long?” The crow answered: “Sure, why not.” So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow, and rested.

A fox jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Moral of the story: To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very high up.

A turkey was chatting with a bull “I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree,” sighed the turkey, but I haven’t got the energy.” “Well, why don’t you nibble on my droppings?” replied the bull. “They’re packed with nutrients.” The turkey pecked at a lump of dung and found that it gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree. The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch. Finally after a fourth night, there he was proudly perched at the top of the tree. Soon he was spotted by a farmer, who shot the turkey out of the tree.

Moral of the story: Bullshit might get you to the top, but it wont keep you there.

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold the bird froze and fell to the ground into a large field. While he was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on him. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, he began to realize how warm he was. The dung was actually thawing him out! He lay there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate. Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug him out and ate him.

A man decides to write a funny and informative collection of stories meant to drive home some interesting life lessons. While he was writing them, his wife came by and asked what he was doing. He explained to her that he wanted to send his friends something interesting to chat about at work the next day. His wife advised him to post it on an internet blog for fun. The husband took her advice, but negligently set up his own server without properly analyzing the potential for an instantaneous burst of Digg traffic. The site, therefore, went down in flames hosting a few paragraphs of text.

Moral of the story: Don’t listen to your wife.