Federal authorities are warning of a possible Al Qaeda-orchestrated terror plot against New York City subway and other transit systems during the holidays, FOX News has confirmed.

The potential threat, described in an internal FBI memo as “plausible but unsubstantiated,” does not extend beyond the New York City area, sources told FOX News. But commuters could see security tighten across the country.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint bulletin late Tuesday night to local and state law enforcement authorities about the possible plot, a homeland security official told FOX.

The report states that in late September, Al Qaeda may have talked about attacking transit systems in and around New York City during the holiday season.

“These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives placed on subway/passenger rail systems,” the bulletin says.

The FBI said it had no indication that any such plot was beyond the very earliest stages of planning.

“We have no specific details to confirm that this plot has developed beyond aspirational planning, but we are issuing this warning out of concern that such an attack could possibly be conducted during the forthcoming holiday season,” states the warning, which is dated Tuesday.

While federal agencies regularly issue all sorts of advisory warnings, the language of this one is particularly blunt.

Intelligence and homeland security officials are working with local authorities to try to corroborate the information “and will continue to investigate every possible lead,” the memo says.

FOX News’ Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more at: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,457747,00.html

Apple appears to have upped the processing speed of the iPod Touch in order to help it go after the portable-game market.

The second-generation iPod Touch uses a slightly faster processor than the iPhone 3G. (Credit: Apple)

Touch Arcade reports that the applications processor inside the second-generation iPod Touch unveiled in September is actually running faster than the processor inside the iPhone 3G, which runs at the same speed that the original iPhone and iPod Touch used. The new iPod Touch’s ARM-based processor is running at 532MHz, while the iPhone 3G’s processor runs at 412MHz.

A game developer interviewed by Touch Arcade noticed a huge difference in 3D-rendering speed as a result of the speed bump. As we remember fondly from our “megahertz madness” days of the Intel-AMD competition in the PC, processor speed is not the only measure of performance, but it is an important one.

With the arrival of the App Store, Apple has been marketing the latest iPod Touch as a gaming device in its latest round of commercials, almost completely ignoring the fact that it’s a music and video player as well.

It seems that Apple has room to boost the clock speed of the processor to 620MHz, according to ARM’s specifications, but that requires striking a balance between performance and battery life.

Read more at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10106891-37.html

Sorry if it sounds like I’m drinking the Google Kool-Aid here, but I switched from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome as my default browser for the very reason Google’s executives said we should: speed.

Years ago, Firefox won me over chiefly with plug-ins, tabbed browsing, and some security advantages. But using Chrome removed a bit of friction from Web I hadn’t realized was there. It felt like discovering I’d been driving with the parking brake on just a bit.

Here’s what coaxed me away: Chrome starts way faster than Firefox. Web pages load faster when I type in an address or click a link. The Omnibox–Chrome’s combination location bar and search box–often gets me where I want to go at least a keystroke faster, and I’m not terribly worried about sending Web navigation and search data to Google.

Individually, a few tenths of a second here or there doesn’t make much difference. But it adds up fast. I spend hours a day using the Web–not just browsing, but also uploading photos, issuing instructions to my bank, editing documents online, and posting comments. As the Web gets more complex and more deeply embedded in my life, waiting for it gets more annoying.

I hadn’t set out to convert to Chrome. I just wanted to see how well it worked, so I used it to run my personal e-mail while at work. Then I added in reading RSS feeds. After a few weeks, I noticed that I was manually copying Web addresses to Chrome and realized that my subconscious mind had made its decision. So last week, I set it as my default browser, despite a range of criticisms (see below).

After I told Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker about my experience, she sounded a bit crestfallen. “We’ve been increasing our focus on performance for some time. Maybe comments such as yours will increase that,” she said.

Faster stripped-down Firefox
More to the point, Mozilla suggested I try a fresh installation of Firefox, one that’s not burdened by those pesky extensions. I hadn’t been running a large quantity, but I started with a fresh reinstallation of Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

I have to say that Firefox picked up the pace a notch. But I compared it again with Chrome on many Web sites I use daily and a variety of others, and with the exception of Flickr and My Yahoo, I still found Chrome snappier.

Of course, disabling extensions is a shame, given that it’s one of Firefox’s big advantages. Google has promised an extensions framework at some point, and it’s the top-requested feature, with 381 people having starred it as a priority in Google’s issue-tracking system for Chrome.

Reinstalling Firefox also reminded me of a feature in the forthcoming Firefox 3.1 that I was happy to leave behind: tab-switching behavior. I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, and use Ctrl-Tab hundreds of times daily to switch between browser tabs. I loathe the new Firefox mechanism, which switches to your most recently used tab rather than cycling one tab to the right, and showing a miniature preview version of the Web page instead of actually switching tabs. I don’t know if others’ brains work differently, but the new mechanism leaves me completely lost in a sea of tabs, forcing me to use the mouse, which slows me down.

I reverted to the earlier tab-switching feature by adjusting Firefox’s behavior thus: First, type “about:config” into the address bar, then move past the warning message, then type “ctrlTab” into the “Filter” box, then double-click first on browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed and then on browser.ctrlTab.smoothScroll to set them to “false,” then restart the browser.

Meanwhile, though, Chrome cycles the way I like, and in another nice move, it opens new tabs immediately to the right of the page I’m reading when I middle-click to open a page in a new tab. That conveniently groups related tasks together.

Off-color remarks
Here’s what’s keeping me an active Firefox user, though: Chrome’s lack of support for color profiles.

Most images on the Web are encoded with a color scheme called sRGB, but there are others out there including AdobeRGB and Microsoft’s scRGB that can show a much broader range of colors. I’m a photography buff with an eensy-weensy photo business, so I prefer images to look as good as possible on the Web.

Apple’s Safari was the pioneer for color management, and Firefox added color profile support with version 3.0 if users manually enable it. With version 3.1, Firefox applies color profiles for images that have been tagged with one. As a result, images on my high-gamut monitor at home look fine in Firefox, but in Chrome they’re hideously garish and oversaturated. It’s a showstopper for me when I’m doing anything photo-related on the Web.

I recognize my color preference is at odds with Google’s performance push. Mozilla programmers found that supporting color profiles slowed Firefox 20 percent to 30 percent, though they reduced that number 4 percent to 5 percent with testing. Eventually, to get it lower, they went with a third way, applying color profiles only for tagged images, which caused only a 1 percent performance hit.

(Credit: Paul Ford)

But Google hasn’t even gotten to the stage of evaluating performance effects. “I don’t see how any sites could depend on this feature if it’s missing/disabled for 90 percent of users,” said Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson in a response to a request to add color management to Chrome, referring to the fact that color management is missing in Internet Explorer and not enabled yet in mainstream Firefox. “I’m all for it, but it’s definitely not a release priority.”

Other gripes
Chrome has other issues that frequently annoy me. Allow me to share.

• There’s no plug-in mechanism. I’m getting by, but there are some I’d like to have back.

• Bad support for RSS subscription feeds. In Firefox, a site with an RSS feed gets an icon in the address bar, and clicking it signs me up for the subscription. In Chrome, I have to hope someone manually put a link on the page, but usually I just move back over to Firefox.

• When I launch a new window, Chrome never starts it maximized, even if the last window was. This is a bit surprising, given Google’s laudable emphasis on showing as much real estate as possible. I always want my browser page maximized. On a related note, I miss Firefox’s maximized mode (hit F11 to try it out).

• Chrome doesn’t respect changing monitor sizes well. When I move to a dual-monitor setup, Chrome stomps all over Windows’ task bar.

• Selection and copy-paste issues. When I’m selecting text in Chrome, I don’t like how the blue selection box spreads wider than the text box. And when text is selected but I missed a few characters, I don’t like the inability to use Shift-right arrow keys to extend the selection a bit.

Read more at http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10107152-2.html

President-elect to lay out his budget belt-tightening vision and introduce Peter Orszag as his new director of the Office of Management and Budget.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama wants to project fiscal restraint even as his economic team assembles a massive recovery package that could cost several hundred billion dollars.

A day after introducing the captains of his economic team and promoting a giant jobs plan, Obama on Tuesday was to lay out his budget belt-tightening vision. The dual images — big spender and disciplined budget watcher — were designed to give both political and economic assurances to the public, the Congress and the financial markets.

Obama also was expected to introduce Peter Orszag as his new director of the Office of Management and Budget, the White House office that serves as a funnel for federal agency budget requests. Orszag is the current director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Obama’s economic team embodies what at first glance seem to be mutually exclusive goals.

Timothy Geithner, Obama’s choice for treasury secretary; Lawrence Summers, who will head the National Economic Council; and Orszag all have links to Robert Rubin, who as President Clinton’s treasury secretary pushed for a balanced budget.

But all three will also be part of an administration that will drive deficits to new heights with an economic plan designed to save or create 2.5 million jobs and redirect the economy over the next two years. Economists from across the political spectrum, including some who have served as informal advisers to Obama, have put the size of an economic recovery package as high as $700 billion over two years.

Obama summed up the challenge Monday.

“The way to think about it is short term, we’ve got to focus on boosting the economy and creating 2.5 million jobs, but part and parcel of that is a plan for a sustainable fiscal situation long-term, and that’s going to require some reforms in Washington,” he said during a news conference in Chicago to introduce Geithner and Summers.

“To make the investments we need,” he said at another point, “we’ll have to scour our federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts and sacrifices, as well, something I’ll be discussing further tomorrow.”

Obama is already starting in the red. The federal government reported a record deficit of $237.2 billion in October, which reflected only a portion of the $700 billion Congress approved last month to rescue the financial markets. The government’s red ink has been rising over the past eight years, reversing a surplus achieved during the Clinton administration.

Leonard Burman, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said Geithner and Summers reflect both the need for a large-scale stimulus to the economy and for fiscal restraint once the economy shows signs of improvement.

“What’s good about the appointments that Obama has made is that it suggests, in ways that his campaign never did, that he really understands this,” Burman said.

Read more at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/11/25/obama-promotes-fiscal-restraint-big-spending/