“Gamers have shown great interest and support for competitive gaming, so we are pleased to offer BringIt as a player-driven service that quickly connects gamers, allowing them to play legally for cash while getting a more intense competitive rush,” said BringIt CEO and founder Woody Levin in a statement.

BringIt works with any video game platform with online capabilities supporting head-to-head competition. Once users register for the service, they’re required to add some money to their BringIt account through PayPal or a major credit card. Once the funds have been received, they can find other players across the globe and challenge them to a game.

So far, BringIt allows players to challenge each other in Madden NFL 2009, Gears of War 2, FIFA 2009, Halo 3, Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock, Rock Band 2, Super Smash Bros Brawl, and Mario Kart, among others. Once users pick a game, they mutually decide how much of their own cash they want to wager and face off against each other online. Scores are then reported back to BringIt, which then sends the funds to the winning party, while keeping a portion of the payout for itself.

BringIt claims that its service is legal because video games are games of skill and its service does not violate any anti-gambling laws across the world. That said, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and others take issue with BringIt profiting off their IP.

BringIt is currently in open beta and is scheduled for a full-fledged launch at some point in the next four months.

Considering that Flash games are hosted all over the place, and rarely with a ubiquitous user interface, you’re likely to run into a good number of them that must be played in whatever space they’ve been given on a Web page. With Flash Game Maximizer, however, you don’t have to worry about this at all.

Once the extension has been installed, you’ll get a new button on the bottom-right corner of your browser that turns yellow when it detects Flash. Clicking it resizes the game to fit your browser window. A slight caveat here is that it completely restarts whatever Flash module is on the page, which on most games means losing any progress.

Because Flash Game Maximizer is an “experimental” extension, you will need to log in to Mozilla’s add-on site to download it.

If you’re a Flash game enthusiast, I wholeheartedly recommend giving this a go. It works on my personal favorite, Totem Destroyer, as well as on Desktop Tower Defense.

Flash Game Maximizer turns almost any Flash game window into a full-screen affair, regardless of whether the developer made it an option. (click to enlarge)

The next test, essentially a “release candidate” version will come in the first quarter of 2009. That means the final release won’t hit Microsoft’s initial goal of finishing the browser this year.

“Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period,” general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting. “We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in Web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done.”

Microsoft first demonstrated the browser at the Mix conference in March. Among its improvements are malware protection, better standards support, and the ability to carve off a piece of a Web page, known as a Web slice. It also supports having private sessions that don’t get logged in a browser’s history.

The first beta version was released in March, with a second beta arriving over the summer.

Hachamovitch said that Web site developers should test their sites and report “any critical issues” to Microsoft.

“We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release,” he wrote. “We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release.”

Hachamovitch also called on technical users to download the current beta 2 version and let Microsoft know how that goes.

Step 1: Copy this code and paste it to wherever you intend to embed the video:

Step 2: Grab the direct link to your video. In case you’ve never done this before, it can be found to the right of the video player on YouTube or from your browser’s address bar.

Step 3: Tweak the embed code. The finishing touch involves making a simple change to embed’s URL source code to direct it to the HD version. To do this, you simply need to copy the alphanumeric gobbledygook at the end of the link you grabbed in step 2 and paste it into the part between /v/ and the & symbol in the embed code.

That’s it–you’re done, and all you had to do was use copy and paste twice!

Safari 3.2 is available via the Apple Software Update application, the Apple Software Downloads page, or Apple’s Safari download site.

Safari-1
This patch affects Safari users on Windows XP or Vista. This update addresses multiple vulnerabilities in zlib 1.2.2 detailed within CVE-2005-2096. Apple credits Robbie Joosten of bioinformatics@school, and David Gunnells of the University of Alabama at Birmingham for reporting the vulnerabilities.

Safari-2
This patch affects users of Windows XP or Vista. This update addresses the security issue in the libxslt library detailed within CVE-2008-1767 in which processing an XML document may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Apple credits Anthony de Almeida Lopes of Outpost24 AB, and Chris Evans of the Google Security Team for finding the vulnerability.

Safari-3
This patch affects users of Windows XP or Vista. The update addresses the heap buffer overflow issue that exists in the CoreGraphics’ handling of color spaces detailed within CVE-2008-3623 in which viewing a maliciously crafted image may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Apple credits itself for finding the vulnerability.

Safari-4
This patch affects users of Windows XP or Vista. This update addresses the security issue detailed within CVE-2008-2327 in which viewing a maliciously crafted TIFF image may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Apple credits itself for finding the vulnerability.

Safari-5
This patch affects users of Windows XP or Vista. The update addresses the vulnerabilities detailed within CVE-2008-2332 in which viewing a maliciously crafted TIFF image may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Specifically, a memory corruption issue exists in ImageIO’s handling of embedded ICC profiles in JPEG images. Apple credits Robert Swiecki of the Google Security Team for finding the vulnerability.

Safari-6
This patch affects users of Windows XP or Vista. This update addresses the security issue detailed within CVE-2008-3608 in which viewing a large maliciously crafted JPEG image may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Apple credits itself for finding the vulnerability.

Safari-7
This patch affects users of Windows XP or Vista. This update addresses the security issue detailed within CVE-2008-3642 in which viewing a maliciously crafted image may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Apple credits itself for finding the vulnerability.

Safari-8
This patch affects users of Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X v10.5.5, or Windows XP or Vista. The update addresses the vulnerabilities detailed within CVE-2008-3644 in which disabling autocomplete on a form field may not prevent the data in the field from being stored in the browser page cache. This may lead to the disclosure of sensitive information to a local user. Apple credits an anonymous researcher for finding the vulnerability.

WebKit-1
This patch affects users of Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X v10.5.5, or Windows XP or Vista. This update addresses the security issue detailed within CVE-2008-2303 in which visiting a maliciously crafted Web site may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Apple credits SkyLined of Google for finding the vulnerability.

WebKit-2
This patch affects users of Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X v10.5.5, and Windows XP or Vista. The update addresses the vulnerabilities detailed within CVE-2008-2317 in which visiting a maliciously crafted Web site may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Specifically, a memory corruption issue exists in WebCore’s handling of style sheet elements. The issue has already been addressed in systems running Mac OS X v10.5.5. Apple credits the TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative for finding the vulnerability.

Webkit-3
This patch affects users of Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X v10.5.5, and Windows XP or Vista. This update addresses the security issue detailed within CVE-2008-4216 in which visiting a maliciously crafted Web site may lead to the disclosure of sensitive information. This update addresses the issue by restricting the types of URLs that may be launched via the plug-in interface. Apple credits Billy Rios of Microsoft, and Nitesh Dhanjani of Ernst & Young for finding this vulnerability.

StumbleUpon’s Partner Program launched in October with HowStuffWorks, National Geographic, RollingStone Online, and HuffingtonPost. According to StumbleUpon, its Partner Program offers “premier” partners tools that allow them to help their users find desired content through the StumbleUpon index without surfing to StumbleUpon’s website, downloading its toolbar, or registering for an account.

By becoming a part of StumbleUpon’s Partner Program, “premier” publishers will allow users to view related articles, photos, and videos indexed by StumbleUpon on their own sites. StumbleUpon believes that offering that feature to its partners can increase exposure to the publisher’s best content and in turn, increase the appeal of StumbleUpon and its discovery engine. And although the company is still trailing behind Digg and Reddit, it believes its Partner Program could help it expand rapidly.

“StumbleUpon is fortunate to able to partner with these premier publishers to expose Stumbling on the web to an even larger audience,” Michael Buhr, General Manager of StumbleUpon said in a statement. “We are pleased with the feedback that we have gotten about the StumbleUpon Partner Program and the opportunity that it provides to both consumers and publishers.”

Whether or not a handful of partner sites will yield better results for StumbleUpon remains in doubt. But as the company’s executives pointed out in October when it started the Partner Program, it hopes to rapidly expand the Program and open it to all publishers as soon as possible.

BrowserPlus and Gears are aimed at improving browsers’ native abilities so Web applications can better match those running natively on a computer’s operating system, and Gears already is open-source software. Yahoo announced its intent to make BrowserPlus open-source software on its Yahoo Developers Blog on Tuesday.

“Openness is a key initiative and a major theme for Yahoo this year and beyond, and open-sourcing BrowserPlus is part of that commitment,” said team member Lloyd Hilaiel. “This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Our hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers. I’d like to see BrowserPlus become a valuable piece of Internet infrastructure.”

Hilaiel also pointed to a number of feature ideas people have suggested.

“Folks on the forums are talking about peer-to-peer support. People are suggesting screen capture technology for better bug reporting. Webcam integration! Easy import of calendaring data! Drag-and-drop of Word documents! BitTorrent! There’s no shortage of ideas. Mainly I’m excited to see what the community creates in the coming weeks and months,” he said.

He also drew some distinctions between BrowserPlus and Gears. “Gears is attempting to accelerate the evolution of the Web by enabling features with wide appeal that can be implemented everywhere. BrowserPlus is more interested in fixing the Web plug-in environment, making rapid experimentation possible,” he said.

BrowserPlus is a framework with a variety of plug-ins; a new version released earlier in November debuted a plug-in computer’s motion sensors, for example. The plug-in architecture is designed to let Web site designers add new abilities to Web pages without requiring people to restart their browsers. With the new version, anyone may use BrowserPlus framework, which previously had been confined to some Yahoo Web sites.

What is the significance of Sun Microsystems‘ announcement Wednesday that Wikimedia is buying truckloads of Sun servers? It’s that the Wikimedia team, which runs Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks, and other sites, is gearing up to change the nature of the reference services. Wikipedia, in particular, is going to get a lot more visual. Limits on the size of upload files will be increased to 100MB. Video–hosted by Wikimedia–will soon be part of the mix.

With the more aggressive support for media files will come, eventually, new ways to edit those media. Kaltura has been working with Wikimedia to create an online video editor that supports wikipedia concepts: users will be able to edit others’ videos, and everyone will be able to see the edit history.

Wikimedia is also considering building an online photo editor into the service, so users will be able to do the same things with photos that they do with text–enhance, clarify, and revert the last user’s edits. Failing that, Wikimedia CTO Brion Vibber told me Wednesday, Wikipedia users may soon get a way to view the revisions that people make offline to photos by flipping through previous versions of the images.

The one holdup I can see with Wikimedia’s newish love of media files is its fetish for open-source technologies. Vibber told me the new video support is being designed first to run in Firefox 3.1, because this open-source browser has native support for the open-source Ogg Theora codec. I’m sure that will make for a good experience in Firefox, but philosophy aside, I’d like to see even support for all browsers, not just Firefox.

Currently, all of Wikipedia, including the photos and audio, fits in less than 5 terabytes of storage. The text alone is less 500 MB compressed. With the new servers and the new media editing services, Vibber expects Wikipedia to be using 10 TB to 15 TB by the end of 2009.

On Wednesday, Google launched themes for Gmail, a feature that lets people customize the appearance of the Webmail application with a variety of new looks. Google is gradually rolling out the new feature to Gmail members “over the next couple of days,” said Gmail team member Annie Chen.

It’s something of a departure for a site that prides itself on its utilitarian nature–even the addition of graphical smileys to Gmail can be justified as improving a message’s emotional nuance. But given Google’s move toward the mainstream, it’s smart. People like to personalize their frequently-used computing tools.

Perhaps more interesting from a brand perspective, Google is even willing to give up the Gmail logo in some of the skins. That suits me fine–I find the logo an eye-trippingly ugly hodgepodge of the Google G, a graphical envelope for the “m”, and three sans-serif letters for “ail.”

Now showing: Gmail themes.

(Credit: Google)