Yesterday, Mozilla announced that it would delay today’s planned launch of Firefox 11 for a few days in order to scrutinize a potential security issue and to avoid issues with Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates today.

Now, however, Mozilla has canceled this delay and announced that Firefox 11 is still on track for today’s release. The security vulnerability, it turns out, was already known and patched. In order to avoid the conflict with Patch Tuesday, though, this release will only be available as a manual update today. Once the Firefox team is sure that there are no issues with Microsoft’s latest patches, it will push automatic updates to all users.

Since switching to its rapid-release schedule, Mozilla never missed a scheduled release date for Firefox.

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Spotify, the popular streaming music service, launched in Germany today. The company had been planning this launch for a while and had already been operating a German-language version in Austria since last year. Quite a few pundits assumed that the delay was due to rights negotiations with the German royalty collection agency GEMA. This organization is quite notorious for charging relatively high rates for music streaming, which was the main reason Grooveshark closed its German site earlier this year. The reality is a bit different, though: Spotify still hasn’t signed a licensing deal with GEMA.

Talking to German public radio, Spotify acknowledged that the company is still negotiating with GEMA. As of now, the two haven’t been able to reach an agreement, though the negotiations, which Spotify describes as „intense,” continue.

GEMA, it is worth noting, has been negotiating with Google to set streaming rates for YouTube for years now. It’s not unthinkable that its discussions with Spotify could also take quite a while. Just last year, Sony Music CEO Edgar Berger argued that „some members of GEMA’s supervisory board have not yet arrived in the digital era.”

Frederic Lardinois founded SiliconFilter in 2011. Before starting this site, he wrote about 1,500 articles for ReadWriteWeb. His areas of interest are consumer web and mobile apps, as well as Internet-connected devices like cars, smart sensors and toasters.You can reach him at [email protected]

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Google I/O is Google’s premier annual conference for developers and last year, the event sold out in less than an hour. After postponing the event and expanding it to three days, Google just announced that tickets will go on sale on March 27th at 7am PT. Once again, developers will have to get in line early, though, as registration will be on a first-come, first-serve basis. Last year, Google hinted at a new registration process where developers would have to solve programming puzzles to be eligible for tickets. Now it looks like the company has moved away from this idea.

One issue a lot of developers have with the first-come, first-serve nature of registration for this event has been the fact that a lot of attendees at developer conferences are now often not developers themselves. I/O, where Google has developed a tendency to give away a lot of pricey gadgets that are often worth more than the ticket fee, has become somewhat notorious for this. 

Tickets for I/O will cost $900 for general attendees and $300 for students and university faculty members.

Here are some more details from Google:

It’s also worth noting that you will need to have a Google+ account to register and that you will have to use Google Wallet to pay for your registration.

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Path, the up-and-coming private social network, had a couple of rough days last month because it uploaded its users’ address books to its servers without their explicit permission. Today, however, the company is focusing squarely on its product again with the release of version 2.1 of its iOS app. This isn’t a major overhaul of the service, as the version number already indicates, but the company made some pretty significant updates to the product that its users will surely appreciate.

Path now, for example, features support for Nike+, so your runs now automatically appear in Path. For those of us who aren’t runners, the new version now also features a Shazam-like Music Match feature that is powered by Gracenote and a smarter camera that you adjust focus and exposure manually.

The Nike+ integration in Path is driven by the company’s new API. It’s worth noting, though, that Path isn’t rolling this API out widely and is taking a very deliberate approach to opening its platform up to third parties. To sync the two apps, users have to very explicitly tell Path to pull the data from the Nike app by pulling a little Nike icon onto the Path icon. This ensures that you don’t share this information without giving the app the permission to do so.

The Music Match feature works just like you would expect. You just click on the microphone icon and let the app listen to the music that’s playing in the background for a while. You can then easily share this song with your friends on the service (though it will only play a 30-second sample, as far as I can see).

Overall, then, this isn’t a revolutionary update, but it puts Path back on track after the privacy discussions of the last few weeks. It’ll be interesting to see when and how the company will open its API to other developers. There is definitely a lot of potential here.

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Photosynth is, without doubt, one of Microsoft’s more impressive mobile apps. The app lets you snap panorama pictures with your iPhone and then upload them to Photosynth.net (and you can even get them featured on Bing Maps). While the mobile app doesn’t give you quite as many features as the web app – which allows you to stitch together 3D panoramas by combining images from multiple perspectives – the app has proven to be quite a hit.

According to Microsoft, 6 million iPhone users have downloaded the app so far (though, as usual, it’s not clear how many active users there currently are). More importantly, though, the company also today announced that Photosynth is now available worldwide (iTunes link).

Also new in the latest version is a tighter integration with Twitter (via iOS5′s built-in Twitter capabilities). 

In case you are unfamiliar with Photosynth, here is Microsoft’s description of the app’s capabilities:

Capture Full-Sphere Panoramas: Look and capture in all directions more easily than what most of us can do with DSLRs and point-and-shoot cameras.

View immediately: With fast On-Device Processing, you can see the final panorama in a few minutes, without requiring an internet connection or data plan.  Very handy for those impromptu panoramas and immediate gratification that you captured the perfect shot. 

Save locally and on the cloud:  Your panoramas saved on your phone can also be saved and viewed online at http://photosynth.net.

Share immediately:  Share your panorama immediately via Twitter, Facebook or Bing Maps.

View in browser or app: Zoom, pan, and rotate your panorama in any direction through the Photosynth app or through the mobile browser.

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It’s been just about six weeks since the last Firefox release and version 11 was scheduled to be released tomorrow, but Mozilla just announced that users will have to wait a little bit longer for the next version of the popular browser. Johnathan Nightingale, the senior director of Firefox engineers, explains that there are two reasons for this schedule change. 1) Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday would coincide with the release of Firefox 11 and, according to Mozilla, those updates have „interacted badly” with its own updates before, and 2) Mozilla is waiting for a report from the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) about a security vulnerability that „may affect this new version of Firefox.”

This security report is due later today, but the Mozilla team obviously still has to evaluate the vulnerability and, if necessary, patch Firefox 11 before releasing it. Nightingale still assumes that Firefox 11 will be released later this week.

This is the first time Mozilla had to postpone a Firefox release since it moved to its rapid-release schedule last year. The last major delay came before the release of Firefox 4, but this was also the last release before Mozilla changed its development cycle.

If you still want to get an early look at Firefox 11, though, you can always download the latest beta version here.

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It looks like 2012 will be Pinterest’s year to shine. Even if it’s not your cup of tea, you can’t ignore that fact that it is one of the fastest growing startups ever. According to the latest data from online sharing tool Shareaholic, Pinterest has now reached the point where it drives more referral traffic to other sites than Twitter. This puts it right behind Google, Facebook, Yahoo and StumbleUpon with regards to referral and search traffic. Just a month ago, Twitter still beat Pinterest by a very thin margin.

Shareaholic’s data is based upon analytics from 200,000 publishers in its catalog which reach about 270 million unique visitors per month. 

Pinterest, of course, is meant to be a site that gets people to click through to third-party sites, but it’s interesting that this small startup is already leaving Twitter far behind at this point. What remains interesting, too, is how StumbleUpon continues to quietly dominate these statistics.

Shareaholic doesn’t specify what types of sites these services are referring traffic to, but chances are that Pinterest and Twitter are aiming for slightly different audiences. 

Besides Pinterest and Twitter, the report also takes a look at how Google+ is doing with regard to how much referral traffic it generates. The numbers there are not very encouraging. According to Shareaholic’s data, „referral traffic from Google Plus held steady at .05% of all traffic from January to February. For context, that’s the same percentage of traffic referred by Yahoo Answers.”

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We’re LIVE on The Hunger Games red carpet! The stars of The Hunger Games are on their way to the world premiere at Live in LA, and we’ve teamed up with our friends at UStream to bring you all the action. Fans have been line Nokia d up for hours to get a glimpse of the cast — Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, and so many more are expected to attend. Watch and chat with us live now!

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It’s a new month, which brings fresh opportunities to capture the world around you. Throughout March, we’ll be offering up daily photo challenges for you to seek out and share with your photo-loving community. It doesn’t matter how you capture them. Use your DSLR, your smartphone, your old 35mm, or a pocket cam! Our subject today: on the road.

How you interpret the subject is up to you! Just upload your pics to our Cool Capture community group on Instagram or Twitter with the #CoolCapture hashtag or post them to our Facebook page. We’ll have a new challenge for you every day this month to test your skills, so be sure to keep checking back for more.

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We’re getting excited about our favorite Marvel superheroes getting back into costume for the release of The Avengers, but are we ready to devote over 700 minutes to the festivities? Tickets just went on sale for what’s billed as The Ultimate Marvel Marathon on May 3. Spend the day — and we mean, All. Day. — with Tony Stark and the gang in a six-film movie marathon at selected AMC Theatres for $40.

Watch Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor 3D, and Captain America: The First Avenger 3D. That’s 10 hours of comic book superheroes on the big screen before even getting to the main event, the midnight premiere of The Avengers. Sounds epic for die-hard comic fans.

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