We often cover quite a few technical topics at Cre8asite in the Tech News forum. I’m posting some of the hot topics of today here instead.

Spread Firefox is a site dedicated to help the launch of the open source Firefox Browser by collecting donations from users of the browser, to place a full page ad in the New York Times. It’s possibly the largest advertising push ever from the open source community.

While it seems that the efforts to promote Firefox are going very well, news about flaws in tabbed browsers was announced earlier today. Maybe the Firefox programmers can address that problem before the launch date of November 9th.

Hopefully, it will. Especially with the announcement that even though many have patched Internet Explorer with a Service Pack upgrade, more security concerns have come up. Seems as soon as you close one door, a window opens somewhere else. Yes, a new exploit has been discovered that can affect users of IE who have installed SP2.

Speaking of Microsoft, it looks as though MSN Chat, and Windows Messenger are going away.

They will be replaced with a new tool that combines the abilities of the two, and adds even more functionality. The Advanced IM for Enterprises (codenamed ‘Istanbul’) is presently in beta, and won’t probably be released to the public until sometime next year. It looks like the swiss army knife of messaging:

Microsoft said Istanbul would enhance real-time collaboration by adding more data, such as out-of-office information. The company also said the new software would ease the use of integrated communications by consolidating applications into a single interface that brings together messaging, conferencing and traditional telephony.

I suspect that they won’t be asking for donations for an announcement of its release in the New York Times.

Another type of communciation on the web that has been picking up a lot of impetus lately is RSS, which allows people to syndicate information across the web from one source to many.

While a lot of the use of RSS has been mostly limited to Blogs and news sites and some forums, the bandwidth used by this service has hit some servers hard. The newsreaders people use often seek updates from the syndication sources at the same time, which can be overwhelming. A post over at Netcraft discusses some of these issues of RSS and Bandwidth Management