For champions of the open source blogging platform, the latest installment of Wordpress has just been released. Aiming more for polish and bug fixing, it’s surprising the number of features crammed into this release.

Nicknamed “Baker”, most of the changes to Wordpress 2.8 are behind the scenes. The overall back-end system being easier to use for the person in charge of the site, as well as having more customisation features on the Dashboard and post listing pages.

There are also improvements to the Theme selection page – with the ability to search online, according to tickboxes relating to style and colour, for hundred’s of available to download themes. Simply click on the Add New Themes item in the Appearance tab and you’ll be searching in seconds. The Themes also have the ability to install into your blog without you having to upload them manually. The widget management has also been polished up to make things a little clearer and straightforward.

The code editor, if you really like to get your hands dirty with Wordpress, now features syntax highlighting, making it easier to navigate and edit your php & css files. Something programmers have been crying out for!

There are also many bug fixes (790 in all) and an overall speed improvement. If you use Wordpress on your site, I suggest you upgrade immediately! Techsnake.com had no problems and was upgraded within minutes.

If you’re unlucky enough to live outside of the UK, the US or Germany, then you will notice that the free use of last.fm to stream music has been taken away.

A move that in keeping with the current economic climate, and the acquisition of last.fm by CBS, means that users outside of the 3 lucky countries will have to pay a subscription fee of €3 a month. Of course, if you have access to a particularly fast proxy server in one of those countries, you can escape the charge..

The impression everyone was given in the community was that IE8 would be different. It would be web standards compliant. Well bad news folks..

It appears that a few sites don’t actually render correctly in the Beta version of Microsoft’s upcoming answer to the modern browser wars. IE8 Beta fails to render 2,400 sites in initial tests, as their creators expected. And those aren’t a few never-before-heard-of sites, but major sites that get millions of hits. Check out the list in a recent ZDNet post.

Now you can argue that the browser is a beta, so things can change, but my argument is that the engine (the part that actually renders web pages) isn’t going to change at all. The only differences between this “platform ready” beta version and the release version boils down to a few GUI changes or usability adjustments.

So expect another Microsoft-broken internet, at least for the foreseeable future. Tech Snake isn’t worried however – the vast majority of visitors to this website use Firefox, or another browser that is sensitive to the web standards. So congrats to everyone who has seen the light!

A significant part of the British government has spoken out against the recent surge of recording and tracking the general public’s whereabouts and communications.

CCTV cameras, databases recording emails, SMS communication and Internet traffic have all been in the news lately, and covered in some depth on Tech Snake. And it appears that government officials have also taken note on the intrusions into civic liberty.

Read all of this article…

And it gets better – apparently the current release candidate is "platform complete" – meaning that this version will be identical to the final release, which is due in the near future.

IE8 looks to remove, or at least diminish, the previous bad press with the browser by being more web standards compliant. The web standards, laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium, lay out how a browser should render a page correctly The long standing acid tests, from The Web Standards Project is used as a benchmark online, which is known to test almost every aspect of the rendering engine. And the results for IE8 are encouraging. When released it should finally be able to pass the Acid 2 test – which is a first for Microsoft.. Of course then there’s the newer Acid 3 test to tackle!

Download the latest version from Microsoft, but remember that technically it is still Beta.

Deal after deal have fallen through, and now Sky Broadband are the latest on the list of companies unwilling to front the £600 million asking price.

Sky, only prepared to part with £450 million, ended talks with the Italian owned ISP (who also have Pipex & Homechoice under the Tiscali umbrella). Of course, you can argue that the company should be worth less anyway, after loosing 37,000 customers since it was announced they were looking for buyers.

I personally have a lot of history with the ISP that includes appalling download rates and congestion. I also have friends and family that have had similar stories to mine. However, I do understand that cheap broadband breeds that sort of thing – and as many people around the country have already done, you should vote with your feet.

So with Tiscali’s bad press will a buyer ever be found that is willing to cough up £600 million?

As detailed two days ago, a serious security flaw was highlighted for Internet Explorer. If you do not have Automatic Updates turned on (which I would strongly suggest) you can visit Microsoft’s site to apply the patch manually here to make sure your system is patched and up to date.

Users of Internet Explorer are being urged to switch to a different browser in a bid to escape a serious zero day flaw.

Internet Explorer 5, 6 and 7 are all shown to contain the flaw that could potentially allow somebody access to your computer. Admittedly, if you stick to well known websites you should be relatively safe, although Trend Micro Anti-Virus estimate 10,000 websites have already been compromised – with many more to follow after the flaw has been made public.

So maybe now is the push you need if you’re still using Internet Explorer, to perhaps switch to a more secure alternative? Firefox, Chrome or Opera (or even Flock) are alternatives that are actually faster and more web standards compliant than Internet Explorer also, so it’s a win-win situation. If however you don’t have a choice and you’re stuck with Internet Explorer, make sure that the browser is put into it’s high security mode (Tools menu, Internet Options, Security Tab, Internet – set the slider to “High”) and also make sure you only stick to websites you know and trust.

For the uninitiated, Flock is an open-source social network browser based on the same codebase as Firefox (Mozilla/Gecko). Because of this it has the same speed and security of it’s better known cousin. I had used Flock for a short period about six months ago so I thought it was time I revisited the project, and do a mini review of the current features.

After visiting flock.com and downloading the latest version, you find during the setup (not surprisingly) that if you’re used to Firefox, there are going to be no great surprises here. After the install has finished you are given the option of importing bookmarks from the other browsers on your system (and has support for the current front runners – IE, Firefox and Opera). Once finished you’ll be surprised at the clean and interesting look to the browser which does set it apart from Firefox – that, and of course, all of the extra goodies.

Read all of this article…

People turned out in their thousands to protest against Australia’s equivalent to the Great Firewall of China.

It seems as though Australian MPs had decided a nanny state is the way forward, instead of educating the (mis)users of the internet. All but one of the ISPs in Australia refused recently to conduct trials with the new system, so it should have been plain enough to expect a reaction.

The Digital Liberty Coalition organised the rallies in every capital city on the 13th of December to bring home the message that the average Australian isn’t going to take the censorship sitting down. 15,000 were expected plus speeches from Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontiers of Australia (EFA). Read the nocensorhip.info article for details.