Representatives of big browser makers Microsoft, Mozilla and Google talk about the future of browsers, as developers decry browser incompatibility and ask what browser makers plan to do about it. The panel of experts talked about HTML 5, Canvas, Silverlight, IE 8, Google Chrome and Firefox at the Web 2.0 Expo.

It wasn’t a good week to be an Alaskan vice-presidential candidate, an online publication or even a multinational science project — as all were compromised by hackers this week.

Those of us who run Linux on our home machines have a harder time testing sites for Internet Explorer compatibility, or accessing sites that require proprietary IE features. IEs4Linux is a script that can help you set up three older versions of IE on any system running Wine. Unfortunately, the program is not as polished as it should be.

Deletionpedia is a site that catalogs everything that gets deleted from Wikipedia, from temporary deletions during clean-up to complete entries that are removed after a period of discussion. Some existed for years and had hundreds of edits, while others were vanity entries or obscure points of reference that had been barely touched.

Company managers also contrasted IE8 Beta 2’s “Suggested Sites” feature with the “Suggest” feature used by rival Google Inc. in its Chrome browser, saying that Microsoft’s browser requires the user’s explicit permission before it’s used. They did, however, acknowledge a bug that prevents the request from reappearing during reinstalls.

A comparison of the past two weeks of traffic on Tectonic.co.za - a period that covers the launch of Google’s Chrome browser - shows that in the week of September 1 to 8 Chrome jumped from 0 percent of browsers used to an above-average 2.98 percent, largely at the expense of Mozilla Firefox.

Often the greatest tech crimes in history have little more reason behind them than “because it was there.” More often than not, a hacker sees an open window—a hole in system’s security, a backdoor, etc.—and climbs on through. And they don’t do it for any real worldly gain, but merely to prove that they can.

McAfee Inc. has announced McAfee Artemis Technology that uses a new Internet-based service hosted by McAfee Avert Labs to provide active protection on the fly when a computer gets hit by malicious computer code. Artemis leverages behavioral technology to examine a piece of malware that isn’t explicitly protected.

The new allegations regarding racist comments supposedly uttered by Sarah Palin have rekindled the war between the left and right of the US media with a ferocity that has not been seen since the unmasking of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, courtesy of some well-placed leaks to prominent right-wing media figures.

The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth—sometimes more during peak hours. While these “power users” are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load.