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."
Coming soon: Netscape Gremlin
~D:
The future isn't what it used to be.
I do not have any cash to give but I've got some bootleg Metallica CD's I could donate(I just need to make some copies).
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
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?
I'm not sure you have to be brave to click the link that crashes your Mozilla. It's like not pressing the red button that says "Don't Press". I knew what it was going to do and I still clicked the link. Give stupid/curious people like me some credit too thanks.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
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.
The Browser Formerly Known as Phoenix people seem to be asserting that.
Perhaps it's just a glib reversal to save face?
And for the better, in addition to stepping on toes, those names were godawful, and brought to mind not only the cars themselves, but also the attendant mullets and hairbands. Great program otherwise.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
According to this --
Perhaps I'm not understanding correctly, but weren't there mp3s *on his box* available for downloading? Unless they were all ok for distribution (certainly possible, but unlikely) wouldn't this qualify as `distributing mp3s himself' ?It's flexible
It's lighweight
It's Stable
It's Got the support of Apple Computers Inc
It's got decent fonts
It also a universal fileviewer/manager
You can even run a terminal emulator at the bottom of it.
It's basically Internet Explorer for linux, but without the bugs and spyware!
Konqueror, the cause of the Dinosaur's extinction
And, it dosen't crash on the crash mozilla page either!
Avalible in all good linux distros, MacOS X, *BSD and even experimentally on Windows!
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
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.
I have a 16X burner. That should be worth $800!
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
Here's how you can crash IE *and* Mozilla in one file ;) :
</fieldset>
<html>
<form>
<input type crash>
<fieldset style="position:fixed;">
<legend>Crash</legend>
</form>
</html>
submit a patch. Seriously, with all the talented slashdotters out there I'm surprised the Mozilla bug wasn't fixed before the story even posted for non-subscribers.
This space intentionally left blank.
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
The grandparent is not criticizing Daniel's actions. He's simply saying, if Daniel had decided to fight, he would have helped out. He's not fighting, so he won't help with the settlement. It says nothing about disapproving of the settlement.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
By your definition the IE 'exploit' wasn't an exploit either. It just crashed the browser.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The guy isn't guilty of any crime, but he had to settle as if he were? Someone enlighten me... I'm still forming my opinion on this, but if the RIAA is willing to pursue bully tactics (intimidating people with lawsuits with no merit against people who can't fight back), and price fixing, they shouldn't have the nerve to complain when the consumer resorts to the same things when fighting back. Not saying it's right, or legal, but they shouldn't act shocked when human nature asserts itself. Oh, and the people who ACTUALLY DO something against the law, even when pursuing their own form of justice should be prepared to face the consequences... (in general, not referring to the lawsuits in question)
> 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
Geek: wow, aren't you timothy? you stopped the Mozilla crashing page, right? how did you do it?
timothy: it was simple really. Web pages have a preset "bandwidth limit", once they reach this limit, they shut down. knowing their weakness, i just sent wave after wave of our own browsers into view them, once they crashed them all, they were effectively shut down.
I stole this Sig
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?
Please, everyone keep in mind that the naming situation wouldn't have been nearly as bad if Phoenix hadn't made such a big deal in the first place.
The big, bloated, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink Mozilla that you download from mozilla.org is called Seamonkey.
However, nobody ever refers to it as Seamonkey - it's just Mozilla. Phoenix/Firebird was just being referred to directly as Phoenix/Firebird until Seamonkey could be retired and the rest of the developers could move over to the new codebase. At that point it would've been "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail & News" again (as far as we end-users are concerned).
If Phoenix hadn't flipped out and had just waited a few months the "Phoenix Browser" would probably have been forgotten.
It's not like Mozilla ever got sued by Exploratoy.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
"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.
This isn't even strictly an HTML exploit (as claimed in the summary): take out the CSS (style="position:fixed") and it loses its teeth. I know of at least one other related crasher (it's reported in bugzilla) involving certain objects and position:..., and this is probably related.
It has always been an internal codename with the intention of publicly calling the browser component "Mozilla Browser" after 1.4 is released. This is not a retraction of "Mozilla Firebird."
Please see this MozillaNews article for reference to the real story.
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
The fact is, every kid wants to be a swashbuckling sea-dog at some point; it's exciting, adventurous, and thoroughly enjoyable. I think that's the point the RIAA was trying to make when they co-opted the term. Maybe. Hm?
The books linked there are serious crippleware. Very hard to browse and read. If you have specific questions in Biology you can search some quality books here: PubMedBooks
Hmm.. this is true. Do I have the right to wear an eyepatch and parrot then? Methinks not, after all..
Not an MP3 trading application, just a search engine that could be used, as Altavista and Google can, for finding MP3s...
That doesn't matter. Remember the Sony decision: as long as there is a possible substantial non-infringing use of the technology, the mere fact that the technology exists isn't enough for the provider to be liable.
A pure mp3 search engine is fine.
There are only three factors to be considered, and whether the search engine is general purpose or not is NOT one of them.
1) Does it help people infringe?
2) Does the provider know of specific infringements that it has helped? (more specific than knowing that they're possible; less specific than knowing individual filenames, though that would be good too)
3) Could the provider have stopped helping people infringe by changing his technology or failing to provide it anymore?
I suspect this kid knew that people were actually infringing using his search engine. I bet he even used it himself in that manner, as even getting a listing of illegally downloadable files could infringe the copyright holder's distribution right.
There is also one other way to escape liability; it is the one that the search engines use. And that is to comply with the DMCA safe harbor in 17 USC 512. But these kids didn't do that either, or else they'd be laughing at the RIAA while totally immune from suit.
So the reason to not sue Google et al, aside from that they do have better lawyers, is that Google was smart enough to shield themselves with the law; these kids were stupid and left themselves wide open to liability. Even though it would be easy-peasy to get the immunity.
But they didn't, and RIAA _was_ right here. Still a bully, but right. It happens from time to time, you know.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I knew a formerly married couple where the guy actually quit his job (very high-paying, no less) to avoid paying his wife child support payments when they were about to get a divorce. He got away with it... and as far as anyone knows he left the country at around the same time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The move to "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail" was always in the plan, and was in the branding document published last month. This change is scheduled to happen at some point after we release the currently-in-development 1.4 application suite.
But, before the change happens, there are likely to be one or more releases of the Mozilla Firebird Browser as a standalone application. That was also always in the plan.
Move along, no change, nothing to see here.
Gerv
(gerv at mozilla.org)
1) Does it help people infringe?
2) Does the provider know of specific
infringements that it has helped? (more specific than knowing that they're possible; less specific than knowing individual filenames, though that would be good too)
3) Could the provider have stopped helping people infringe by changing his technology or failing to provide it anymore?
First, excuse me for being so brash, but you deserve it...
Put this list back in your ass from whence you pulled it.
How come the RIAA hasn't sued Sony (I know, a paradox) for making CDRW drives. It meets your three criteria. What about Sony's MP3 players? Check. How about the CDR manufacturers. Check. Or any VCR manufacturer. Check. Or photocopying machine makers. Check.
Shall I go on, or do you get the point yet? Besides, this list you made up contradicts the previous sentence you wrote: Remember the Sony decision: as long as there is a possible substantial non-infringing use of the technology, the mere fact that the technology exists isn't enough for the provider to be liable.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.