Mark your calenders everyone, July 13th 2009 will be the day that Microsoft will officially announce the Windows 7 RTM. This also happens to be the same day as the Worldwide Partner Conference 09 in New Orleans.

We are likely to see many more leaked builds before the July 13th date, as Microsoft engineers continue to smash bugs and other problematic showstopper issues. On July 13th, all manufactures will be able to get their hands on the RTM to begin testing with their software and hardware.

The Windows 7 GA or General Availability build will come on October 22nd, which is the version that's released to the entire world. The build may or may not change from the RTM stage to the GA stage, it's dependent on whether or not any showstopper bugs are found by the manufactures.

During a presentation at the SyScan conference in Singapore, Charlie Miller, a renown security expert and winner of the Pwn2Own hacker contest, unveiled a disturbing vulnerability in the iPhone. The vulnerability would allow him to inject SMS messages into the iPhone and then have the recipient of the message automatically run malicious code on the phone.

The worst part of the vulnerability is that the owner of the phone would run the code without any kind of warning that such code is being ran on the phone. The malicious code could contain a payload that would make your phone join a DDOS attack or botnet on a web site or address. It could also contain code that would present the attacker with your precise location, live on a map as well as take pictures or turn on the audio recorder to snoop in on what you were talking about.

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Arianespace yesterday launched the largest commercial satellite into space, the TerreStar-1 for North America satellite phone company, TerreStar Networks Inc.

The launch was carried out by Ariane 5 ECA from the European Space Port in the Guiana Space Center. TerreStar-1 was built by Space Systems Loral in Palo Alto, California on behalf of the satellite operator TerreStar Networks Inc. based in Reston, Virginia. Weighing nearly 6,910 kg at launch, TerreStar-1 is the largest commercial communications satellite ever launched. It will be positioned at 111 degrees West, offering new-generation mobile communications services across the entire United States and Canada.

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NASA said the fueling test that was conducted on the shuttle just hours ago, uncovered no 'worrisome' gas leaks.

At about 9 a.m., the liquid hydrogen tank was 98 percent full and the "topping" mode began. A vent valve at the top of the hydrogen tank began cycling, as planned, to disperse excess gaseous Hydrogen through a vent system that carries it safely away from the launch pad. At that point during two June launch attempts, a gaseous hydrogen leak was detected outside the Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate, or GUCP, where the vent line is attached.

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Still running Windows 7 Beta? You may want to upgrade, today. Beginning today Microsoft said that your system will shutdown every 2 hours, in an effort to encourage you to upgrade to Windows 7 RC from the Beta builds.

If you plan on moving over to the Windows 7 RC you'll need to be off of it by March 1st, 2010 as you will suffer the same 2-hour shutdown stipulation as well. If you're running the beta, I'd say upgrade to the Windows 7 RC and in the meantime, pre-order a discounted copy of Windows 7 Retail edition so you can upgrade to it once it has been released on October 22nd, 2009.

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Not more than two weeks ago, Apple released the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade to the public and now they have just released the iPhone OS 3.1 update to developers. The new beta build 7C97D for iPhone OS 3.1 has no official changes as of yet but reports suggest that it makes both the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS much speedier moving around in the operating system.

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The Sirius FM5 satellite was launched into orbit this morning from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahstan. The new satellite will provide additional broadcasting capabilities for Sirius XM Radio.

A Proton Breeze M rocket capable of nearly 2.5 million pounds of thrust, launched the 12,831-pound satellite into space. After a 9 hour 14 minute mission, the Breeze M successfully released the SIRIUS FM-5 satellite, weighing over 5.8 metric tons, into geo-transfer orbit.  This was the 346th launch for the Proton. The Proton Breeze M vehicle is developed and built by Khrunichev Research and Production Space Center of Moscow, Russias premier space manufacturer.

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The latest version of Windows 7 has leaked out onto the Internet, this time it is Windows 7 Build 7264 which has a build string of 6.1.7264.0.win7_rtm.090622-1900.

We have also seen reports of Windows 7 Build 7265 being leaked already which carries the build string of 6.1.7265.0.win7_rtm.090624-1905 which means it was compiled on June 24th.

As of now, we are only a few weeks away from the final RTM version of the operating system. Stay tuned for the final build name!

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NASA today began filling the space shuttle Endeavour's fuel tank to perform leak tests to make sure the shuttle is finally ready to launch on July 11th.

NASA crew began filling a half-million gallons of the liquid hydrogen and oxygen into the main external fuel tank this morning in preparations for the tests.

During the shuttle launch attempts last month, gas leaked from a plate on the fuel tank that attaches to the vent line. Engineers believed the leak was caused by a slightly misaligned plate. They installed a new seal and washers and believe this may correct the problem.

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Mozilla has officially released the Firefox 3.5 web browser today, it's latest and most feature rich browser to date. The new browser brings us a revamped JavaScript engine for faster page loading, many new features such as the ability to browse the web in private, and HTML5 support.

Looking at the Firefox 3.5 Release Notes we see the major new features;

• Support for the HTML5
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors and offline application storage,

The Pirate Bay team which recently went to court and loss for copyright violations, has launched a brand-new site called VideoBay. Video Bay provides streaming content of TV shows, music videos and more.

The new video streaming site is definitely still in beta, perhaps even alpha, because the site comes with a warning that states, "Don't expect anything to work at all". The on-going development of the site will take up to several years according to Peter Sunde of Pirate Bay.

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News stories have been circulating the media today about the new Apple iPhone 3GS phones having problems with overheating. Whoopty do! Let's see any company double the speed of a phone by upgrading the CPU and it not heat up more without any additional changes to the cooling from the earlier model. Yeah, I know the new processor doesn't get much hotter than the older one because of the smaller transistors being used. It gets hot, big deal so does the iPhone 3G! Most of the phones I've had get really hot after long exposure, what makes the iPhone 3GS any different?

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After Firefox 3.5 RC2 being released, just last week, Mozilla Labs will be unveiling the Firefox 3.5 Final version tomorrow!

The release of Firefox 3.5 comes six months later than originally planned. The delay was mostly because of the amount of bugs that were found along the way, as well as revamping the JavaScript engine to compete with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8.


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Britney Spears has died, at least according to her Twitpic account on Sunday. This turned out to be false along with information being sent out from Ellen DeGeneres TwitPic account, because someone had broke into the two accounts and began sending out false information from them.

Twitpic is a service that allows Twitter uses to share photos. While TwitPic isn't owned by Twitter, it is a widely used service but apparently has flaws of its own.

Twitpic informed users Sunday to disregard false messages from Spears' account and said that they were implementing a fix to the vulnerability immediately. We tried reaching them and none of our emails were returned.

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NASA has launched the new GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) known as the GEOS-0 on Saturday. The new weather satellite will serve as a spare for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who uses the satellite's to track hurricanes and other weather events.

The GOES-0 was launched at Cape Canaveral using the Delta IV rocket. The new satellite will work it's way into its final orbit location by July 7th. Once the satellite is in orbit and fully operational the name of it will change to GOES-14. At this time, the satellite will be handed over to the government by Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems on July 18th.

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