Free Republic

Who could be upset by a scheme that allows free use of software? Well, Gervase Markham has found one Trading Standards officer who is Who could possibly be upset with the Mozilla Foundation for giving away its Firefox browser? One of my roles at the Mozilla Foundation relates to copyright licensing. I'm responsible for making sure that the software we distribute respects the conditions of the free software licences of the underlying code. I'm also the first point of contact for licensing questions. Most of the time, this job involves helping people who want to use our code in their...

For you users of Firefox, this is a great posting aid. It is a WYSIWYG HTML popup for posts. Right click in a field, and blam.... Works GREAT!! Get It Here

Computer code that could be used in cyberattacks on Firefox users has been released, increasing the urgency for people to upgrade to the latest version of the Web browser. The two pieces of exploit code, posted online earlier this week, take advantage of a security vulnerability in Firefox that Mozilla patched in an update Thursday. In response to the exploit release, the browser maker on Tuesday upgraded the severity rating of the flaw from "moderate" to "critical," its most serious rating. "This exploit was published after we released the 1.5.0.1 update," said Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Mozilla....

I have seen discussions of folks who know about Mozilla Firefox, and I hope some of you will help me, keeping in mind that I am not very well versed in computer related matters, but my son is. But he is stumped, as well. I use Mozilla Firefox as my search engine. I have the moderate SafeSearch feature on. There are a number of web pages that it pulls up, but when I click the item on the search page, everything that I have pulled up on the internet disappears. Nothing else. Any Word or Excel documents or anything else...

Mozilla on Wednesday released an update for Firefox 1.5 that fixes several security flaws and makes other changes aimed at improving the open-source Web browser. The update, Firefox version 1.5.0.1, patches a total of eight security vulnerabilities. One is deemed "critical" by Mozilla, four are rated "moderate" risk, and three are tagged "low" risk. The more serious flaws could let an attacker take over a system running a vulnerable version of Firefox, according to Mozilla's security alerts. Among the issues tackled is a problem disclosed late last year, which concerns Web pages with an extremely long title that could cause...

Microsoft plans to take the wraps off Internet Explorer 7 on Tuesday, releasing the new "preview" version of its Web browser to the general public for testing. The program, still a work in progress, will be available shortly for download from the Internet Explorer section of Microsoft's corporate Web site, the company said. The company, which began limited testing in July, had promised to deliver a public beta by the end of March. "The big update is that it's public," said Margaret Cobb, group product manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft. "All previous releases were limited." The latest version works...

The Mozilla Foundation has set a March launch date for a version of its Firefox Web browser that will run on Apple Computer's Intel version of Mac OS X. "We are targeting the official release of Firefox for Intel Mac OS X in late March with the Firefox 1.5.0.2 update," said Mozilla software engineer Josh Aas told. Demand for the browser on Apple's new CPU platform is expected to rocket as the PC vendor last week started selling the first Macs based on CPUs from Intel. Previously Apple had used IBM's PowerPC chips. While an unofficial version of the software...

Internet Explorer Sucks This study is from August, but I missed it. The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available. MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7%...

Anyone up for creating a FreeRepublic-specific search plugin for FireFox? The plugin needn't be anything fancy -- it could basically be a shortcut for the Google "site:freerepublic.com" query, or something similar. There's a Firefox Plugin generator here, but darned if I know how to use it. This plugin might be useful for searching the bodies of past FR threads, not just the titles.

Thursday 12th January 2006 Firefox achieves 10 percent market share Ingrid Marson ZDNet UK November 03, 2005, 11:45 GMT Mozilla's Firefox has managed to grab over 10 percent of the Web browser marker with its highest percentage to date, according to Web analytics firm OneStat.com on Tuesday. The company said that Mozilla's browser now has a global market share of 11.5 percent, an increase of 2.8 percentage points since April. Some of this growth is at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has declined by 1.2 percentage points since April, to a market share of 85.5 percent. The popularity...

A report by Mark Russinovich has raised serious concerns about the seedier side of anti-spyware. He investigated a number of programs that claimed to be spyware removal tools, and found that some of them not only do a poor job of detecting spyware, but may in fact be hazards themselves. Spyware has become big business in recent years, bringing in as much as US$1.6 billion in 2004. As spyware proliferates, the market for anti-spyware also grows, and many products such as Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy have arisen to combat this threat. However, it appears that some programs are...

It was only a matter of time before a trojan or virus targeted AdSense or YPM for malicious activity, and the time has come. A new trojan horse discovered by an Indian publisher replaces Google AdSense ads with their own ads, advertising sites including dating, sex, viagra and weight loss. This trojan is very recent, because it not only converts regular AdSense ad units, but also the Google AdSense and Firefox referrer buttons into text links. Techshout.com reports that a new, deceptive Trojan Horse program has surfaced. The program is engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to...

This alert is a follow-up to a post made yesterday on our blog: http://www.websensesecuritylabs.com/blog/ Websense® Security Labs™ has discovered numerous websites exploiting an unpatched Windows vulnerability in the handling of .WMF image files. The websites which have been uncovered at this point are using the exploit to distribute Spyware applications and other Potentially Unwanted Soware. The user's desktop background is replaced with a message warning of a spyware infection and a "spyware cleaning" application is launched. This application prompts the user to enter credit card information in order to remove the detected spyware. The background image used and the "spyware...

Researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available. MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7% unsafe. Opera was 17% unsafe: 65 days. That number is accidentally a little...

The minority of Mac users still browsing with Internet Explorer need to consider moving to another browser very quickly, as Microsoft plans to discontinue support for IE beginning Dec. 31. The news, which came in a statement on Friday, may not have come as a complete surprise to Mac users: Microsoft announced back in June 2003 that it was ending Mac support for IE. Microsoft has not upgraded the software in three years, leaving IE 5--rather than version 6, which is available for Windows--as the most recent version available to Mac users. While IE for Mac will continue to be...

Google Inc. is testing a Firefox extension that displays blogger comments on the Web page being viewed. The Blogger Web Comments for Firefox, released in beta this week, shows a display panel on the bottom right of the browser that lists bloggers' comments. Clicking on an item launches a new tab for viewing the blog. For people subscribing to Google's blogging service, called Blogger, they can use an "add comment" link on the display panel to post their own comment on their blog. Google will automatically add to the blog a link to the page being viewed. The extension is...

If you use the Firefox browser .. read this !! .. Two vulnerabilities in the popular Firefox browser have been rated "extremely critical" because exploit code is now available to take advantage of them. The cross-site scripting and remote system access flaws were discovered in Firefox version 1.0.3, but other versions may also be affected, said security company Secunia, which issued the ratings Sunday.

Mozilla Corp. has warned users of its newest browser, Firefox 1.5, that a bug in how the software handles extremely long names can make it seem that the computer has crashed. The flaw, however, does not expose users to attack, contrary to earlier reports by researchers. Malicious pages with very long titles--the proof of concept for the pseudo denial-of-service (DoS) attack contained 2.5 million characters--make the browser appear to hang, said Mozilla in an online security advisory, although the software is actually busy processing the name. Once encountered, the very slow start can't be corrected until the site name is...

Exploit code for the latest version of open-source browser Firefox was published Wednesday, potentially putting users at risk of a denial-of-service attack. The exploit code takes advantage of a bug in the recently released Firefox 1.5, running on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. Firefox, which initially debuted over a year ago, has moved swiftly to capture 8 percent of the browser market. The latest Firefox flaw exists in the history.dat file, which stores information from Web sites users have visited with the Firefox 1.5 browser, according to a posting on the Internet Storm Center, which monitors online threats. "If...

Mitchell Baker is, in many ways, everything Bill Gates is not. Microsoft Chairman Gates is male, and firmly believes software should be created and owned by individual companies. Baker is female, despite the sound of her first name, and a champion of ``open source.'' That's the once-radical notion that software should be written cooperatively and freely shared. What makes Baker worth watching is her job overseeing the Mozilla Project, an open-source effort based in Mountain View that develops the free Internet browser called Firefox. So far, Firefox is the only open-source software widely adopted by consumers, and that makes it...