Trojan can grab extra personal banking data...

Computerworld Stephen Lawson (IDG News Service)

29/September/2008 A Trojan can add data entry fields to legitimate online banking sites and entice consumers to give up additional information.

As your business becomes more collaborative and global, the risks to your company’s trade secrets rise proportionally. Fortunately, there are new strategies to protect the data that allows you to compete

The call to Bob Bailey, an IT executive with a major US government contractor, came on an otherwise ordinary day in October 2003. "Why are you attacking us?" demanded the caller, an IT leader with a Silicon Valley manufacturer. He wanted to know why Bailey's company had launched a denial-of-service attack against his networkAdditional Resources
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A Trojan horse program now available to a growing number of fraudsters can add data entry fields to legitimate online banking sites and entice consumers to give up sensitive information such as bank card numbers and PINs (personal identification numbers).

The Limbo malware integrates itself into a Web browser using a technique called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) injection, said Uri Rivner, head of new technologies at RSA Consumer Solutions, a division of EMC. Because it's so closely integrated in the browser, it can operate even while the user is at the real bank site and can actually change the layout of that site, he said.

"If phishing were a stock, I would invest in it

"Nothing tells you that something is wrong here, with one exception: You're being asked to provide some information that you were never asked to do before," Rivner said during a briefing for reporters and analysts earlier this week. "If you are convinced that you are now communicating with the bank, the fraudsters can get away with anything they like."

Limbo can get onto a user's computer through many paths, including both pop-up messages that ask you to download an add-on program and methods that are invisible to the user, he said. They sometimes get on to PCs in conjunction with other phishing attacks.

And like other malware programs, Limbo is becoming available to more fraudsters through an underground market that includes a complex supply chain and falling prices, according to Rivner. Limbo costs about US$350, down from about $1,000 a year ago and $5,000 two years ago, he said.

"The big trend here is that it's becoming affordable," Rivner said.

The online fraud marketplace consists of "harvesters" who collect user information and "cashout" operations that use the information to do whatever has to be done to translate that information into money. For example, harvesters may capture credit-card numbers and cashout operations may use those cards to buy products online, have them delivered to an address, and sell them on the black market, he said. The two classes of fraudsters typically meet and do business with each other in IRC chatrooms and dedicated Web forums, where the most successful fraudsters are the ones who develop a reputation for working reliably and honestly with other participants, Rivner said.

Now, some fraudsters are taking a SaaS (software-as-a-service) approach, selling malware, access to botnets and everything else a person needs to become a harvester of data on unsuspecting consumers, according to Rivner. Having paid the price for this service, the harvesters can then take the identities stolen with it and sell them at a profit. The ease of going into business with this model may dramatically increase the volume of online fraud, he said.

"If phishing were a stock, I would invest in it," Rivner said.

At RSA, the encryption giant that became EMC's security business through a US$2.1 billion acquisition in 2006, the target for combatting online banking fraud is the cashing-out step. The company sells software that looks at every transaction a customer makes and assesses the level of risk, Rivner said. It may look at the IP (Internet Protocol) address from which the site is being accessed, as well as that user's typical pattern of transactions. If the risk level is high, the bank can block the transaction and contact the customer directly, he said.

This approach is increasingly being used by banks because of the difficulty of tracking down and eradicating malware and phishing, Rivner said. There may be numerous Trojans on a customer's computer, but the bank isn't hurt by any of them until a fraudster tries to use them to divert money from an account, he said.

Twins who swapped roles charged with fraud...

Reuters

Fri Sep 26, 2008. ROME (Reuters) - An Italian woman who worked as a part-time judge as well as a lawyer was substituted by her identical twin sister in court so she would not lose out on legal fees when she had two simultaneous engagements.

The 54-year-old twins from northern Italy have now been charged with fraud and will go on trial in January, Italy's leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera, reported Friday on its website.

One of the twins, identified only as Gabriella, worked primarily as a lawyer but also as an honorary judge, a part-time, paid position that entails helping full-time judges when their case load is heavy.

When Gabriella was called to be a substitute judge she sent her sister twin Patrizia to stand in for her at an existing engagement as a defense lawyer elsewhere in the Milan area.

The problem was that sister Patrizia was not a lawyer like sister Gabriella but charged the clients anyway.

The clients discovered the sister act and are now suing both for damages. Prosecutors have charged both with fraud, the paper said.

(Editing by Jon Boyle)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserve

Chocolate Helps Heart Stay Healthy...

Yahoo! News

LiveScience.com Tue Sep 23 2008. A small square of dark chocolate daily protects the heart from inflammation and subsequent heart disease, a new study of Italians suggests. Milk chocolate might not do the job.

However, this guilty pleasure has a limit.

Specifically, only 6.7 grams of chocolate per day (or 0.23 ounces) represents the ideal amount, according to results from the Moli-sani Project, one of the largest health studies ever conducted in Europe. For comparison, a standard-sized Hershey's kiss is about 4.5 grams (though they are not made of dark chocolate) and one Hershey's dark chocolate bar is about 41 grams (so a recommendation might be one of those weekly).

Chronic inflammation of tissues in the circulatory system is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, such as myocardial infarction or stroke. So doctors strive to keep patients' inflammation under control. One marker for inflammation in the blood is called C-reactive protein.

The researchers found a relationship between dark chocolate intake and levels of this protein in the blood of 4,849 subjects in good health and free of risk factors (such as high cholesterol or blood pressure, and other parameters). The findings are detailed in the latest issue of the Journal of Nutrition.

"We started from the hypothesis that high amounts of antioxidants contained in the cocoa seeds, in particular flavonoids and other kinds of polyphenols, might have beneficial effects on the inflammatory state," said Romina di Giuseppe, lead author of the study. "Our results have been absolutely encouraging: People having moderate amounts of dark chocolate regularly have significantly lower levels of C-reactive protein in their blood. In other words, their inflammatory state is considerably reduced."

The inflammation reduction that the researchers observed controlled for other confounding variables such as wine or produce intake.

Previous studies have found that chocolate might be good for you, though doctors usually warn that it is more important to focus on one's overall diet when it comes to health. One health study found that blood platelets among chocolate-lovers were less likely to clot together in dangerous clumps.

Other studies have found a host of diet and exercise changes that can help a person beat the odds of death. Clearly, no single change is a guarantee of long life.

With chocolate, moderation is key, the new study found.

"The best effect is obtained by consuming an average amount of 6.7 grams of chocolate per day, corresponding to a small square of chocolate twice or three times a week. Beyond these amounts the beneficial effect tends to disappear," di Giuseppe said.

The milk in milk chocolate interferes with polyphenols, so the team kept that out of the study.

"We consider this outcome as the beginning of a large series of data which will give us an innovative view on how [to achieve] prevention in everyday life, both against cardiovascular disease and tumors," said Licia Iacoviello, head of the Laboratory of Genetic and Environmental Epidemiology at the Catholic University of Campobasso and responsible for the Moli-sani Project.

The Moli-sani Project is funded by the Pfizer Foundation

500,000 Women die in pregnancy at childbirth....

Health Reuters By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) - More than half a million women still die each year in pregnancy and childbirth, often bleeding to death because no emergency obstetrical care is available, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.

Despite modest progress, particularly in Asia, the global maternal mortality toll remains stubbornly stable due to a lack of financial resources and political will, it said.

More than 99 percent of the estimated 536,000 maternal deaths worldwide in 2005 occurred in developing countries, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa, it said in a report entitled "Progress for Children: A Report Card on Maternal Maternity".
"One of the critical bottlenecks has always been access to highly skilled health workers required to deliver emergency obstetrical care, particularly caesarian sections," Peter Salama UNICEF's chief of health, told a news briefing.

Around 50 million births in the developing world, or about 4 in 10 of all births worldwide, are not attended by trained personnel, according to the report.

Hemorrhaging is the leading cause of maternal death in Africa and Asia, causing one in three deaths, it said. Infections, hypertensive disorders, complications of abortion, obstructed labor or HIV/AIDS are other causes.

Such complications can be easily treated in a health system whose facilities are staffed with skilled personnel to handle emergencies around the clock, but disparities persist, it said.

"The lifetime risk of maternal death in the developing world as a whole is 1 in 76, compared with 1 in 8,000 in the industrialized world," UNICEF said.

The riskiest place to give birth is Niger, where the risk of dying in pregnancy or childbirth over the course of a woman's lifetime is one in seven, it said. In Sierra Leone it is 1 in 8.

But developing countries including Sri Lanka and Mozambique have succeeded in reducing maternal mortality rates, it said.

A combination of family planning, training skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetrical care and post-natal care is the key to reducing maternal mortality, according to the agency.

At the current average reduction rate of less than one per cent a year, the world will miss the goal of reducing maternal mortality rates by 75 percent between 1990 and 2015, to less than 150,000, one of the Millennium Development Goals, it said.

"The time is right. We now know exactly what to do for maternal mortality reduction to make this one of the next big issues in global health," Salama said.

Programs to combat three major epidemics -- HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria -- now receive the required international attention and billions in funding, he said.

"But maternal mortality and child mortality do not yet receive the attention that the scale of the problem deserves," he said. An additional $10 billion would be needed each year to combat both child and maternal mortality, according to Salama.

UNICEF said last week that more than 9 million children died before their fifth birthday in 2007, down slightly from a year before, but a huge gap remains between rich and poor countries.

(Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Richard Balmforth)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Storm over Spanish politician's brothel...

Reuters

18 September 2008. MADRID (Reuters) - A Spanish politician's public description of how he lost his virginity in a brothel has angered his female counterparts, who accused him of encouraging prostitution.

Miguel Angel Revilla, head of the government of the northern region of Cantabria, told a television interviewer earlier this week that he had paid the first time he had sex at the age of 18.

Female members of the regional parliament from the opposition conservative Popular Party were outraged. "As the head of the regional government, he should be an example for the young people of Cantabria," they said in a communique.

"Instead he encourages them to pay for their first sexual experience."

Thursday, Revilla, a member of a regional party, accused his critics of hypocrisy and said they were unable to find matters of substance on which to attack him.

"There are major problems which need to be addressed now, not what a poor 18-year-old did," said Revilla, who is now 65, adding: " Ninety-nine percent of Spanish men did it back then."

(Reporting by Jason Webb; editing by Robert Hart)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Officials call off controversial autism study...

Health Reuters By Will Dunham

Wed Sep 17, 2008. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Health officials have called off plans for a study examining a controversial type of treatment that some autism activists have touted as alternative medical therapy for children with the condition.

The National Institute of Mental Health, or NIMH, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said in a statement on Wednesday that it has canceled a study aimed at assessing the effectiveness of a treatment called chelation.

Chelation (pronounced key-LAY-shun) is a type of therapy in which a man-made amino acid, called EDTA, is added to the blood, and it has been used to treat heavy metal poisoning.

Some autism activists have advocated it on the theory -- rejected by most scientists -- that autism is triggered by exposure to mercury, a heavy metal, from childhood vaccines.

Many studies and medical experts have dismissed the notion that mercury used in a vaccine preservative causes autism, but some parents of autistic children strongly believe it does.

Since 2001, with the exception of some influenza vaccines, the mercury-containing preservative has not been used in routinely recommended childhood vaccines, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"NIMH has decided that resources are better directed at this time to testing other potential therapies for autism spectrum disorders, and is not pursuing the additional review required to begin the study," the institute said.

The study was given initial permission to proceed in 2006, according to NIMH's statement.

"No subjects were recruited for this clinical trial," according to the statement.

"In February 2007, based on new scientific data, an NIH Institutional Review Board reassessed the risk-benefit ratio of the proposed study. The board determined that there was no clear evidence for direct benefit to the children who would participate in the chelation trial and that the study presents more than a minimal risk," it added.

The institute said the only way that the study could go forward would be through an additional governmental approval process, and it decided not to pursue this.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Deaths make 2008 deadliest for US in Afghanistan...

Yahoo! News By JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer

12 Sept. 2008. KABUL, Afghanistan - Insurgents killed two U.S. troops in Afghanistan on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Thursday, making 2008 the deadliest year for American forces since U.S. troops invaded the country in 2001 for sheltering Osama bin Laden.

The deaths brought the number of troops who have died in Afghanistan this year to 113, according to an Associated Press tally, surpassing last year's record toll of 111.

Afghanistan was the launching pad for al-Qaida's terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. U.S. forces invaded in October 2001 in response and quickly drove the Taliban out of power.

Across Afghanistan, U.S. troops paused in silence Thursday to commemorate the 9/11 attacks. At a U.S. base in Kabul, members of the New York National Guard, many of whom served at the site of the World Trade Center after the towers came down, remembered the attack on their home state.

"For those of us who were there, served at Ground Zero, 9/11 is deeply personal," said Col. Brian K. Bale, the commander of the 27th Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

Maj. Stephen Bousquet, 34, of Buffalo, N.Y., provided security at Ground Zero for three weeks after the attack. He now trains and mentors Afghan police, he said, "so American and coalition forces can leave one day."

Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaida network, is believed to be in the lawless tribal belt on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. He had been sheltered by Taliban leader Mullah Omar before 9/11.

Taliban fighters folded in easy defeat in fall 2001 in what at first appeared to be a resounding U.S. victory. But militants that U.S. commanders once derided as ragtag amateurs have transformed into a fighting force advanced enough to mount massive conventional attacks. Suicide and roadside bombs have turned bigger and deadlier than ever.

The number of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek militants flowing into the Afghan-Pakistan region has increased this year, bringing with them command expertise the Taliban lacked.

U.S. death tolls have climbed sharply from the first years of the war. Only five American service members died in 2001. Thirty service members died in both 2002 and 2003; the toll climbed to 49 in 2004, then 93 in 2005 and 88 in 2006.

Last year 111 troops died, including one killed by a sniper while meeting with Pakistani officers in Pakistan. That mark was surpassed Thursday — with more than three months left in the year — reflecting both the increased number of American troops deployed to Afghanistan as well as the insurgency's increasing potency.

Top U.S. generals, European leaders and analysts say the blame lies to the east, in militant sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. As long as those areas remain havens where fighters arm, train, recruit and plot increasingly sophisticated ambushes, the Afghan war will continue to sour.

"What you have is a broad expansion on the front, and because of this you have expansion in areas of the Taliban. Even in areas where there is no substantial fighting, the presence of insurgents has increased," said Anthony Cordesman, a security expert with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"You have less cooperation from Pakistan, and there's political disarray," which creates a situation where there is little security and stability, Cordesman said. "You also have a weak government that is incapable of maintaining a significant presence in high threat areas."

Since the 2001 invasion, a total of 519 U.S. troops have died in the Afghan war, including those killed in border areas of Pakistan and in Uzbekistan, which was a staging area in 2001. An additional 65 more have died outside the Afghan region in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, according to the Defense Department.

The Pentagon says 117 U.S. service members died last year in Operation Enduring Freedom, but that includes six deaths outside the Afghan region: two in the Philippines, two in Ethiopia, one in Somalia and one in the Gulf.

The NATO-led force in Afghanistan said one soldier was killed Thursday in the east when insurgents attacked a compound. The separate U.S.-led coalition said a second service member died while conducting combat operations. No other details were released, but a Western military official told The Associated Press that both troops were American.

Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the spokesman for Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense, noted the militants aren't just targeting U.S. forces. He said Afghan soldiers and police have also suffered a record number of casualties over the past year. Figures weren't immediately available.

President Bush announced this week that he was sending an Army brigade and a Marine battalion to Afghanistan in November to replace two that are scheduled to leave.

Some 33,000 U.S. troops are now stationed in the country, the highest level since 2001. Overall, more than 65,000 troops from 40 nations are deployed in Afghanistan.

U.S. commanders in Afghanistan say they need another 10,000 troops — even more than the deployment plan Bush announced. The commanders also urge more nonmilitary aid and say the Afghan government must perform better.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee this week that, "I'm not convinced we're winning in Afghanistan. I'm convinced we can."
___

Associated Press reporters Amir Shah and Fisnik Abrashi in Kabul and Carley Petesch in New York contributed to this report

Google Chrome: 3.8% browser share...

Software - ZDNet Australia Munir Kotadia, ZDNet.com.au

09 September 2008. Just a week after its launch, there are more ZDNet.com.au readers using Google Chrome than Apple's Safari browser. Meanwhile, Microsoft Internet Explorer now accounts for just 53 per cent of all browsers.

Browsers used by ZDNet.com.au readers today.

Google Chrome appears to be a hit, with 3.8 per cent of ZDNet.com.au readers already using the new browser. From internal statistics, it appears that Chrome users have either ditched Internet Explorer or Firefox 2.

Browsers used by ZDNet.com.au readers BC (before Chrome).

On 1 September (the day before Chrome's launch), Microsoft IE 7 enjoyed 35.1 per cent of the market while IE 6 accounted for 22.5 per cent, meaning the total IE market share stood at 57.6 per cent. Today, Microsoft's combined browser market share stands at 52.9 per cent with IE 7 at 33.1 per cent and IE 6 holding on to 19.8 per cent.

Firefox 3.0's market share has been boosted during the same period, from 26.5 per cent to 29.9 per cent. Firefox 2 however, has taken a hit, falling from 8.1 per cent to 6 per cent market share.
Your favourite browser is? Microsoft IE Mozilla Firefox Apple Safari Google Chrome Opera .

Interestingly, Apple's Safari Browser, which is built on the same WebKit framework as Google Chrome, has hardly been affected, moving down 0.2 per cent from 3.4 per cent share to 3.2 percent.

Chrome's rise has been meteoric, accounting for 2.5 per cent of browsers the day after it was launched and peaking at 4.5 per cent on Thursday — when the hype was at its peak — before dropping off again on Friday. Currently, Chrome's market share stands at 3.8 per cent.

All the above figures are based solely on the browsers used by ZDNet.com.au readers to access the site.

Have you downloaded Chrome? Will it be replacing your regular browser? How much market share can Chrome realistically own? Can IE bounce back?

High blood calcium tied to lethal prostate cancer...

Health Reuters By Will Dunham

Wed Sep 3, 2008 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Men with elevated levels of calcium in their blood may have a much higher risk of getting fatal prostate cancer, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

The findings indicate that a simple blood test may identify men at high risk for the most dangerous prostate tumors, and there already are drugs available that cut calcium levels in the bloodstream, the researchers said.

They tracked 2,814 men in a government health survey in which they gave blood samples that revealed calcium levels.

The men in the top third of blood calcium levels had 2.68 times the risk of developing fatal prostate cancer later in life compared to those in the bottom third, the study found.

"If serum calcium really does increase your risk for fatal prostate cancer, that's wonderfully exciting because serum calcium levels can be changed," Gary Schwartz of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who helped lead the study, said in a telephone interview.

"One way to think of it is to think of the tremendous advances in the control of cardiovascular disease that occur from understanding that things like serum cholesterol predict heart attack," Schwartz added.

Doctors have struggled to find ways to predict if a man who gets prostate cancer will have a tumor that poses little danger, as is often the case, or one that is a killer.

Blood calcium was not very predictive of whether a man would get nonlethal prostate cancer, but was highly predictive of whether a man would get a fatal case, the researchers wrote in the American Association for Cancer Research's journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

The blood samples on average were given a decade before the cancer appeared, the researchers said.

A COMMON CANCER

Prostate cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed form of cancer in men worldwide, with about 780,000 men diagnosed per year, and the sixth mostly deadly form in men, with about 250,000 deaths per year, the American Cancer Society said.

Schwartz said it is unclear whether it is the actual calcium or blood levels of parathyroid hormone, which is supposed to keep calcium levels at normal levels in the bloodstream, that is raising the risk.

Either way, he said there are drugs that can lower them, including Fontus Pharmaceuticals Inc's Rocaltrol, also called calcitriol; Genzyme Corp's Hectorol (doxercalciferol); Abbott Laboratories' Zemplar (paricalcitol); and Amgen Inc's Sensipar (cinacalcet).

People treated for high blood calcium usually have chronic kidney disease, which is associated with low vitamin D levels. Low vitamin D levels elevate parathyroid hormone levels, Schwartz said.

Halcyon Skinner of the University of Wisconsin, who also worked on the study, said there is little relationship between calcium in the diet and blood calcium levels, so these men would not benefit from eating less food rich in calcium.

Previous research had suggested a role for calcium in prostate cancer. In laboratory studies, parathyroid hormone and calcium promote the growth of prostate cancer cells.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and David Wiessler)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Heart bypasses beat drug stents in study...

Health Reuters By Ben Hirschler

Mon Sep 1, 2008. MUNICH (Reuters) - Patients with difficult-to-treat clogged arteries are better off getting bypass surgery rather than drug stents, according to results of a major clinical study on Monday.

Both procedures proved equally safe but those patients receiving Boston Scientific's drug-coated Taxus stent were more likely to need a repeat procedure, researchers said.

The keenly awaited results of the so-called SYNTAX study by Dutch researchers were presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.

"Despite the advent of drug-eluting stents, surgery comes out a winner," Douglas Weaver, president of the American College of Cardiology, said after the results were presented.

The one-year study found that 17.8 percent of patients receiving stents -- tiny wire-mesh tubes used to prop open clogged heart arteries -- either died, suffered a heart attack, had a stroke or needed a repeat procedure.

The figure was 12.1 percent for those undergoing surgery and receiving coronary artery bypass grafting, known as CABG.

Stenting was introduced in the 1990s and allows doctors to treat patients by inserting a catheter into the groin, resulting in very quick recovery times. CABG requires open-heart surgery.

Doctors in Munich said the results would be studied carefully but might not lead to a dramatic change in practice since many of the patients in the Dutch study would probably have received surgery anyway in normal clinical practice.

A more favorable result for stenting, however, could have encouraged further use of stenting over CABG.

Keith Dawkins, Associate Chief Medical Officer at Boston Scientific, said he believed the study was reassuring for the use of stents, despite not achieving its goal.

"The primary endpoint was missed. But it wasn't missed because of safety concerns; it was missed due to revascularization (reopening of arteries)," he said.

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Google set to introduce its own Web browser...

Technology Reuters

Mon Sep 1, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc is set to introduce on Tuesday a new Web browser designed to more quickly handle video-rich applications, posing a challenge to browsers designed originally to handle text and graphics. Google...";

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc is set to introduce on Tuesday a new Web browser designed to more quickly handle video-rich applications, posing a challenge to browsers designed originally to handle text and graphics.

Google officials confirmed news of long-rumored plans to offer its own Web browsing software, entitled Google Chrome, in a company blog post after it mistakenly mailed details of the project to a Google-watching blog, called Blogoscoped.com.

The company statement calls the move "a fresh take on the browser" and said it will be introducing a public trial of the Web browser for Microsoft Corp Windows users on Tuesday. Details can be found at tinyurl.com/gchrome/.

The Internet search leader is also working on versions for Apple Macintosh users and for Linux devices, Google said.

The launch of Chrome coincides with the recent introduction by arch-rival Microsoft of its Internet Explorer 8 last month. Internet Explorer has roughly three-quarters of the browser market, followed by Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari.

Google said its engineers had borrowed from a variety of other open-source projects, including Apple Inc's WebKit and the Mozilla Firefox open-source browser. As a result, Google plans to make all of Chrome software code open to other developers to enhance and expand, the company said.

"We realized that the Web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser," Google Vice President of Product Management Sindar Pichai and Engineering Director Linus Upson said in a jointly authored blog post.

BUILT FOR SPEED

They said Google Chrome promises to load pages faster and more securely, but it also includes a new engine for loading interactive JavaScript code, dubbed V8, that is designed to run the next generation of not-yet-invented Web applications.

"What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build," Pichai and Upson wrote.

A Google spokesman declined to comment beyond the blog post.

"The browser landscape is highly competitive," Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, said in a statement.

"People will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, (it) puts them in control of their personal data online," Hachamovitch said.

GOING 'INCOGNITO'

Google confirmed that it had prematurely mailed a copy of a comic book. Blogoscope's writer, Philipp Lenssen, scanned and published the 38-page comic here

Chrome organizes information into tabbed pages. Web programs can be launched in their own dedicated windows. It also offers a variety of features to make the browser more stable and secure, according to the comic book guide.

Among Chrome's features is a special privacy mode that lets users create an "incognito" window where "nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer." This is a read-only feature with access to one's bookmarks of favorite sites.

Once available for testing on Tuesday, the browser can be downloaded at http://www.google.com/chrome/

(Additional reporting by Daisuke Wakabayashi in Seattle, Paritosh Bansal and Nick Zieminski in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Jan Paschal)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved
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