One thing I've learned in the years I've been reviewing products is that design details matter, even if the eye at first skims over them. The shape of a button or placement of a key can mean the difference between delight and drudgery. So it's not surprising that subtle changes in Amazon.com's (AMZN) second-generation Kindle e-book reader make it a vastly better product than the original.

Introduced in late 2007, the Kindle was a breakthrough in the long-disappointing field of e-book readers. Despite its mediocre hardware design, Amazon's elegant solution for buying and downloading content over an invisible network made it a winner. With the Kindle 2 ($359), Amazon is at last offering a device that is as good as the rest of the system. The combination of the new hardware and its superior book-buying experience puts the Kindle 2 miles ahead of its only real rival, the $300 Sony (SNE) Reader.

Better-Placed Buttons

Using the new Kindle is nothing like reading e-books on a laptop. You can enjoy the device anywhere you can whip out a regular book and not worry much about how you hold it. This wasn't necessarily the case with the Kindle 1. So much of its surface was covered with buttons that I never knew quite where to put my hands, and I was forever unintentionally turning pages, jumping to the menu, or triggering some other disruption.

The Kindle 2's buttons are much smaller and better placed. The ones that turn pages have been redesigned and no longer respond to a stray press on the edge of the reader. The odd scroll wheel on the original Kindle has been replaced by a more traditional five-way navigation control of the sort used on many cell phones. These changes—a cleaner look overall and half the thickness (just over a third of an inch)—add up to a far more pleasant experience.

Amazon also either left alone or improved the parts that worked well. Delivery of books, magazines, and newspapers is done over the Sprint (S) wireless broadband network and requires no user registration or extra fees. Purchases are billed to your Amazon account, and the cost of the network is built into the price. (One downside: Amazon's choice of network technology, along with content-licensing issues, limits the Kindle to the U.S. market, at least for now.) A redesigned keyboard lets you check for titles in the Kindle store, search for text in a book, or add annotations or bookmarks.

There are other nifty improvements: The display, based on technology from E Ink in Cambridge, Mass., supports 16 shades of grey instead of 4. Power consumption, low to begin with, has been cut further, so the battery lasts for days at a stretch. Pages turn a bit faster, and the Kindle can even read text to you—though no one will confuse its synthesized voice with that of an audiobook. There's enough memory to store 1,500 books, so managing your library is likely to be a bigger problem than running out of space. If you have multiple Kindles, new or old, linked to the same Amazon account, downloaded content appears on all of them. And Amazon promises, a bit vaguely, the future ability to load Kindle books onto other devices.

Not Perfect in Dim Light

There are things that could be done to make the Kindle even better. The E Ink display, which relies on reflected light rather than the backlight used by a computer or phone screen, is easy on the eyes, provided the lighting is good. But, as with Kindle 1, the letters are dark grey on light grey rather than black on white and thus a little hard to read in dim conditions. And too often I find that the book I want isn't available, even though Amazon offers more than 200,000 titles. (Prices range from $1 to around $15, with most books going for $10.) One last gripe, which isn't going to change: Unlike a paper book, a Kindle title can't be sold or given away when you're done with it.

Ultimately, the best market for the Kindle may be as a replacement for huge, expensive textbooks. But textbooks need a low-cost, large-format display and, especially for K-12 education, color. E Ink is working on both, but neither is likely in the near term.

I still prefer the old-fashioned pleasure of reading ink-and-paper books. But a couple of weeks with the Kindle 2 is converting me. The ability to carry a whole library in a 10-oz. package makes it a reader's treasure.

VMware Fusion 2 vs. Parallels Desktop 4: Let’s Dance

Microsoft Director Bill Gates sold 2 million shares of the software company he founded for $37.7 million, according to a late Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

He sold the shares at the weighted average price of $18.8361 - the price range actually was $18.32 to $19.09.

Gates is left with 756.1 million shares held directly and 424,816 indirectly.

Monday's filing gives Gates a total of 15.8 million that he has sold in 2009 for a value of $290 million.

The current slate of sales comes on the heels of 20 million shares Gates sold from Oct. 31 to Nov. 13 last year at a value of $435 million.

In the past six months, excluding Monday's filing, company insiders have sold a total of 37.2 million shares for $749.6 million. No shares were purchased.

Shares of Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) fell 22 cents to close at $19.44 Monday.

TITLE:
Mozilla Firefox 2 Multiple Vulnerabilities

SECUNIA ADVISORY ID:
SA33184

VERIFY ADVISORY:
http://secunia.com/advisories/33184/

CRITICAL:
Highly critical

IMPACT:
Security Bypass, Cross Site Scripting, Exposure of sensitive
information, System access

WHERE:
From remote

SOFTWARE:
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.x
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/12434/

DESCRIPTION:
Some vulnerabilities have been reported in Mozilla Firefox, which can
be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security
restrictions, disclose sensitive information, conduct cross-site
scripting attacks, or potentially compromise a user's system.

1) Multiple errors in the layout engine can be exploited to corrupt
memory and potentially execute arbitrary code.

2) An error in the processing of XBL bindings can be exploited to
bypass the same-origin policy and read data from a target document in
another domain.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires that the
target document contains a "<bindingsi>" element and that the "id" of
the read binding is known.

3) An error in the feed preview functionality can be exploited to
execute arbitrary JavaScript code with chrome privileges.

This is related to vulnerability #3 in:
SA31984

4) An error exists when processing "XMLHttpRequest" requests to a web
server which redirects the browser via a 302 HTTP status code. This
can be exploited to bypass the same-origin policy and disclose
sensitive information from another domain.

5) An error exists when processing JavaScript URLs redirecting the
browser to another domain returning non-JavaScript data. This can be
exploited to disclose sensitive information from the other domain via
a "window.onerror" event handler.

6) An error when processing URLs starting with whitespace or certain
control characters can be exploited to output a malformed URL when
rendering a hyperlink.

7) An error in the CSS parser when processing "\0" sequences can be
exploited to potentially bypass third party script sanitation
routines.

8) An error when processing an XBL binding attached to an unloaded
document can be exploited to bypass the same-origin policy and
execute arbitrary JavaScript code in a different domain.

9) Two errors can be exploited to pollute "XPCNativeWrappers" and
execute arbitrary JavaScript code with chrome privileges.

10) Several errors in the session restore feature can be exploited to
execute arbitrary JavaScript code in a different domain or with chrome
privileges.

The vulnerabilities are reported in versions prior to 2.0.0.19.

SOLUTION:
Update to version 2.0.0.19.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

PROVIDED AND/OR DISCOVERED BY:
The vendor credits:
1) Daniel Veditz, Jesse Ruderman, and David Baron
2) Boris Zbarsky
3, 8-10) moz_bug_r_a4
4) Marius Schilder of Google Security
5) Chris Evans of Google Security
6) Chip Salzenberg, Justin Schuh, Tom Cross, and Peter William
7) Kojima Hajime

ORIGINAL ADVISORY:
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-60.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-61.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-62.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-64.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-65.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-66.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-67.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-68.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-69.html

OTHER REFERENCES:
SA31984:
http://secunia.com/advisories/31984/

Authorities say two people have been killed inside a Toys "R" Us store in Southern California.

Riverside County sheriff's Sgt. Dennis Gutierrez says Palm (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ) Desert police got a call saying shots had been fired inside the store Friday.

He says two people are dead inside, but further details were not immediately available.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Federal regulators on Friday shut down two big thrifts based in Southern California, saying they fell victim to the acute distress in the housing market in that state.

The failures of Downey Savings and Loan Association, based in Newport Beach, and PFF Bank & Trust of Pomona brought the number of U.S. bank failures this year to 22.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of the two thrifts. U.S. Bank, based in Minneapolis, acquired all the deposits of both.

Downey, the 23rd-largest U.S. savings and loan, had assets of $12.8 billion and deposits of $9.7 billion as of Sept. 30. PFF, the 38th-largest, had assets of $3.7 billion and $2.4 billion in deposits.

Also Friday, Georgia regulators shut down The Community Bank, a small bank in Loganville, Ga. The FDIC was made receiver of the bank, which had $681 million in assets and $611.4 million in deposits as of Oct. 17. The FDIC said all the bank's deposits and about $84.4 million of its assets will be acquired by Bank of Essex, of Tappahannock, Va. Its four branches will reopen Monday as offices of Bank of Essex.

The Office of Thrift Supervision, the federal regulator for the two California thrifts, said they both suffered mounting losses since last year. Downey's business focused on nontraditional, high-risk home mortgages such as payment-option and adjustable-rate loans.

The Treasury Department agency recently boosted the minimum capital requirements for the parent, Downey Financial Corp., as the company struggled with the slumping mortgage market. Downey was hit hard by rising mortgage defaults, especially in its option adjustable-rate mortgage holdings. Option ARMs allow customers to choose a different payment option each month -- including a payment that is smaller than the interest due on the loan.

Option ARMs have been among the worst-performing loans during the downturn in the real estate market.

PFF, established in 1892, had a large concentration of housing construction loans hit hard by the deteriorating real estate market on the West Coast, the thrift agency said.

"The closing of these two thrifts once again demonstrates the tremendous impact of the housing market distress on the state of California," said John Reich, director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, in a statement. This year, four of the five failures of institutions regulated by the agency -- and all the ones of significant size -- had major concentrations in housing finance business in California, he said.

In July, another big savings and loan, IndyMac Bank based in Pasadena, Calif., failed and was seized by regulators with about $32 billion in assets.

The FDIC estimated that the resolution of Downey will cost the federal deposit insurance fund about $1.4 billion, while that of PFF will cost an estimated $700 million.

Regular deposit accounts are now insured up to $250,000 as part of the financial rescue law enacted in early October.

The 22 bank failures so far this year compare with three for all of 2007 and are far more than in the previous five years combined. It's expected that many more banks won't survive the next year of economic tumult. The pressures of tumbling home prices, rising mortgage foreclosures and tighter credit have been battering many banks, large and small, nationwide.

This year's failures also include Seattle-based thrift Washington Mutual Inc. in late September, the biggest bank collapse in U.S. history. It had $307 billion in assets.

The FDIC estimates that through 2013 there will be about $40 billion in losses to the deposit insurance fund, including an $8.9 billion loss from the failure of IndyMac Bank. The FDIC is raising insurance premiums paid by banks and thrifts to replenish its fund, which now stands at around $45.2 billion, below the minimum target level set by Congress and the lowest level since 2003.

On Friday, the FDIC formally approved a program to guarantee as much as $1.4 trillion in U.S. banks' debt for more than three years as part of the government's financial rescue plan. Under the program, meant to thaw the freeze in bank-to-bank lending, the FDIC will provide temporary insurance for loans between banks -- except for those for 30 days or less -- guaranteeing the new debt in the event of payment default by the borrowing bank.

The FDIC also will guarantee deposits in non-interest-bearing "transaction" accounts by removing the current $250,000 insurance limit on them through the end of next year. That could add as much as $500 billion to FDIC-backed deposits.

Well over half of the roughly 8,500 federally insured banks and savings and loans are expected to tap the FDIC's temporary guarantees.

Of the 8,500 federally insured banks and thrifts, the FDIC had 117 on its internal list of troubled institutions as of June 30, a five-year high. The agency doesn't disclose the banks' names.

Japan - world's No. 2 economy - in recession

TOKYO (CNN) -- Japan, the world's second-largest economy, is in a recession, government officials announced Monday.

Japan's Cabinet Office confirmed that its economy fell another 0.1% in its third quarter, following a 0.3% drop in the second quarter.

The country's gross domestic product - second to that of the United States - has fallen by 0.4% this year.

Stocks on the Nikkei were trading about 1% higher in Monday morning trading.

Major indexes around the globe have plummeted over the last two months. The Russian stock market has lost 65.5% of its value since the start of the year. Stocks in Japan and the United States have been equally hard hit, falling 42% and 33%, respectively.

In Europe, the pain has been particularly acute. The European Union on Friday officially declared that the 15-nation group had entered into a recession, with its gross domestic product declining 0.2% for the second straight quarter.

Japan's recession announcement was not unexpected. Part of the problem is the strong yen, which skyrocketed in recent weeks as turmoil in the world's financial markets and concerns about a global recession drove investors away from high-yielding currencies such as the euro and the pound. As a result, lower-yielding currencies like the dollar and the yen surged in value because they are considered by many investors to be a safe-haven.

Since Japan is such a big exporter of goods, a more robust yen hurts profits for Japanese firms as sales from abroad get translated back into yen. The more that the yen has climbed, the worse Japan's stock market has performed, which has resulted in a ripple effect on European and U.S. exchanges.