Firefox 3.5 Vulnerability Rated 'Highly Critical'

By Thomas Claburn July 14, 2009

US-CERT on Tuesday warned about vulnerability in the new Firefox 3.5 browser that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code. Proof-of-concept exploit code was posted Monday on Milw0rm.com, an exploit code aggregation site, so it's likely that the vulnerability is being actively exploited. The vulnerability, discovered by Simon Berry-Byrne, is related to the way Firefox 3.5 processes JavaScript code. Mozilla has acknowledged the vulnerability and has a fix that's being tested. "The vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code," the company said on its security blog. "The vulnerability can be mitigated by disabling the JIT in the JavaScript engine.

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DirectX 11 Compute Shader: Three times faster than DX10.1

By Carsten Spille Jul 14, 2009

AMD's Developer Relations boss Richard Huddy explains the mode of operation of Ambient Occlusion - the DirectX 11 Compute Shader is said to provide up to three times the performance possible with DirectX 10.1. Using a Compute Shader path in DirectX 11 could offer up to three times the performance possible with DirectX 10.1, mentions Richard Huddy, AMD Developer Relations, in an interview with Pc Games Hardware. And even in DirectX 10.1 modern Radeon cards with their Fetch4 feature are able surpass pure DirectX 10 devices like the current Geforces. But at the same time Huddy explains that Compute Shader is uncharted territory for developers and thus it is hard to integrate. Getting the optimum out of it is even harder currently.

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