With 10 weeks to go before the election, the amount of news coverage surrounding McCain and Obama is set to skyrocket (as if it hadn’t already).

In order to help you parse through all the chatter, Google has set up a special Web site where mobile phone users can find the latest headlines.

Google appears to be throwing everything it has at the upcoming Presidential Election. It is using multiple avenues and products to provide coverage.

Google believes that plenty of people will be interested in accessing news from their mobile phones. So it set up a “one-stop-shop” for mobile phone users to get what they need.

The site is located at http://m.google.com/elections.

The products that it is tailoring to election coverage are mobile Search, News, Reader, YouTube and Maps.

In its search product, Google will let you “link to search results for Obama and McCain, so you don’t have to type in their names on your phone each time you want information.”

The Mobile News Web site has set up a special link that will go to a site that only houses news that is relevant to the election.

Google Reader has already set up specific places for the general public to see what Obama and McCain are reading. If you use Google Reader, you can subscribe to the candidates’ reading lists here.

On YouTube, both McCain and Obama have their own channels. These channels will be used to hold their speeches, press conferences and other public statements. Users will be able to watch the videos on their mobile phones.

Lastly, Google is suggesting that attendees of the Democratic National Convention in Denver and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis take advantage of Google Maps for mobile to help get around town.

There you have it. If you’re a political news junkie, Google’s various mobile products will help you get your fix.

Mozilla Labs announced the winners in their contest for the best Firefox 3 add-ons. The Extend Firefox contest received over 100 entries. Tags and bookmarks ruled the winners. See if you can find one or two new extensions to try out.

Best New Add-on

Pencil is a user interface prototyping tool. Not your ordinary extension and it could be useful, too.

Tagmarks is tagging in a click. Rather than use words to describe a bookmark, click icons.

HandyTag uses text tags, but doesn’t make you create them yourself (though you still can). Grabs common tags from del.icio.us and other sources.

Best Updated Add-on

Read It Later has almost hit 1.0. This extension makes it easy to create a “to read” list without the clutter of using standard bookmarks.

TagSifter provides several different ways to browse through the tags you’ve already created. Advanced users can use some fancy logic syntax to find just what they want (i.e., tagged with movie and comedy, but not jackblack).

Bookmarks Preview brings coverflow to bookmarks. Scroll through thumbnails of the pages before deciding where to go.

In addition to these six, the judges also chose some excellent honorable mentions (Close and Forget is a neat idea, if not a little paranoid).

Also, probably in honor of sponsor Last.fm, the judges named Fire.fm the best music add-on.

Since the time Amazon made a tabbed interface popular, web designers have been talking about the design pattern. Are tabs good? Are they bad? How do you make them?

Amazon has since removed tabs from their site, but it’s still a useful metaphor when done right. So what’s right and wrong? The Usability Post shares 5 tips for tabbed navigation:

1. Connect the active tab to the content
2. Make other tabs a different color
3. Change the font color on the active tab
4. Have the link area span the whole size of the tab
5. Make sure the landing page has its own active tab

Each step is illustrated with the right and wrong way, and explained. That’s helpful. Now you can include tabs on your website without the wrath of the entire design community (you’ll never avoid all the wrath, no matter what you do). Just don’t look like Amazon in 2000:

If you’d like to implement tabs and don’t know how to do them, you can’t miss with this classic A List Apart tutorial.

In a move to make Firefox more competitive with desktop applications and proprietary graphics technology like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash, Mozilla on this afternoon released TraceMonkey.

TraceMonkey is a project that adds native code compilation to SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s JavaScript engine.

Mozilla has included TraceMonkey in an alpha version of Firefox 3.1, the next major release of the open-source Firefox Web browser.

TraceMonkey is off by default, because it’s not entirely bug-free but when it’s more stable and enabled, Firefox’s JavaScript should get faster “by an order of magnitude or more,” as Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich put it in a blog post:

“If you’re doing something like image processing, we can demonstrate six to seven times speed-ups and we can probably double those,” said Eich in a phone interview. “If you’re doing a tight [programming] loop that’s just manipulating bits, you can go 20 to 40 times faster.”

Trace Monkey was built with the help of UC Irvine research scientist Andreas Gal, using a technique called “trace trees.”

Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering at Mozilla (soon to leave for Facebook), has posted a screencast demo that shows how TraceMonkey makes image editing done through Firefox competitive with dedicated image editing applications, at least in terms of the responsiveness of the user interface.

“What we’re trying to do is extend the capability of the browser,” said Eich, adding that graphics applications and games in particular stand to benefit from improved JavaScript performance. “Not everyone wants to get a plug in,” he said.

Improving browser performance is necessary to provide an open-source alternative to proprietary rendering technologies. “If browsers are only doing JavaScript and doing it slowly, we worry that content will migrate to closed platforms like Silverlight,” said Eich.

Mozilla’s support for the canvas graphic rendering element in the HTML 5 specification and the Ogg video format also reflects this goal.

If Mozilla is successful in its efforts, the rationale for developing rich Internet applications (RIAs) will become increasingly questionable. As Eich sees it, RIAs are already at risk. “Those platforms that are not a browser are an increasingly thin value-add to what the browser can do,” he said.

Eich said that when Google launched Google Maps and found that it was done without plug-ins, they were stunned. He expects that ongoing browser performance improvements will usher in similarly surprising applications.

Firefox 3.1 should be ready before the end of the year, Eich said.

If you are going to hack a phone system, do you really want to hack the Department of Homeland Security?

That’s what happened this weekend when someone made hundreds of illegal calls from a FEMA PBX to the Middle East and Asia.

It appears that it was the usual culprits of poor change control and misconfigurations left FEMA’s digital doors open.

All of this is according to an Associated Press story I read on MSNBC.com last night.

According to the AP’s Eileen Sullivan and Ted Bridis, the attacker placed more than 400 calls on the hacked FEMA phone system to places such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Yemen.

Here’s the kicker, from an IT security perspective, from the AP story quoting a FEMA spokesperson:

FEMA’s chief information officer is investigating who hacked into the system and where exactly the calls were placed to. At this point it appears a “hole” was left open by the contractor when the voicemail system was being upgraded, Olshanski said. Olshanski did not know who the contractor was or what hole specifically was left open, but he assured the hole has since been closed.

This illustrates an excellent, yet often overlooked, point. Despite all of the attention we spend focusing on zero-day vulnerabilities and exotic exploits and attacks – many times it’s simply poor change control procedures, lack of urgency to patch, or carelessness that gets an organization bitten.

Fortunately, in this case, it only appears to have been $12,000 in illegal calls to the Middle East and Asia, and some egg of the face of FEMA and the DHS.

Source: MSNBC: Hacker breaks into FEMA phone system

In case there was any doubt that the company is still stuck in the 1990s, Microsoft hired Jerry Seinfeld as the face of its $300 million USD advertising campaign to hawk Windows Vista.

Here’s the incomprehensible part: The 54-year-old washed-up has-been was chosen because Microsoft is “weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.’s advertising,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Seinfeld is most famous for his 90s-era sitcom, which always prominently displayed a Macintosh in his TV apartment. Microsoft will pay Seinfeld $10 million.