Apple’s failure to clean up old code in QuickTime leaves people running Internet Explorer vulnerable to drive-by attacks, a Spanish security researcher said today.

Ruben Santamarta, a researcher at Madrid-based Wintercore who revealed a bug in IE8 last month, today outlined the QuickTime plug-in vulnerability.

Hackers only need to dupe users into visiting a malicious site hosting exploit code, said Santamarta, who added that his attack code works when someone browses with IE on a machine running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 that has QuickTime 7.x or the older QuickTime 6.x installed.
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YouTube is said to be negotiating with major Hollywood studios to offer streamed, pay-per-view movies by the end of the year.

The move would pitch it directly against Apple and Netflix, which are both working on beefing up their entertainment offerings.
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A firm owned by billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen yesterday sued Apple, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and seven other companies, charging them with infringing patents filed more than a decade ago.

Google and Facebook blasted the lawsuit as “unfortunate” and “without merit.”

The complaint, filed Friday morning in a Seattle federal court, named AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and Google’s YouTube.
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Mozilla has released an official Alpha version of its mobile Fennec browser for users of Google’s Android OS.

According to Mozilla dev Stuart Parmenter, the latest iteration of the browser was designed to create a “single,” fluid Web experience between the traditional desktop and mobile devices.
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Apple has announced that it will holding a “special event” on September 1, which could bring an upgraded iPod Touch and possibly, the redesigned Apple TV.

Analysts and industry insiders are claiming that the upcoming Apple special event will be to unveil the new iPod Touch, which will feature dual cameras. The next generation of iPod Touch is due in stores in times for the holidays, but the actual release date will likely be revealed at the event.
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A Hewlett-Packard tablet device is coming in early 2011. This should be no surprise to anyone since HP already sells a tablet device. But the difference is there will be more than one such device, and one of them will be running Palm’s webOS.

It’s important to remember that HP has been selling tablet PCs for several years. These machines run Windows, and they’ve found a strong vertical market where they are really the only choice. In areas such as health care, the HP tablet is the only real device that offers support for the applications the customers need and for the security demanded by regulators. The iPad just isn’t in the same league when it comes to industrial-strength computing, but that should be no surprise either, since it was intended to be a consumer gadget.
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Less than 24 hours after Microsoft said it couldn’t patch Windows to fix a systemic problem, attack code appeared Tuesday to exploit the company’s software.

Also on Tuesday, a security firm that’s been researching the issue for the past nine months said 41 of Microsoft’s own programs can be remotely exploited using DLL load hijacking, and it named two of them.
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