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Long experience has taught me to be leery of new software. It’s much better to wait and let everyone else find the bugs before even thinking of changing my set-up.
In the case of Mozilla Firefox 3 I made an exception, spurred in part by the hype surrounding its attempt to set a one-day download record. (Mission accomplished.)
After nearly a day living with the new Firefox, it’s very nice. Very, very nice.
I must admit that Firefox 2 often frustrated me, crashing at inopportune moments. (I can break anything.) So far (knock on wood) Firefox 3 is sailing through like a champ.
One thing I often do is bring up a host of tabs while writing a story, as many as two dozen. Firefox 2 hiccuped badly. Firefox 3 seems to handle it.
Firefox 2 would sometimes forget that I like big text for these old eyes. Firefox 3 hasn’t forgotten yet. (This is now called the Zoom feature. It used to be called increase or decrease text size.)
One reason I was reluctant to be a beta-tester for Firefox 3 was because I have add-ons, some of which I paid for, and the beta versions did not support them. It took me five minutes to get them working in Firefox 3.
There are new security settings on the Advanced tab under Tools, which are very, very nice. I especially like being warned if the page tries to re-load — a favorite phisher trick foiled.
You can customize the controls on toolbars through a single screen accessed from the View menu. The Page Source under View is also very clear now — makes it easy to see how pages are made.
Entering unfamiliar Web pages is now easier. As soon as you start entering an address, the new Firefox starts guessing at your meaning. Keep typing and it’s bound to guess right, so you click on that entry and don’t go wrong.

blogs.zdnet.com

This week, as first reported by CNET News.com, Microsoft talked publicly about COFEE, its free Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor. The company demonstrated the tool as part of a law enforcement conference held in Redmond.
COFEE is a USB drive that allows law enforcement to run more than 150 commands on a live computer system and save the results on the portable drive for later analysis. This preserves valuable information that could be lost if the computer had to be shut down and transported to a lab–files that are stored in active memory would otherwise be lost, for example.
COFEE was developed in 2006 by Ricci Ieong and Anthony Fung, both members of the High Tech Crime Investigators Associate’s (HTCIA) Asia South Pacific Chapter. Fung now works for Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement team in Hong Kong and used to be on the police force there. Ieong is founder and principal consultant for eWalker Consulting.
COFEE consists of plain text scripts; the data collected from these scripts is routed to a provided USB drive. Although intended for use with a command line, there is also an option for GUI. Raw text captures generate either SH1 or md5 checksums. The results for an acquisition are then presented in either plain text or HTML. Each operation produces its own log file to help investigators.
Although Microsoft would not confirm any specific tools included within COFEE, it did say that all the tools were publicly available. A quick search by CNET revealed several free Windows-based digital forensic tool kits available for download. These include:
Several news reports have suggested that Microsoft is also providing law enforcement with new tools to defeat BitLocker in Windows Vista or access to a secret back door within Windows. A Microsoft spokesperson denied this, saying, “COFEE does not circumvent Windows Vista BitLocker encryption or undermine any protections in Windows through secret ‘backdoors’ or other undocumented means.” Microsoft also stressed that COFEE is still in beta.

news.com