Slashdot Mirror

Can you point to a source, please?
Because the front page of FlashBlocks site says something different:

Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.

(Emphasis taken from source)

There used to be a Firefox extension for Local Shared Objects, called Objection, and I used it back then, but it's not compatible with Firefox 3.

I have the Flash plugin, but I also run FlashBlock. It's awesome. No crappy flashy anything unless I actually want it, and then it's only a few mouseclicks away. That plus NoScript meant it took me about half a dozen clicks before I had both the permission and the ability to run the clickjacking demo. I feel pretty safe with Firefox.

Guess what, there's one that does Vi too. http://vimperator.mozdev.org/ I'm not taking sides, in fact, I use nano.

Were you typing that with vi or something?

Well, the vimperator. Close enough in my book.

Objection is simple flash cookie removal tool/Firefox addon. It is a fork/continuation of the original program by greg yardley

This is a great program. It works as advertised. The only issue I have is Objection's automatic detection of the directory that holds the flash cookies. I have to manually tell the program that the cookies are in: /home/MYUSERNAME/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/RANDONNUMBER

Also Objection is being actively developed and it looks like a new version 4 will be out soon, unfortunatly for me the beta version of 4 could not find the cookies even though i pointed it to the appropriate directory.

Flashblock - don't let it run in the first place and it can't put cookies on your system.

Actually, Flashblock doesn't prevent flash from running - it just shuts it down quickly, so it doesn't block cookies at all.

No, but AdBlock (plus) will prevent those silly flash ads from ever being downloaded in the first place. a much better solution.

Flashblock - don't let it run in the first place and it can't put cookies on your system.

Actually, Flashblock doesn't prevent flash from running - it just shuts it down quickly, so it doesn't block cookies at all.

Same reason I won't switch to Opera. I like vim.

Oh, and don't forget about noscript, even if Chrome runs javascript faster, most of the time, I don't care.

I already have to deal with 2 (IE for sites that don't play nice, and FF as my preferred).

What, you haven't installed IETab?.

(I'm really liking Chrome, but I'm longing for the day IETab and GreaseMonkey get ported to it).

Great! I'll switch to it as soon as Vimperator is ported.

If you use vi, then clearly you need Vimperator.

I have the same issue with our corporate documentation system.
Editmode only works in IE.
But thanks to IEtab http://ietab.mozdev.org/ I don't have to leave firefox to visit those pages with IE.
I added a rule to IEtab always open said app with IEtab
Works completely transparent.

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
http://noscript.net/

I used to use the Read Easily Firefox extension, that adds a toolbar button and a hotkey (Ctrl-Z) to toggle styles on and off. Perfect for tiny fonts, bad colors, etc.

Now, Vimperator rendered many smaller extensions obsolete, I mapped the \ key to do it, with :map \ :invnum<CR>

> How would Firefox even know which podcasts to download?

Tooltip that supports multimedia in ENCLOSURE tag : images are displayed beside the description, and audio and video files are played (podcasting, try feed http://inforss.mozdev.org/inforss.xml) with the firefox embedded multimedia plugin

http://inforss.mozdev.org/index.html

> How would Firefox even know which podcasts to download?

Tooltip that supports multimedia in ENCLOSURE tag : images are displayed beside the description, and audio and video files are played (podcasting, try feed http://inforss.mozdev.org/inforss.xml) with the firefox embedded multimedia plugin

http://inforss.mozdev.org/index.html

I wonder what the impacts would be of blog-disclosures being retracted or edited after the fact, Ministry of Truth-style?

Very likely. That's why for instance, most lawyers have their staff run diff programs between digital copies of contracts that are emailed back and forth between parties.

It's also very likely, that a few companies get caught doing this type of retroactive editing for their financial disclosures. It's trivial to catch, and given enough eyes -- someone is bound to catch discrepancies.

For instance, this firefox extension updatescanner will scan urls at regular intervals, alerting you when there is a change and giving you a particular diff for each change, all the while not relying on the official header information -- which is often incorrect. I suspect that given the recent news, both the McCain camp and the Obama camp have been using this kind of tool to track each others' unofficial campaign retractions and additions.

Those features you're talking about - and basically a lot of what Awesomebar wants to provide have previously been implemented into Vimperator.
I switched from Opera to FF2 for Vimperator, because that's just an Awesomebrowser, not just the bar. Best keyboard support in a browser. Ever. One of the great features of Vimperator is also the :buffers! command (accessible via the 'b' shortcut) that essentially brings Awesomebar's functionality to your tabs - rendering that tab bar unnecessary -- and I've disabled it. Along with all the menu&button-clutter, see the screen shot below.

Screenie.
And while you're wondering... C-i will fire up Vim (gvim -f by default) when you're above an input field, so you can edit your /. reply in a decent text editor, instead of relying on GTK's horrible default capabilities. (of course, that's configurable. You could even put Emacs there. *shudders*)

I can only say it is a real shame that no-one has noticed any of the mouse gesture add-ons and would like to incorporate mouse gestures and wheel-based tab switching natively.

Disclosure: my main browser is Opera. I do use Seamonkey and Firefox (as well as other browsers). I currently use Firegestures, and have used Optimoz and "All-in-one gestures" in the past.

I just installed Foxyproxy and told it to reroute "http://apps.facebook.com/scrabulous" through a free proxy outside of the effected area. http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/

If Hasbro asks, I'm in Brazil.

Sir, I am appalled. Why didn't you write the comment in gvim in the first place?

Then you should probably try vimperator, which is a great Firefox plugin. http://vimperator.mozdev.org/ It's an amazing plugin that I'm not sure how I survived without. And it allows you to pass HJKL to /. D2, but you have to switch in and out of vimperators pass-through mode. But you get to leave the mouse on side collecting dust.

Easy, Flashblock

It's a bad idea with a precedent. Maybe AVG got the idea from the Fasterfox add-on, which can be set to pre-fetch every link on the page, increase the number of server connections, et cetera.

What a great idea.

I do have one question...

If Microsoft kills it's plugin technology (ActiveX) how do you expect people to render video?

Every major browser out there (with the possible exception of Lynx) has a plugin technology that allows things like video rendering to be possible. As long as you allow plugins that have the ability to render arbitrary code, you have an environment that is the functional equivilent of ActiveX.

ActiveX has a bad reputation simply because it is the most popular plugin technology out there. There is absolutely nothing inherently less secure with ActiveX controls than there is in the extension mechanisms used by other browsers.

Does anyone remember the GreaseMonkey vulnerabilities? No ActiveX, but a buggy browser plugin.

Killing ActiveX won't make IE any more secure.

Well, my extension is pretty much an application, and runs on Firefox (among others): http://msnmsgr.mozdev.org/ /shamelessplug

While all other /.ers are complaining that ClamWin is useless I want to bring some points :
- ClamWin has a built-in plug-in to scan incoming mail in outlook.
- ClamWin is easy to call from scripts and is a nice thing to add to the commands that are launched by your favourite bit-torrent client once a file is completed (I use this on my linux based torrent downloading/file server machine)
- ClamWin has plug-ins for FireFox : SafeDownload, Download Scan, Download Statusbar all let you launch the scanner of your choosing once a download finishes. ClamWin Antivirus Glue is another solution, but one has to manually update the minimal supported version (the plugin is set to support up to 1.5 although it works with more modern versions).

So, although ClamWin isn't continuously scanning in background, it can cover most of the usual entry points. (Although I don't know about plugins for Thunderbird and Microsoft file server).

For those who like to test newer bleeding edge software : WinPooch software can launch a scan when ever an executable is opened - it's almost as good as an on demand scanner.

Either disable it, or at least use adblock+ and noscript to avoid having 80 flash widgets running inside your 30 tabs.

What you want is FlashBlock.

How about some customizable on/off toggles, or dials for stuff like Javascript, cookies, etc. Hace it so that you can put it on the browser surface - like right next to the printer icon. Easily accessible, and not down 4 layers of menus.

You want Prefbar, and so do I, to be built into the Mozilla codebase.

Enigmail is an OSS plugin for Thurderbird that gives GPG/PGP support.

Firefox and IE also don't have built-in Flash or Java support, but we all fix that within the first 5 minutes of an install, right? Email encryption should be no different.

The hardest problem I find is getting people to maintain their keys and a real trusted way to exchange keys w/o man-in-the-middle attacks.

Just putting your key in pgp.mit.edu or on your homepage doesn't prevent man-in-the-middle attacks any more than an SSL cert not signed by a CA that your browser already trusts is worth anything (again, unless you securely download that self-issued SSL key).

More people need to use these. Operating without a centralized Certificate Authority, GPG really depends on there being sufficient users to establish a web of trust.

I think people (in the US at least) either don't understand the simplicity of sniffing cleartext, or don't think they care. The aggravating part is that GPG can be really easy to use. Apps like Seahorse make key and keyring management trivial. There's a great Thunderbird plugin that makes signing and/or encrypting your mail no harder than it was before. (Yes, I know not everyone uses Linux and Thunderbird, but I trust GPG tools exist for other OSs/email clients)

Given a safe and ubiquitous encryption scheme, I can't think any reasons for sending text/data in the clear. Now all we need is a ubiquitous encryption scheme.

Two words for you: Firefox and Adblock. (ok that's actually three, the latter of which is a composite word, but don's you mind that) Set the right filters and it takes care of Google's text ads as well.

FTFP:

The goal of this project is to make it possible to sync your calendar data to your palm handheld. The way to do this is create a framework, so it is possible to make it run on multiple platforms without rewriting everthing.

If you hate the awesomebar, use vimperator! It's made just for people like you, who want those damn kids off their lawns and think that mice are the worst thing to happen to usability since keyboard overlays went out of style.

(Admittedly, though, every so often I actually do a :set menuoptions+=T, because on occasion the Awesome Bar is actually... ya know... useful).

You may also want to try Vimperator, a Firefox extension for controlling the browser entirely with the keyboard, with vi-like keybindings. It's not perfect, but I find it much more convenient than the standard mouse-driver interface.

Pah -- the built-in keybindings are for sissies. All hail Vimperator!

Ask and ye shall receive Vimperator.

Also, pie menu is interesting, but problematic. Does it float over the other windows or sit under? Can it be moved around? Will we have to alt-tab to get to the Start menu? How nice will it play with multiple screen setups and other non standard desktop layouts?

You'll have a lot of trouble getting by without it on a lot of websites. .... http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Wait, you need flash on many websites or you can't even navigate, so the solution is to...block it? I'm confused.

Too many websites lean on Flash too heavily. You'll have a lot of trouble getting by without it on a lot of websites. Its obnoxious, and what's more, there's more and more Flash-based advertising appearing on various websites (yes, I'm glaring at you too, Slashdot). But there is a way to make Flash be a little more well-behaved: http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Best Firefox extension EVER. Works on Seamonkey, too, which is what I use at home.

Try Prefbar: http://prefbar.mozdev.org/.

[Dis|En]able colors, images, animation, java, javascript, flash, popups, cookies, referrers, and a whole bunch more with a single click.

The issue I've seen with Flash isn't a crash, but that if one lingers on a page with a lot of Flash content (say, Youtube) and leaves the page up while browsing in other tabs, CPU eventually spikes to 99% usage, requiring the browser to be shut down.

Unfortunately, this isn't a Firefox problem, but a problem with the Flash plugin. The workaround I found (thanks to other Slashdot users) was to install the addon Flashblock. Now, instead of having the Flash content sitting and waiting, it's replaced by a little clickable object to load it. Since installing it, I have not experienced the CPU spike behavior, when it used to be a daily issue. Hope this helps folks.

I know I'm a leech by not viewing the ads, but I use Platypus on my web comics.

I had to turn off AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey and NoScript to find out that the page was shagged on Friday.

Hope they don't do that to Garfield, Ctrl-Alt-Del, UserFriendly and Penny Arcade too. Five comics a day, and now dilbert dot com is replaced with the FeedBurner page. When I get to my desktop machine I'll Platypus that too.

For those who use FlashBlock extension for Mozilla's Web browsers, you need to click on top right corner unshown Flash section or allow Flash or else the Web site looks weird (be sure to report it too so its Web staff can fix it).

Here is what it looks like when Flash is blocked: screen shot.

Yes, I am sure.
You are right, and I pointed that out at first, it doesnt happen most of the time, but it can occur.

go read the source.
http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/flashblock/source/content/flashblock/flashblock.xml?rev=1.34;content-type=text%2Fplain;sortby=date

Look for the settimeout values which indicate you want a callback event raising after a specified period.

The period is set to 0, but as with all callbacks, I believe it does not run instantly.
(This code used to fail if you just call the flashblockShowPlaceholder() function directly because the actual DOM is not completely initialized)

Most of the time the flash will be blocked instantly, but if other threaded operations are ongoing and the page load is not simple then the flash actually gets time to run.

(If its totally changed and is really secure I will be very pleasantly surprised, but from the looks of things it hasn't yet).

Don't forget Objection (for Firefox), which lets you delete Stored Local Shared Objects (Flash "cookies") and you just might reach 25% less paranoia.

It's not just hard to use, it's also ugly as hell. ...just using it for digital signatures makes my email nearly unreadable never mind using actual encryption

I'm not too knowledgeable about this stuff either, but I think what you want to use is PGP/MIME. That way the digital signature is appended to the email the same as an attachment. It probably won't even be noticed by people who aren't looking for it or using a signature-aware email client, and it won't look particularly weirder than an email with a plain old attachment. If you use Thunderbird you can install the Enigmail plugin to use PGP/MIME. I've been messing with it recently and kinda like it.

> When you can figure out a way to make public key encryption so easy even my mother can use it I'll be happy to try.

Try enigmail.