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Privacy Leak in Mozilla and Mozilla-Based Browsers

Posted by timothy on from the where-are-you-going-where-have-you-been dept.

Mike S. writes "Mozillazine has pointed users to this story at ZDNet UK which breaks the news about a privacy bug discovered in in all Mozilla builds up to and including 1.2a as well as browsers based on Mozilla such as Netscape 6/7, Chimera and Galeon. The bug allows a web site to track where you're going when leaving the site whether you use a link, a bookmark or type a URL into the address field. This page has a demonstration of the bug and instructions on patching it via a user.js file."

3 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Easy work-around for now by *xpenguin* · · Score: 0, Troll

    Or, instead of modding up this karma whore, you could read the last part of the page which tells you exactly the same fix.

  2. Re:Easy work-around for now by jesser · · Score: 1, Troll

    Just because it's intentional, doesn't mean it's not a bug. The space-adding hack breaks code, breaks plain-text urls (exacerbated by the "Slashdot doesn't automatically turn URLs into links" bug), generally frustrates people, and can be fixed.

    Slashdot's use of tables for layout is the only reason "page-widening trolls" exist. If Slashdot used a simple layout or a CSS layout, a single wide post would not cause other posts to wrap off of the screen. Slashdot's use of tables also makes IE users wait for the entire page to load before they can read the first comment, but the space-adding hack is the most visible result of using tables for layout. See also: More reasons to avoid using tables for layout rather than only using tables for tabular data.

    --
    The shareholder is always right.
  3. Dear BugZilla morons by MicroBerto · · Score: 2, Troll
    No. If this bug was fixed months ago when it was first detected, then there would have been no problem. However, the slashdot ultimatum was issued and appropriately followed through.

    We will not tolerate ourselves to look stupid while accusing other companies of leaving security holes for months, and then doing it ourselves. Do it again, and we will slashdot you again. And yes, we will defeat your referrer. Thank you, have a nice day. :)

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    Berto