Wednesday was a bad day in the Middle East and beyond, and 'twas almost as bad for Big Evil, while Firefox landed some good news. Let's get to it, the game is afoot!

Many these days — definitely us here at Linux Journal — are attached to our internet connections at the hip. Internet addicts in the Middle East and India got a nasty shock yesterday, as an under-sea cable connecting the regions to the rest of the world experienced what AT&T called a "disruption" causing a bit of "congestion." While AT&T was busy trying to get the phlegm out, Egypt & India were down to thirty to fifty percent access.

Meanwhile, Microsoft — sounding not unlike a Scooby Doo villain — was busy blaming IBM for the failure of the OOXML standard at the ISO. Apparently, IBM has a nefarious plan to spread Open Source to governments, and capitalize on it via consulting. We suppose it could be true, after all, The Empire is the expert on psychotic schemes to fix ISO elections.

If that weren't bad enough for the Big Bad Wolf, the French police have tossed MS in lockup with the announcement that the Gendarmerie will be switching 70,000 systems to Ubuntu Linux over the next four years. The men-at-arms have been sliding towards Open Source for quite some time, but no doubt this is merely evidence of IBM's sneaking about.

Speaking of those responsible for safety, two reports hit the wire today on the state of our security. First out was news that the bug Microsoft described as too hard for hackers to exploit has — three weeks later — been exploited. While The Empire was busy with it's usual "we're invincible" stance, Mozilla announced that they've upgraded the priority of an extension-based attack bug discovered last week and pledged that a patch would be available next week. That's good news, particularly given the news out of Europe that Firefox's share of the browser market is up in the Old World, in some cases as high as 45%.

And finally on the security front comes the news that popular web sites including Expedia and Rhapsody have been unwittingly pushing malware via infected Flash advertising, even though they thought they'd nailed the bad ads last week. Researchers aren't willing to guess at the method being used, but have pointed at the underlying ad networks as failing to properly VET the content.

That's it for the Morning Show, back at noon with news and weather!
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Justin Ryan is News Editor for LinuxJournal.com.
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