The Dropquest event starts at this link, although before you start you might want to download the company’s PC desktop client, because a number of the puzzles take place within a user’s own Dropbox account.

The nice thing is that everyone who enters and completes Dropquest 2012 will be able to get an extra 1 GB of space on their Dropbox account. The person who completes all the puzzles first will get 100 GB of free storage space for life, along with some other nice Dropbox swag.  10 second place finishers will get 20 GB of free space for life, 15 third place finishers will get 5 GB for life and 50 fourth place finishers will get an extra 2 GB of space.

One more thing: Dropbox claims that this year’s Dropquest will be hard, saying, “Last year Dropquest was finished in a little under 2 hours, but the Black-ops team doubts that it’ll be solved in under 5 hours this year — feel free to prove us wrong.”

Chapter 1: 64529 38645 46637 24929 <- try one of these
Chapter 2: https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2012/crane
Chapter 3: SMUDGES
Chapter 4: SOMA
Chapter 5: MAD LIB

Chapter 6:

https://www.dropbox.com/events?ns=false&n=0&d=1-7-2003

https://www.dropbox.com/events?ns=false&n=0&d=3-21-2005

https://www.dropbox.com/events?ns=false&n=0&d=11-28-2001

Chapter 7:
https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2012/LEADING or
https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2012/DEALING or

https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2012/aligned

Chapter 8: triumphant
Chapter 9: Go https://www.dropbox.com/tour/6 and invite the given email address
Chapter 10: Mexico, Korea or Argentina
Chapter 11: Southpole
Chapter 12: Restore Chapter12.txt to its previous version (on the dropbox website)
Chapter 13: Go to https://www.dropbox.com/help, and click on the shield of “Security and Privacy”
Chapter 14: Click http://www.surfpoeten.de/sudok… and find out the square that’s referring to your highlighted square. Then solve the puzzle by placing the numbers as they are shown exactly on your highlighted square
Chapter 15: Share a folder with savior@dropbox.com, flash@dropbox.com, or boxer@dropbox.com
Chapter 16: Go to https://www.dropbox.com/share and click on the rainbox icon on the top middle of the page
Chapter 17: Shanghai
Chapter 18 – Do a repair on the Dropquest Folder (bottom left corner of chapter page)
Chapter 19: On the actual dropbox site, move the pictures in the ‘spring cleaning’ folder into the category folders:

Category 1: 1 3 6 8 9
Category 2: 2 4 5 7 10

Chapter 20 solution: https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2012/apollo13

Chapter 21: ABUSIVELY

Chapter 22: Adage, Faced, Nasha, Badge

Chapter 23: MACHU PICCHU

Endgame: colosseum

Now let’s talk details. It’s no surprise that it will roll out for free. What’s interesting though is that Google is planning to start everyone with 5 GB of storage. Of course you can buy more, but that trumps Dropbox’s 2 GB that is included with every account. Dropbox does make it easy to get more space, including 23 GB of potential upgrades for HTC users.

What’s also interesting is the wording related to how the system will work. It’s been long-thought that Windows integration will come easy, but that getting the Google Drive icon into the Mac a la Dropbox would be a bit harder. From what we’re reading, Google Drive will work “in desktop folders” on both Mac and Windows machines, which still leaves the operation question unanswered.

But there is one very solid piece of news – Google Drive is expected to launch in the middle of next week. Given how big companies such as Apple, Google and the rest operate, I’m placing my bets on Tuesday, but Wednesday is also a popular day for Google updates. In fact, TechCrunch seems to have gotten their hands onto the app itself.

Now as for the reliability of the information? It’s not at all uncommon for big companies to launch with partners for new features. When that happens, the partners will often-times have a heads up to integration and specifics, and that’s exactly what appears to have happened here as it did with the Lucidchart leak from last week. We’ll have to wait and see exactly how it all works out, but let’s just say that our earlier prediction of in-app document editing is pretty solid as well, given the nature of the release that was sent to us today.

With Google’s current purchased pricing structure:

• 20 GB – $5/yr
• 80 GB – $20/yr
• 200 GB – $50/yr
• 400 GB – $100/yr
• 1 TB – $256/yr
• 2 TB – $512/yr
• 4 TB – $1024/yr
• 8 TB – $2048/yr
• 16 TB – $4096/yr

This will certainly put a hurt on competitors, like Dropbox, who charge $10/month for 50GB a year. Google’s equivalent to that price would be the 400GB level.

Update: A site has received a working copy of the Mac OS client for Google Drive. While the client runs and is definitely is a Google product, it does not connect to his account because it is not activated for the service. This probably means a beta rollout.

The universal XSS, or cross-site scripting, vulnerability is present in all versions of Flash, but was only being actively exploited in versions that worked with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. In a security bulletin, Adobe credited Google for discovery of the bug and warned it “could be used to take actions on a user’s behalf on any website or webmail provider, if the user visits a malicious website.” Representatives with Adobe and Google didn’t elaborate on the in-the-wild attacks or the underlying bug, except for an Adobe spokeswoman saying Google first reported it on February 10.

Security researchers, meanwhile, said the squashed bug was exotic.

“They’re kind of rare and they’re extremely powerful, so now you’re talking about an 0-day cross-site scripting flaw being used in the wild, which can really only be useful for account takeovers,” said Jeremiah Grossman, a Web security expert and the CTO of WhiteHat Security. “For an attacker to find one and use it in the wild, that’s the first I’ve ever heard of.”

Most XSS vulnerabilities are the result of coding errors on a specific website. A universal XSS, by contrast, stems from bugs present in browsers or plugins and can be exploited as they access multiple sites. Besides its zero-day status as a vulnerability—meaning it was fixed only after it was under attack—the Flash bug is noteworthy because it affects software that is installed on a majority of the world’s computers. What’s more, universal XSS vulnerabilities typically give an attacker the ability to run custom-written JavaScript in a victim’s browser that can steal authentication cookies used to log into private accounts and take similar actions, such as send spam or messages to all addresses contained in an address book.

Over the past few years, Adobe has worked hard to improve the security of its Acrobat, Reader, and Flash applications, which are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and installed on millions of machines. In 2010, the software maker released a Windows version of Reader that included a security sandbox that isolated the document viewer from sensitive OS functions, such as the changing of registry settings and the writing or modification of crucial files. That same year, Adobe Flash for Google Chrome added similar protection. Last week, Adobe released a beta version of Flash for Firefox when running on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and has said similar protection will be coming to the IE version of Flash soon.

As useful as sandboxes are in restricting potentially buggy code to a small part of the operating system, they do nothing to minimize the damage that can be done by attacks that exploit universal XSS flaws, researchers said.

“Adobe and Google, when they create their sandboxes, they’re designing them to stop memory corruption vulnerabilities,” Chris Rohlf of Leaf Security Research told Ars. “To their credit, the sandboxes do a good job of stopping memory corruption vulnerabilities, but they’re simply not designed to stop these sorts of things.”

An updated version of Flash, which includes fixes for several other vulnerabilities Adobe rated as critical, is available here.

The Verge confirmed that Apple has dropped the “Mac” part of the name and prefers Mountain Lion from here on to be called “OS X Mountain Lion.” Apple is using the “Mac” brand to specifically talk about hardware now, similar to how Apple seperated iOS out from the iPhone and iPad a few years back.

It’s obvious that simple is better for Apple, and we’re sure the change will cause less confusion for potential Apple buyers. What’s interestinfg is that Apple actually ditched the “Mac” in OS X when Lion came out last year, and the branding was also absent from the App Store. Mountain Lion marks the completion of that transition.

Microsoft has online stores for each localized region and the store in India has been compromised. As of 12:30 PM EST http://www.microsoftstore.co.in/ was still offline. WPsauce.comwas able to grab a couple screenshots before the site went down that revealed that EvilShadow team was responsible for the breach, although the hackers are not design experts as blue text on black backgrounds makes getting your message across a bit harder on the eyes.

Image Credit: Hackteach

The real damage from this breach of security is that the database of the site has been compromised and to make things even worse, the passwords were saved as plain text. If you have ever created an account on Microsoft’s store for India, it is imperative that you change your password immediately on all other websites that use similar phrases or logins.

A breach of security such as this is bad enough publicity for Microsoft but the fact that they did not adhere to industry best practices for securing sensitive data is rather alarming considering how often consumers use the same or similar passwords on multiple websites.

According to the announcement:

The feature goal here is a new Gecko based browser built for and integrated with the Metro environment. Firefox on Metro, like all other Metro apps will be full screen, focused on touch interactions, and connected to the rest of the Metro environment through Windows 8 contracts.

The MozillaWiki has yet another page that goes into further detail on the organization’s plans for Firefox to run on Windows 8′s Metro UI. Mozilla will also release a version of Firefox that will run on Windows 8′s “Classic” UI, stating:

Classic is very similar to the Windows 7 environment at this time, it requires a simple evolution of the current Firefox Windows product. Metro is an entirely new environment and requires a new Firefox front end and system integration points.

With Microsoft planning to launch the Consumer Version of Windows 8 on February 29, the first concept version of Firefox for Windows 8 Metro could be released on that same day or shortly thereafter. Public alpha and beta versions of the browser should be released in the second half of 2012.

The H.265 video codec, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC, is being designed to replace the current H.264 standard used for high definition and Full HD (1920×1080) video encoding and decoding. The Joint Collaborative Team, a collaboration effort between the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T, has just achieved a “committee draft” in a meeting in San Jose.

The new video standard is expected to provide a huge difference in data transmission and streaming efficiency compared to the previous one, with one of the speakers present at the meeting suggesting a 67% improvement.

H.265 will be designed to support new, still to be created video delivery and streaming technologies from day one, including devices working at 4K and Ultra HDTV (also known as 8K or 4320p) resolutions. Just to put things in perspective, the Ultra HDTV definition contains about 16 times the amount of pixels present in a 1080p video stream.

Before appearing on the market as a proper video standard, H.265 will have to achieve two more milestones: the draft international standard meeting is expected to be held within six months from now and the final standard ratification should arrive in January 2013.