The fine folks at Sucker Punch are at it again. On September 14th, we can expect to see a sequel to the amazing Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus. The original Sly Cooper game was slick as you please, with a highly stylizing cell-shaded Racoon hero slinky about, whacking things with his hook and jumping around all over the place. The controls, dialogue, level design, music, sound effects, and general ambience made for a tremendously enjoyable experience. I very much look forward to whatever the next one has in store. All the usual preview sites have been drooling all over it as is their wont, but if past Sly Cooper experience means anything, reviews aren’t necessary: just go buy the dang thing.

Earlier this week, Microsoft made a significant update available to their legions of certified engineers and technicians. Go turn on Automatic Updates so you can take advantage of the new features. It isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, but for the first time, Microsoft is making a significant push for security on their Windows Operating System. It’s long overdue, and nobody really believes that the new firewall won’t have more holes than a Swiss cheese factory, but it’s a big step in the right direction. The service pack weighs in at over 266MB so it’ll require a little patience.

It looks like there was a bit of a security problem with my favorite web browser, so they dilligently released a patched version. The security problem is similar to something a lot of folks got very upset about in the Macintosh world(see Daring Fireball), namely that a rogue link could cause your system to execute commands. A writeup on this is available at Bugzilla, though there is probably something a bit more human-readable out there somewhere. I must say that I’m rather disappointed in the text blurb that accompanies the 0.9.2 upgrade on the Mozilla site; it gives no up-front admission of the potentially serious security issue. It smacks of the older attitudes of Microsoft and the still poor attitudes of Apple in the face of quality assurance issues.

That being said, go upgrade your Firefox, Thunderbird, and/or Mozilla when you get a chance to. Better safe than sorry, a stitch in time saves nine, and all that good stuff.