Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Australia, Nomenclature, Books
Please, no more name changing. suqur writes "As a follow-up to many stories previously posted, News.com reports that the recently renamed Mozilla Firebird browser (previously known as Phoenix) has finally given up on its new name, and relinquished the name. The new names for the Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird will be Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail, respectively. Looks like they're right back where they started, eh?"
Whatever the name, Mozilla is still only almost perfect: GeekLife.com writes "An old Mozilla exploit continues to crash almost any version/flavor of Mozilla with just 5 lines of plain HTML code (no JavaScript, ActiveX, etc.). If you're very brave, you can test/crash your Mozilla by going here.
It's important to report fairly on issues like this, or people will come to think of the Open Source journals as biased, uninformative, irresponsible propaganda machines, which will greatly harm any legitimate cause that the OS folks are promoting."
Books to download, at varying prices. Scott Pendergrast writes "We're working here at Fictionwise to convince publishers to release Neal Stephenson's works as eBooks. Recently his Cryptonomicon work finally became available in Secure Microsoft and Palm Reader formats (yes, the irony of this title being sold in an encrypted format is not missed ;-)
To encourage sales of this title, which hopefully will result in more of his works becoming ebooks, we're offering a 50% micropay rebate on it (so we're actually losing a bit on each sale)."
If you like your books free and non-fiction, though, mindpixel writes "I am not lying. The National Academies Press which was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States, has more than 2,500 free, searchable, high quality books online. Some random examples:
- The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life
- Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time
- Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy
- Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response"
This ought to be tax-deductable, too! ThreeToe writes "Recently the RIAA settled a lawsuit with four college students; one of them was Daniel Peng of Princeton University. Daniel is accepting donations to help pay his $15,000 settlement fee along with related legal fees. You can send money via paypal by clicking here. Remember that Daniel simply wrote an MP3 search engine; he didn't distribute MP3s himself. Those who share my belief that this lawsuit was wrong-headed should make a statement by assisting Daniel."
That will simply encourage them. If it were me being sued, I'd challenge it all the way to the Supreme Court. Not my fault he chickened out.
Why would we donate money Daniel Peng? Yeah, he got screwed, but the fact is he settled rather than fight. I'd be willing to donate $ for his legal bills had he opted to fight the RIAA lawsuit -- but not now; why should we give him money to help pay the settlement, when it will go straight to the RIAA?
Yet an equivalent bug (because they're bugs, not vulnerabilities) in IE makes the front page and generates hundreds of 'M$ is teh sux' posts.
Ahhhh, but this is open source, so the bug must be 'less bad'.
His reasoning is quite acceptable IMO, in an earlier Slashdot article he mentioned in an interview that he or his family did not have the resources to fight this in court therefore they agreed to a settlement.
Unfortunately the RIAA have chosen to target University students, the same people who in couple of years will graduate and gain employment and therefore have more disposable income to purchase music through the 'proper' channels.
It's been said many times before, the RIAA are digging there own grave with this type of legal action.
Isn't that what the EFF and ACLU are for?
Actually, the ACLU kind of has a lot on their plate these days, what with trying to stop Ashcroft from spying on everyone and locking them up in Gitmo without even being charged and all...
GMD
watch this
Yes, even if mozilla is as easy to crash as IE, we don't risk as much doing so since our browser isn't integrated into our operating system... ...so even if the exploit is exactly the same as IE's, we're still hurt less in the end.
So how come this "exploit" wasn't deserving of its own front page story like the IE one was?
Umm, cause it wasn't an exploit.
IE exploits gives bad people access to your machines. This just crashes your browser. Does a crash in code that is so obscure that nobody ever triggered it using tags that I've personally never heard of (I'm no HTML expert but I have been a professional webmaster on and off for 10 years) warrant a font page story? My vote is no.
If this doesn't get modded up or gets labelled as Flamebait or troll I'll have lost all hope for Slashdot.
You may notice that one of the numerous links in this Slashback is to a page that crashes Mozilla.
cant_get_a_good_nick replies to the following (written by cscx):
"So how come this "exploit" wasn't deserving of its own front page story like the IE one was?"
with
"Umm, cause it wasn't an exploit.
IE exploits gives bad people access to your machines. This just crashes your browser. Does a crash in code that is so obscure that nobody ever triggered it using tags that I've personally never heard of (I'm no HTML expert but I have been a professional webmaster on and off for 10 years) warrant a font page story? My vote is no."
And yes, he is right! But what he fails to remember is that just a few days ago the same sort of crash was labelled as an "exploit" by slashdot.
here
He also makes reference to the fact that this is really uncommon html code. i.e. we should go easy on Mozilla for this. But IE received no such grace from slashdot readers. Go on, click on the link. Read through the comments.
We all know we're biased in some sense to Linux. But does it have to be so god damn obvious? We're geeks. We're supposed to be smarter than average. We should be better than this.
What really gets me though is that cscx was modded as a troll for his statement. Bias doesn't get anymore blatant than that.
Sean
Amen to that. If we all pitch in and pay the fine it will only encourage them to repeat the trick. Sorry, but if you want help you had better be willing to do your part.
As a more libertarian sort, I'm much more likely to contribute to mutual aid than to give outright charity. Helping somebody fight against injustice boils down to selfish self-defensein that it lowers the odds of it happening to me in turn. Helping somebody who wants to bend over and take it only raises the odds of getting screwed in return, and where is my motivation for that?
Yes it sucks to be that one guy who gets picked as a test case, but Freedom isn't free any more than Free Software is free. And it isn't until the crap hits the fan that you are forced to look deep down into your self and decide whether to be a sheep or stand up and accept the responsibility to defend the Liberties you were supposedly endowed with. And should the day come that a hero fights a truly just cause alone, our experiment in self government is concluded.
If this guy didn't know that being a mp3 trader (yes I know he claims the defense of only indexing files) in any way risked the wrath of the RIAA then the guy is an idiot. Idiots deserve no help from me. So lets assume he did know and was doing it as an act of civil disobedience. Then he is obligated to follow through and BE the test case. I'm sure that the authorities would have been more than happy to let Rosa Parks chicken out and settle for a small fine and stop the growing civil rights battle swirling around her case, but what sort of world would she have helped build?
Democrat delenda est
(regarding point "C" above)
I'm a musician. I spend hours and hours writing music and finally invest in studio time and the costs of publishing my music on CD (none of this is cheap). The only reason I invest my own money in doing this is that I expect to get a return on my money.
When that CD is pirated and copied, I don't understand how people can think that there's nothing wrong with taking something without paying that they're supposed to pay for. By pirating my CD, you're able to listen to my music without compensating me for the time and money that it took to make the CD in the first place.
You can sit here and rattle off definitions of "theft" and "piracy" and "copyright" all day long, but the bottom line is that you're gaining enjoyment off of my work and hard-earned money without paying for it.
By your definition the IE 'exploit' wasn't an exploit either. It just crashed the browser.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
> And what exactly is wrong with the RIAA's goal? They have a legitimate claim against illegal file sharing & ripping
What's wrong is that the RIAA used their huge legal and financial resources to persecute a student who ran a computer network search engine?
Not an MP3 trading application, just a search engine that could be used, as Altavista and Google can, for finding MP3s...
If they are so right, why didn't they sue Altavista first? Why not Google first? Because they would have fought back and won. Therefore the RIAA was NOT suing because they were right, they were using their superior force to pervert our legal system and intimidate people who are doing LEGAL things that conflict with the RIAA's goals.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
You can sit here and rattle off definitions of "theft" and "piracy" and "copyright" all day long, but the bottom line is that you're gaining enjoyment off of my work and hard-earned money without paying for it.
Go lookup Payola and learn about the record business. If some people don't get to enjoy your stuff for free (via radio or other means) you won't ever recover your expenses. Of course even if you do sell nearly a 1/2 million CD's you might not recover your expenses either. That how it works and if you don't like it, try a different line of work. If CCR can't make money in the business how do you expect to?
"Slashdot" was brutal enough (and even pro-microsoft!). Here's a small list of some postively moderated comments to jog your memory:
An Overview Of PNG; Mozilla M17: M25
Mozilla Milestone 14 Awaits: This better not be M14
Mozilla To Be Dual Licensed - MPL/GPL: IE?
Mozilla M8 Released: Improvement over Netscape, but barely
Mozilla M8 Released: Top 10 things I love about Mozilla.
21 Linux Web Browsers? MS IE for Linux - I'd use it, wouldn't you?
/. has swung in the other direction. Who cares if there are a bunch of 'M$ is teh sux' posts. Does it mean something different from all the 'Mozilla is teh sux' posts from four years ago?
The editors of slashdot were hardly generous in their criticism either:Netscape 6 Fails To Support Web Standards
So what does it mean? The perception of mozilla among a good number of users on
In my opinion, I think Mozilla IS better than IE. Yes, I snicker when I see silly little exploits or bugs in Microsoft products. I work with this stuff all day. I know how many millions of dollars my company spends on Microsoft, and I know that in many cases I can get an open source product that does the job well enough, or sometimes better than the equivalent Microsoft product. I subscribe to ntbugtraq and I see 2-3 vulnerabilities a week for Microsoft products. It makes me wonder why this expensive software has so many problems, and makes me appreciate the effort that goes into free software, even when they get the same kinds of bugs.
Mozilla has come a long way, and, I think, surpassed IE. I hope jwz is proud of what Mozilla has become, even with its problems.
I know I am.
I'm a musician too, and I expect that anything I produce will provide publicity for my act. Artists should be paid for any CD's sold, merchandise, etc. but _not_ for every MP3 downloaded. :D You think that "intellectual property" is equivalent to tangible property, and that information should not be free. Some things are for everybody to enjoy.
Why should people pay for every MP3 they download? When did altruism vanish from the face of the planet? I suspect you Americans think that you can patent ideas too