Slashdot Mirror
Inquirer Blasts Mozilla for Microsoft-Style Bashing
DoubleWhopper writes "An article over at The Inquirer blasts Mozilla and "lead Firefox engineer" Ben Goodger for resorting to Microsoft-style bashing of Netscape for their recent flawed release. After posting excerpts if scathing comments from readers of Goodger's own blog, the author comments, "I wonder why should companies contribute or fund the Mozilla Foundation, if any derivative work or redistribution of the Foundation's browsers they create is going to raise the FUD mocking and anger of Mozilla's 'lead engineer'". This after Christopher Aillon's (of RedHat) reaction last week."
... was hardly wrong. Here it is, verbatim from his blog:
If security is important to you, this demonstration should show that browsers that are redistributions of the official Mozilla releases are never going to give you security updates as quickly as Mozilla will itself for its supported products.
Now, if it is true that Netscape is a "redistribution" of Firefox (Netscape says it is), its only fair to comment that if FF is updated, it will be some time before Netscape is. I wouldn't call it Microsoft-style bashing.
I don't want to read
he was still correct (by a day)
No, actually, in this case, he was wrong (by about a week). Somebody who downloaded Netscape 8.0 when it was released, then updated to 8.1 when it was released, would have a day of unpatched vulnerability.
Somebody who downloaded Firefox 1.0.3 on the day the latest exploit was revealed, then updated to 1.0.4 the day it was released, would have at least a week of vulnerability.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
From his blog:
/. For example, let me ask you this: Are global warming activists spreading FUD? The history of some would seem to indicate so. Does it make it any less of an argument for them to make it?
If security is important to you, this demonstration should show that browsers that are redistributions of the official Mozilla releases are never going to give you security updates as quickly as Mozilla will itself for its supported products.
The above statement is: True.
From the 10 immutable laws of security:
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
The above statement is: True.
Either of these could be viewed as FUD, because it requires the reader have a level of paranoia or fear. It is whether or not someone chooses to believe them that makes the FUD different.
IMHO, this shouldn't even be newsworthy enough for Slashdot to cover. As stated by others, this guy isn't even part of the Mozilla Foundation and this is more an attack on one person's comments than the foundation as a whole.
They make a very good point, Firefox contains the latest code and the latest security updates. AOL and Netscape can use their code, but ultimately, if a user's top priority is security, they should probably be using the browser first to be updated.
The only reason why someone should use Netscape or the AOL browser is if they *have* to, or if those browsers offer some feature that Firefox doesn't currently have.
There's a lot of FUD slung from both commercial and open source developers, I don't see why this term has become *the* definition of "evil" on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace
Old UNIX shell thing.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
If you work on such a terminal and accidently type the backspace key, all you get is a series of ^H , instead of actual text being deleted.
The /. commnets with ^H in them are a elite way of showing two ways of putting things, The first word being not so politically correct followed by ^H and the PC version of the same.
Man I have too much time on my hand...btw to get the backspace key to do what it should do "stty erase "
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Very old terminals did the echo themselves sometimes. Typing the backspace key actually deleted the character in front of the cursor. Nevertheless, the mail program (mailx mostly) read a backspace char (0x08). When this char was sent to the recipient (because BS was not the stty erase character, as you explained), it was often represented at the sender side as ^H. It could also be that it did a backspace; this depended on the MUA and the terminal settings.
So, there were senders who did not even realize that one could see their edit actions. Similar to those folks who sent around MS .doc files today.
I remember getting emails with ^H in them. Man, I'm feeling old today. ;-)
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
What are you smoking? I updated 1.0.3 to 1.0.4 through the "Check Now" button and didn't have any problems.
Doublecheck your internet connection settings.