Users of the Pale Moon browser recently discovered, upon upgrading to Pale Moon 25, that 2 popular add-ons for blocking ads (Adblock Plus & Adblock Edge) no longer worked properly. The main complaint was the disappearance of the toolbar icon.

This issue was the result of a decision of the Pale Moon developers to stop identifying the browser as Firefox variant, and for Pale Moon to have its own unique application GUID.

In most cases this caused no issues with regards to add-on compatibility, since Pale Moon does accept add-ons with a Firefox GUID, as well as those with a Pale Moon GUID.

But with regards to Adblock Plus and Adblock Edge, there will be a need going forward for both add-ons to officially support Pale Moon, or they will not work.

You can read more about it here:

• Extensions and Pale Moon 25
• Changes to Pale Moon GUID and XUL Overlay Adjustments

Unless and/or until both add-ons begin officially supporting Pale Moon, you will either have to find other means for blocking ads, or use this edited Adblock Plus add-on, from the Pale Moon site. Please be sure to remove Adblock Plus/Adblock Edge from your browser before installing this version:

• Adblock Plus (Pseudo-Static)

After installing this version you will notice the return of your toolbar icon and that the add-on functions as it should.

As you may have heard, Keurig is engaged in a battle with a host of companies that aspire to provide consumers with ‘pirate’ coffee pods. And who is losing this battle? The consumer.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Keurig’s business model is pretty much the same as the business model used by most producers of desktop printers. Desktop printers have become almost trivially cheap — you can buy a laser printer for under a hundred bucks now — but the cartridges cost a bundle. That’s where they make their money. Likewise, Keurig sells its popular single-cup coffee makers at astonishingly reasonable prices, and makes its money on the coffee pods. Naturally, given that the pods are lucrative and easy to make, there have been imitators. A large number of companies have sold, over the last few years, their own “K-cups,” pods of coffee designed specifically to work in Keurig’s machines. Consumers love this, both because competition lowers prices and because it expands the range of roasts and flavours available.

To fight the onslaught of packagers of (perfectly legal) pirate K-cups, Keurig recently starting selling its “Keurig 2.0″ line of coffee makers. The 2.0 machines incorporate a digital rights management (DRM) system, designed to ensure that Keurig machines work only with Keurig branded and Keurig licensed pods, effectively shutting out the competition, at least temporarily. The result is that all those non-licensed Keurig imitators won’t work in the new 2.0 machines.

This gave me a really sick feeling in my stomach.  :sick:

As a young man, Kevin Mitnick became the world’s most notorious black hat hacker, breaking into the networks of companies like IBM, Nokia, Motorola, and other targets. After a stint in prison, he reinvented himself as a white hat hacker, selling his skills as a penetration tester and security consultant.

With his latest business venture, Mitnick has switched hats again: This time to an ambiguous shade of gray.

Late last week, Mitnick revealed a new branch of his security consultancy business he calls Mitnick’s Absolute Zero Day Exploit Exchange. Since its quiet inception six months ago, he says the service has offered to sell corporate and government clients high-end “zero-day” exploits, hacking tools that take advantage of secret bugs in software for which no patch yet exists. Mitnick says he’s offering exploits developed both by his own in-house researchers and by outside hackers, guaranteed to be exclusive and priced at no less than $100,000 each, including his own fee.

And what will his clients do with those exploits? “When we have a client that wants a zero-day vulnerability for whatever reason, we don’t ask, and in fact they wouldn’t tell us,” Mitnick tells WIRED in an interview. “Researchers find them, they sell them to us for X, we sell them to clients for Y and make the margin in between.”

Mitnick declined to name any of his customers, and wouldn’t say how many, if any, exploits his exchange has brokered so far. But the website he launched to reveal the project last week offers to use his company’s “unique positioning among security researchers and the hacker community” to connect exploit developers with “discerning government and corporate buyers.”

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