Google has released an update for Chrome, their own web browser. From their advisory here: "Google Chrome's Stable channel has been updated to version 2.0.172.31 to fix two security issues in WebKit." CVE-2009-1690 is a memory corruption which can lead to arbitrary code execution within the sandbox. CVE-2009-1718 is an information leak. Both CVE's name Apple Safari, however they also affect Google Chrome.

Google will soon be coming to 11 of Canada's largest cities including Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg and Calgary. The Internet giant will be driving around cities in the coming weeks to map the streets of Canada to include a street-eye view of streets, buildings and their surroundings.

The street view will provide users to help locate meeting spots, buildings and a better idea of their destination. With the added bonus of being able to see your own home on Google, many people raise privacy concerns, which Google is ready to handle. Images of people's faces and licence plates will be automatically blurred out, and any requested offensive images will be removed from the web site.

Google Street View - Canada will be added to the small list of available countries, including Australia, France and Britain. The popular service has been in use on Google for some time on mapping U.S. cities and streets for public view. Some popular street data has already been collected in Canada, where it will be made public soon, along with the 11 new major cities in Canada.

More info : Globe and Mail

Google isn’t just talking about hosting applications in the cloud any more. They’ve launched Google App Engine, an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. It consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store services.

At first blush this is a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).

However,Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

The service is completely free during the beta period, but there are ceilings on usage. Applications cannot use more than 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day.

One current limitation is a requirement that applications be written in Python, a popular scripting language for building modern web apps (Ruby and PHP are among others widely used). Google says that Python is just the first supported language, and that the entire infrastructure is designed to be language neutral. Google’s initial focus on Python makes sense because they use Python internally as their scripting language.

Google toolbar crashes IE 8 when the user goes to certain web sites. It crashed for me when I visited http://my.ebay.ca  and  http://www.google.com/ig

Way to reproduce:

• Install Google tool bar, in my case toolbar was installed when I upgraded.
• go to http://www.google.com/ig Google toolbar gives you a crashed warning and takes IE with it.

Severity can be high if you had already set http://www.google.com/ig as your home page because you are stuck in an endless loop that can only be fixed if you uninstall the toolbar. Note that the crash doesn't occur if you are in Emulate IE7 mode.