Windows update KB951748 should not be installed. It will break your Internet connection. If you have it already installed, uninstalling it fixes the problem.

I have spent the day troubleshooting over 20 PCs and have found all installations to have the install date of 9 July 2008, which in my part of the world is tomorrow. I think that as of tomorrow it should work. If not then MS broke something again, but we are used to that.

How to fix it? Go to Start> Control Panel> Add/Remove Programs. Make sure to put the tick mark in the “Show updates” box in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Scroll down to the Windows Updates and look for (KB951748), highlight it and press remove. You will need to immediately do a reboot and when your machine has restarted your Internet connection will function again!

Google has decided to step up the safety of Gmail by adding some small new features available to every user. The footer of your session will now contain information such as your last log in, activity, and IP address that the session was accessed from.

In addition to above, users will also be able to see if they are logged in on another computer, and check recent activity to ensure their account is not being accessed by anyone else. Should a user forget to sign out, they are now able to safely remotely sign out from any location.

I’m pretty excited by Opera’s Userscripts that allow you to write Javascript files that are far richer than greasemonkey Userscripts -which is also supported by Opera- I’ve written a security plugin for Opera last night, that attempts to mitigate various Javascript attack vectors. But, one problem for writing a security plugin is that we usually need to process a script before it gets rendered by the browser. Otherwise, it is already to late to block a dangerous request or script instance. This is particularly useful to mitigate CSRF and XSS.

For instance, the Opera event listeners can process inline or remote Javascript and other page events before and after it gets executed. What a marvelous idea, I am really stunned when I read about it. It’s exactly what I wanted for Opera! It really gives absolute user control over the page. Bare with me, it is written in a couple of hours with a few ideas I had at the moment. I will be working on it some more when I find the time for it. I gave the script the name Arioso, as an appreciation for Opera.

A lot of people have used Google but few have any idea as to the complexity and computer power necessary to return billions of queries with millions of results all in under a second. This isn’t by accident, an oversight by Google or even due to security concerns, Google believes in not making search seem complicated to users. This notion is perhaps best illustrated in Google’s “Technology Overview”, which uses just 5 images and 4 sentences to explain the “Life of a Google Query”.

Despite Google’s simplistic interface, search is complicated. For example when a user in San Francisco enters a query like google.com/search?q=blogoscoped, the user’s browser first completes a DNS lookup mapping www.google.com to a specific IP address. At this stage, Google’s DNS load balancer determines which cluster of computers at which of Google’s 36+ data centers will process the query.

Pioneer, the Japanese drive manufacturer, has developed the first laboratory prototype of a Blu-ray Disc that can store 400 gigabytes on one side. Each of its 16 storage layers holds 25 gigabytes. The previous record holder, TDK, only managed to squeeze 200 gigabytes on to 6 to 8 storage layers.

Pioneer says the greatest difficulty it had to overcome was extracting a useful optical signal from the sandwiched layers. Its new lens technology however does a very good job of compensating for spherical aberration in the optical path and minimizing crosstalk and transmission losses, so the optical sensor is able to get a good signal even from the lowest layer.

The success of the prototype will probably be exploited mainly for publicity purposes. It is doubtful, given the current state of the art, that such a 16-layer Blu-ray Disc would ever go into production. Present-day Blu-ray Discs can store 50 gigabytes on two layers. The return from the production effort falls dramatically with each additional storage layer, so economically justifiable mass production still seems far off.

For a practical drive, higher transfer rates would be desirable. If a 400-gigabyte disc were written to at the normal Blu-ray transfer rate – 4.5 megabytes per second – it would take 25 hours for the burner to fill it. Because of speed restrictions, it’s expected that the Blu-ray Disc will in the future be limited to being read or written at a maximum of 12X. This makes it more likely that the technology developed by Pioneer will be used in coming generations of new optical storage media, rather than in a Blu-ray device.