As 2011 draws to a close we wanted to take a look at computer and information security in the twelve months that have passed.

What will probably stick in most people’s minds is the Sony PlayStation Network and Qriocity hack, which resulted in an outage lasting 23 days. In other developments, hacktivist groups like Anonymous and LulzSec took to social media to further their causes, and mobile malware got more attention than ever before.

All in all, there’s no doubt that 2011 was a very busy year for IT security professionals.

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Do you have an itch when it comes to how your web browser works? Perhaps there’s some functionality you want from the browser that it doesn’t support, or it does something in a particular way that drives you nuts.

Chances are there is an extension to remedy that situation.

We have gone over most of the extensions available for Apple’s Safari web browser and come up with recommendations for 15 extensions that we think you should try.

You find all the extensions on Apple’s Safari Extension Gallery. We can’t link to each individual extension, unfortunately, because the way Apple has built the site, so you have to go to the gallery and click your way to the extension you want.

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Although there’s been much talk about the demise of Flash lately – including right here on this blog – no one can deny that it’s brought us a wide assortment of strange and wonderful web animations through the years.

So today we’re kicking off a series of articles called Friday Fun, where we’ll try to bring you some of the more fun, weird, quirky and wacky corners of the web, and we start with Flash animations.

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In April 2010 the late Steve Jobs wrote an open letter addressing Apple’s insistence on not supporting Adobe Flash on its mobile platforms. He concluded: “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Shortly thereafter, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said: “The technology problems that Mr. Jobs mentions in his essay are ‘really a smokescreen.’”

Hindsight is of course 20-20 but even though Jobs’ open letter was written just under two years ago, wasn’t the writing already then on the wall for Flash and Adobe?

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After Apple’s iPad announcemet, Adobe Flash was inadvertently thrust into the spotlight. Apple’s tablet device was pitched as the future of web browsing, but just like the iPhone, support for Flash was conspicuously absent. This led to a discussion that ultimately split many commenters into two camps; those that believe the iPad’s lack of Flash makes it an inferior web browsing device (despite what Steve Jobs wants us to believe), and others who feel Flash is so detrimental to the web that the iPad would likely be better off without it.

Even before the iPad’s announcement, it’s generally been in vogue to criticize Flash for its masterful ability to hog your resources, or its overall instability. While I can’t deny that Flash is far from a perfect solution, it’s worth remembering Flash’s positive contributions to the internet, along with the bad.

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In the past few weeks, there have been some major shifts in the BitTorrent community which have had a resounding impact on the larger world of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. They’ve led to some of the largest BitTorrent sites completely changing focus, or figuring out smarter ways to continue sharing files illegally.

Meanwhile, Adobe announced a massively interesting inclusion in their upcoming Flash player 10.1 update – a seemingly innocuous version number that is adding some world-changing P2P technology to Flash video streaming.

I’d like to discuss these opposing trends of illegal versus more legitimate uses of P2P technology, and what they ultimately mean for how we use the Web.

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is in the process of developing HTML 5, an open standard that could eliminate the need for browser plugins such as Adobe’s Flash video player.

HTML 4.01, the current version of HTML that we use to create web pages and incorporate technologies such as CSS and JavaScript, has been around since December of 1999. The standard has certainly been a huge success, in that it represents a markup language which can work across all browsers and operating systems. Still, there are issues which HTML 4.01 simply wasn’t designed to address.

One of the most significant of these issues is the use of video on the Web.

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While we were busy working, Adobe took over the Internet. More specifically, Adobe’s software took over just about every aspect of web design and development. Is this really a good thing for web designers and developers? Or for web users? Or for anyone, other than Adobe? My answer is a resolute, unwavering “No”.

Now let me explain why.

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