Microsoft today said it will issue an emergency patch for the critical Windows shortcut bug on Monday, Aug. 2.

The company said that it is satisfied with the quality of the “out-of-band” update — Microsoft’s term for a patch that falls outside the usual monthly delivery schedule — but also acknowledged that it has tracked an upswing in attacks.

“In the past few days, we’ve seen an increase in attempts to exploit the vulnerability,” Christopher Budd, a spokesman for the Microsoft Security Response Center, said in a entry on the team’s blog. “We firmly believe that releasing the update out of band is the best thing to do to help protect our customers.”
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MIcrosoft will ship a beta of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in September, a company executive said today.

If the timeline is accurate, the IE9 beta release will come a month later than earlier speculation, which had settled on August, a pick based in large part on PowerPoint slides purportedly from a Microsoft presentation that focused on Windows 8, the next iteration of the company’s OS.
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Delivering on a promise the company made back in June, Apple on Wednesday released an update to Safari 5 which turns on extensions support akin to what browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer have been offering for years.

In addition to the debut of these plugins, Apple also plugged several security issues, including a widely publicized flaw in the AutoFill feature that could open up users to information disclosure.
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The U.S. Copyright Office’s ruling making iPhone jailbreaking legal doesn’t really matter, as long as the process voids the warranty of your smartphone. Apple reminded customers in a statement to Cult Of Mac that jailbreaking their iPhones voids the device’s warranty, which means no free repairs if your phone goes bust because of that.

“Apple’s goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience.”
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Jailbreaking an Apple iPhone to add unauthorized apps or use an alternative cell provider is officially no longer a government offense.

The Library of Congress, as part of a regular review of copyright rules, has revised a 1998 position that banned phone owners from bypassing technical locks on the devices. The process, nicknamed jailbreaking, has been used by iPhone owners to buck AT&T Inc.’s exclusivity as the cell carrier for the device.

Apple Inc., which makes the iPhone, had urged that the rules be kept intact. But in a statement Monday on the rule changes, Librarian of Congress James Billington said phone owners who did a workaround on the device were among those who would “not be subject to the statutory prohibition against circumvention.”
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For the second time in two months, Mozilla on Friday rushed out a fix for Firefox to patch a problem with a browser update issued just days before.

Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6.8 on Friday to patch a single security problem and deal with what Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, called “a stability problem that affected some pages with embedded plug-ins.”

The company had released Firefox 3.6.7 two days earlier.
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Apple on Friday began taking requests for free bumpers or cases for iPhone 4 owners who have had reception problems — and said sales of the white iPhone 4 would be delayed until “later this year.”

Last week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at a news conference that his company would give bumpers or cases to iPhone 4 customers in response to reports of a “death grip” that resulted in dropped calls.

Earlier in the week, Consumer Reports said it couldn’t recommend the iPhone 4 because of an antenna problem. The magazine said its tests confirmed signal strength could weaken when the iPhone 4 was held in a way that covered a gap in its wraparound stainless-steel antenna. However, Consumer Reports said using a bumper or case remedies the problem.
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