The Opera 10 browser is now ready to download for Windows, and Mac, and Linux, three months after the beta first emerged (hands-on Opera 10 beta review).

If you’ve been keeping up with the beta updates, the final build of the cross-platform browser shouldn’t surprise you. Opera Turbo, the browser’s much-publicized compression engine for slow-poke connections, remains a feature highlight. Opera claims that Opera Turbo runs the browser up to eight times faster on suffering connections than do competing browsers.

The refreshed user interface is also noteworthy. Joining the new default skin (changed from version 9.6), are changes to tab bar behavior. The conventional tabs double as thumbnail images. Double-click the thin gray bar below the tabs (indicated by dots) or click and drag to expand open tabs into preview windows that you can navigate by clicking among them.

Other enhancements include an expanded Speed Dial (a feature that has later been adopted and adapted in Google’s Chrome browser) that shows more commonly visited Web pages than in previous Opera browsers. You’re also able to customize it with a background picture. You’ll see that spell check will be applicable to any text field (for 51 languages), and that Opera’s incorporated e-mail client takes a page from Google’s books by threading e-mail conversations.

Developers get access to a newer version of Opera Dragonfly, the publisher’s online development tools, but everyone can benefit from the speedier rendering engine that, according to Opera, makes version 10 up to 40 percent faster than version 9.6–before switching on Turbo’s compression.

Despite all the additions that Opera hopes will keep Opera 10 competitive, there are still two notable omissions for this final release. The first is Opera Unite, which uses your browser as a Web server for sharing your content with others. The second is the Carakan JavaScript engine that promises to process JavaScript about 2.5 times as fast as the engine used in Opera 10 alpha.

News, Review browser, Opera 10

  Friday’s release of the new version of the Mac OS, dubbed Snow Leopard, could include some security features that would make it secure, or at least push it closer to the level of security that Vista and Windows 7 have, experts said this week.

Contrary to popular Mac fanboy belief, Macintosh is not more secure from a software standpoint than modern Windows; it’s merely safer to use because malware writers prefer to target the platform with the biggest install base, according to Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi, co-authors of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook, which came out this spring.

“Apple hasn’t implemented all the security features that Vista has,” Miller said. “They made some improvements in Leopard, but they are still behind.”

If there is any truth to rumors circulating about Snow Leopard, the operating system security playing field could become more level as of this weekend and Mac users will really have something to brag about.

First off, a screen shot published on the Mac Security Blog of Intego on Tuesday appears to show a security feature supposedly in Snow Leopard that looks like it is detecting a Trojan in a disk image being downloaded via Safari. The post cites unnamed reports about an anti-malware feature being added.

“If it’s true, it will mark a fundamental change in that Apple will be admitting that their operating system is as susceptible to malware as other operating systems,” Miller said.

CNET’s review of Snow Leopard posted late on Wednesday says that File Quarantine, first introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, has been refined in Snow Leopard. File Quarantine checks for known malware signatures and displays an alert dialog if it finds a known offender and will be automatically updated via Mac OS X’s software update as new malware signatures are found in the wild, the review says.

It’s unclear whether rumors are true that Snow Leopard includes several internal features designed to prevent attacks that Vista and Windows 7 have, known as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) on that platform.

By randomizing the location of key pieces of data, ASLR makes it much more difficult for attackers to predict where data is going to be in order to execute their code or the code resident in the process. For exploit code that gets past the ASLR barrier, DEP will try to block it from running, recognizing that it is data and not a legitimate code.

“If you have both, it’s hard for an exploit to get around it. Leopard has some ASLR but everything is not randomized and Leopard has no DEP,” Miller said. “Things could change significantly for the Mac if they do a good job…That was my main gripe with it.”

In June, Dai Zovi reported on a new local privilege escalation vulnerability researchers had discovered that gives local root access on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. He offered up a wish list for Snow Leopard that included: real” ASLR; “full use of hardware-enforced Non-eXecutable memory (NX);” default 64-bit native execution for security-sensitive processes; sandbox policies for Safari, Mail.app, and third-party applications (akin to what Chrome has); and Mandatory code signing for kernel extensions.

Apple’s Mac OS X security page makes reference to offering sandboxing, Library Randomization, and Execute Disable, but there are no details.

An Apple spokeswoman did not follow up on an e-mail request seeking an interview for this story.

The Snow Leopard Web site says it will offer protection against some common types of heap buffer overflow exploits but not new types of such memory overflow exploits, according to Dai Zovi.

The security level in Leopard falls in between Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Vista, he said. If Snow Leopard has full ASLR and DEP, it would bring its security close to the level of Vista, he added.

While adding full ASLR and DEP to Snow Leopard will boost the operating system’s defenses against targeted attacks, the Mac OS software arguably has more holes that malware can slip through, Miller said. “It would be fair to say that Mac has more bugs, but it’s impossible to measure,” he said. Read more…

Apple, News, Review Apple, Mac OS, Snow Leopard

Intel teamed up with GridRepublic on Monday to launch a Facebook application that allows the spare processing power in a PC to be used to fight diseases and study climate change.

The massive amount of data crunching necessary for high level research is often extremely expensive or not readily available–or both. Intel’s solution is Progress Thru Processors, a computing application built on the Facebook platform that allows people to donate their PC’s available data processing capacity to research projects such as Rosetta@home, which uses computers to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases.

In addition to Rosetta@home, Progress Thru Processors participants can choose to contribute processor power to the research efforts of Climateprediction.net and Africa@home. Climateprediction.net is dedicated to increased understanding of global climate change by predicting the Earth’s climate and testing the accuracy of climate models. Africa@home is currently focused on finding optimal strategies to combat malaria by studying simulation models of disease transmission and the potential impact of new anti-malarial drugs and vaccines.

“By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers,” Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager of corporate marketing, said in a statement.

The application was launched Monday as a public beta and available to all Facebook users and is available for download here.

The application will activate only when a PC’s performance is not being fully utilized. When the participant’s computer usage demands more processor performance, the application defers and sits idle until spare processing capabilities become available again, Intel said. The application runs automatically as a background process on a PC and will not affect performance or any other tasks, according to Intel.

Progress Thru Processors does not require participants to leave their computers powered up unnecessarily. By keeping their PCs on only as they normally would, participants will still be contributing, Intel said.

News facebook, Intel

In ‘Terminator Salvation,’ visual effects and computer graphics played a big part in making many of the action sequences look realistic. This is a mototerminator, a key evil robot in the film, and one that required the visual effects team at ILM to work hard on making an exploding car do what they wanted.

What do you do if you’re a filmmaker trying to capture a scene in which an onrushing tow truck slams into a parked car, sending the car rolling neatly up and over the truck’s back, but you face the reality that the car, vaulted into the air by a cannon shot from below, actually flies high above the truck?

If you’re making “Terminator Salvation,” or T4 as it’s known, the latest salvo in the 25-year-old series, you turn to the visual effects experts at Industrial Light & Magic and depend on them to solve the problem.

And solve it they did. Those who see the film, which opened Friday, will see the collision rocket the car into the air and, indeed, roll right over the back of the tow truck. They’ll never know that in real-life, the car actually soared high and straight up into the air.

Why did it matter? According to Ben Snow, the ILM visual effects supervisor on T4–who had the same title on films like “King Kong” and “Iron Man”–it had every bit to do with the film’s story. In the scene, the driver of the tow truck is trying to derail a so-called mototerminator, a high-speed killer robot in the body of a super motorcycle that is chasing fast behind. But the mototerminator is an intelligent machine, and isn’t so easily knocked down.

So, Snow said, the point of the exploding car is that it’s supposed to fall over the top of the truck and into the mototerminator’s path, providing the evil robot the chance to showcase its instant maneuvering skills. And to turn that high-flying car into something that looks, on-screen, just as the script called for required a whole lot of visual effects.

“Usually we try and do it” for real, Snow said, “but it would be a miracle with an effect like this. So you weigh if it’s worth standing around with an expensive film crew for a day trying to get it. Do we have more than one go at it?”

Instead, Snow explained, the real-life footage of the car exploding into the air was enough for the visual effects team to get going on the computer graphics (CG) version of the sequence. They combined the real footage with a digital version of the car that was based on some still photos they’d taken, and then they simulated the desired rolling-over-the-truck effect using ILM’s proprietary rigid body simulation tools in order to produce the CG version.

Snow said that the footage of the truck, taken from behind, was doctored with visual effects to show it from the point of view of the mototerminator, which has a heads-up display calculating what’s happening with the car.

“The story point,” Snow said, “is that this mototerminator is reacting to the car, and able to do an incredibly nimble evasive maneuver to get out of the way. So we’re trying to tell the story of these things being really bad-ass.”

In the past, a movie studio might still have tried to produce a similar effect but Snow said that filmmakers might well have been less likely to turn to CG for the effect.

“I think we would have tried a lot harder to get the effect for real with the car,” he said. “I can now depend on effects. I can take existing material and re-project it and get it to do what I need to…I can count on the fact that I can get a believable rigid-body simulation of something like a crumpling, rolling car. I mean, we were doing those kinds of things (a few years ago) on “Twister” and “Star Wars.” But if you compare the realism of what we’re able to achieve now to what we were able to achieve five years ago, it’s way more realistic now.”

That sort of advance, Snow continued, means that Warner Bros. and director McG can “make a Terminator for the 21st century…updated to give it a more gritty, edgy feel. Instead a guy puppeteering the robot, we’re able to have the robot running around and chasing people.”

Explosions on a bridge
Another of T4’s major action sequences involves a large-scale battle that includes several forceful explosions on a bridge high over a river gorge. But Snow said that since it was obvious that the filmmakers couldn’t conduct the explosions on the actual bridge–the fantastic Rio Grande Gorge Bridge near Taos, N.M.–it was necessary to film the sequence in three different places and then blend the footage together using visual effects and CG.

The sequence was shot on the bridge, on a nearby roadway and on a set on a field in Albuquerque, N.M., where they could actually blow up a truck.

The sequence, then, involves combining footage from the three different locations, going back and forth between them depending on the severity of destruction in each frame, and using CG to patch them together seamlessly.

Snow explained that putting the sequence together meant marrying footage from all three locations, adding digital backgrounds when needed, adding railings to the CG bridge, and adding the CG truck to the bridge.

“We re-projected this onto the (CG bridge) so I could have the truck fall over the edge, because in the original, it didn’t fall over the edge,” Snow said. And “those sort of techniques are just some of the things that we’ve been perfecting over the years: re-projection, the ability to say, ‘Well, we can go and do this, shoot at three different locations, and we don’t always have to use blue screen.’ …We can make it so you don’t know which bit of the bridge is CG.”

And, importantly, it means that for the filmmakers, there’s no worrying about whether they can fulfill the all-important script element of blowing up a truck on a bridge.

Molten metal
For Snow’s visual effects teams, the hardest part of working on T4 was getting the film’s molten metal sequence just right. This meant making a scene in which melted metal pours through a terminator look believable, even though it’s done in CG.

“We have some very good fluid simulation tools that we’ve developed over the years,” Snow said, “but getting the molten metal to pour in and through this skeletal robot and look believable involved a lot more computing power than we’ve (ever used before). That was surprisingly hard, given that in the end, it’s only in a few shots.” It’s funny seeing the film now, Snow said, because it’s over in seconds and took days and more than a hundred high-power processors to create.

By comparison, Snow said, previous fluid sequences in films like “Pearl Harbor” used 30 lower-power processors and were considered beyond state-of-the-art at the time.

Today, visual effects teams like those at ILM still struggle to do realistic digital doubles and CG fire, Snow said, but the barriers to such effects are breaking down rapidly. And that could mean that in the near future, filmmakers can turn to CG to get just about any effect they want.

“The sky is the limit with digital technology,” Snow said. “We’re not limited by physical constraint. And so there’s no time for complacency.”

News, Review CG, T4, Terminator Salvation