...At Google.

Microsoft's new multimedia hub goes down a storm on Google with it being the top searched for query. Microsoft's main competitor - Darth Vader is way down in 10th place, while their other competitor Sony's PlayStation 3 is struggling in 3rd behind country singer Kenny Chesney.

Xbox 360 Degrees:

It's now emerged that most of the demonstrations that Sony have been showing of the PlayStation 3 are fake. This won't strike anyone as being very surprising with Sony's past record (the PS2 announcement, lots of fancy demos and "Toy Story graphics in real-time" look at what we actually got).

Earlier Epic's Mark Rein had confirmed that only their Unreal 3 engine demo was being rendered on early PS3 hardware and a few other less then spectacular titles, it even emerged that the Fight Night demonstration that EA showed had been put together on an Xbox 360 and then ported over to the PS3 as Sony had been so late in delivering their development kits to EA, despite the advanced graphics chip the PS3 had it still suffered from slow down and aliasing.

The most astonishing demonstration was definitely the Killzone video - Guerrilla's Jan-Bart Van Beek finally let it slip that it was all pre-rendered.

Is the Killzone sequence a fair example of what people can expect from realtime gameplay on Playstation 3?

Jan-Bart: It's basically a representation of the look and feel of the game we're trying to make.

It represents what you're trying to do with the game? Well where's the actual game then? Stop showing us videos and show us the game.

While Microsoft have their own surprises:

On the Microsoft front, after several people came out speaking about the hardware their demonstrations were actually running on - not being anywhere near the final machine... Dual core 2Ghz CPU and a Radeon 9800 Pro (in comparison the PC I'm writing this on is about even) shocked a lot of people. Microsoft's Robbie Bach finally confirmed them to be true, stating that they were only using the alpha development kits and that the final kits won't be ready until about July.

AnandTech found out more.

Advantage Xbox.

Wow.

A pair of unpatched vulnerabilities in Mozilla's Firefox Web browser -- rated as "extremely critical" by one security firm -- could allow an attacker to take control of a PC simply by getting a user to visit a malicious Web site.

Not good, and what's worse this exploit is actually out on the net today. This would mean the forth critical security patch for Firefox this year, when 1.0.4 is released, in comparison IE has only had 2, both of which were promptly fixed. I don't believe there is currently any solid release date for version 1.0.4 which would address these issues.

With all these people using Firefox, I actually had a look at the traffic logs for my sites over the last 7 days (about 50 000 visitors). Out of those using Firefox only 13% actually had the latest version 1.0.3 (which is as above not secure anyway), everyone else were using even older versions with loads of security issues.

Mozilla REALLY need to get a move on with releasing updates, and they need to get their users installing them. The autoupdate in the old versions certainly doesn't work right, I've got autoupdate enabled on one of mine (using 1.0.2) and it has yet to inform me about 1.0.3, which has been out for weeks. I have to go and manually check, which isn't a very nice experience with it being hidden in advanced options.

How is your average user who saw Firefox mentioned in the newspaper (most of which falsely claim it's "secure") going to know how to do that? Chances are they're running an even older version, have been fooled into thinking they have something "rock-solid and secure" and are going to end up with their machines compromised. Mozilla you're not in the little leagues anymore, not all of your users visit your update page every day and try out the nightly builds, you have to get ALL of your users up to date, and you have to get vulnerabilities fixed BEFORE samples of the exploit code get put up on the net.

Firefox is a ticking time bomb, it's getting close to critical-unpatched mass, Mozilla had better do something fast, because if a lot of users do suddenly find their machines not working they're gonna end up with a very bad taste in their mouths that will hang around for years to come.

The media drive in my server finally died either today or yesterday, not exactly sure when.

*salutes* 80GB 120GXP after approx 94 608 000 seconds of faithful service you give your data to the great beyond.