But what is true is that the Slashdot editors or the submitter has decided that instead of even mentioning the patch, they would just focus on the exploit.
But of course the patch has automagically applied itself to every BES server in the world, instantly, leaving no window of vulnerability while sysadmins scramble to apply it.
Here lies Mozilla Firefox 2004-2011 tragically taken from us in a laser-shark jumping tournament mishap. Mourned by beloved siblings Thunderbird and Seamonkey, and disinherited siblings Sunbird and Songbird. We take comfort in the fact that he died as he lived, mad screaming insane. "I don't need to see a version number - just give me the latest shark you've got!"
Of course the right thing is to write it to be independent from version numbers, but test it with a certain version number (or version range
That's fine as long as you can get all your testing done within about two hours every six weeks, so you can fix your app before the security guys have to push out Firefox X+1 to patch the flood of security exploits.
Hi. Thank you, Mozilla developer, for your willingness to talk to us. Sadly, talk isn't enough, because it's not your talk we have a problem with but your actions. Explaining why you made a decision that a large chunk of your userbase directly and loudly asked you not to doesn't change the fact that you still went ahead and made that decision. In many people's dictionaries, doing something that breaks other people's work, and which isn't actually your decision to make, is exactly the definition of arrogance.
That you somehow manage to still "feel" humble about your one-sided decision-making doesn't change that you actually did it. Sorry. I know you feel bad about being called the bad guy here, but that's because you are one of the bad guys.
Or at least, you're one of the guys representing the organisation whose software is now no longer allowed to be supported by the IT division of the organisation where I work. Is that what you wanted? Dunno, but it's what happened, so perhaps you should try to understand why?
Again, sorry that you are so upset about this. I wish I could do something to help.
No, I don't think you understand at all. We're not upset about Mozilla's decision to abandon the enterprise. This has nothing to do with anybody's feelings. We're simply pragmatically and unemotionally dropping Firefox like the ticking security timebomb it has now become.
See, your software used to be an asset in the Enterprise. Due to your colleague's decisions, it's now become a liability. That's usually considered a bad thing, no?
The thing you could do to help would be to talk to your colleagues at Mozilla, and get them to reverse the decision they made. Primarily, make it so we in the Enterprise world can have long term security patches to Firefox separately to API breakage. We don't want new features. We want not to be rootkitted by every script kiddie who comes along. With what you've done, we now can't guarantee that. So, we're going back to Internet Explorer.
There was a time, around 1999 if I recall, when Mozilla seemed to think that it wanted to compete with IE. Now it seems like you've shrugged and decided to abandon even trying to compete with Microsoft and just stay a home browser. That's fine if you want to do that, but some of us in Enterprise world would really, really, really, love to use Firefox at work -- and we were this close to getting authorisation to do it -- but now you've made it impossible. So, we're having to abandon you. I'm surprised that you're okay with this. I really am. But as I said, this isn't about emotions, it's about rational decisionmaking.
If you want to have us as eyeballs and mindshare, please stop breaking our security patches (or write your software so it doesn't have zero-days in the first place, that would be super neat, but that seems to be impossible right across the industry right now, so we'll settle for patches like everyone else). But now that you've done the damage, it'll probably take about five years for us Enterprise types to trust you again.
Does that help explain our problems with why merely feeling "humbled" at working for super-awesome Mozilla doesn't really cut much ice with us corporate IT types? What we'd like to see is actual actions. If you could take that message back to your colleagues, we'd be much obliged.
As for keeping some old software, we tried this but our IT people refused to allow it "because it could not be supported". WTF??? we were not asking for "support".
I can see you've never worked in IT.
Protip: There's no such thing as an employee using a piece of software to do corporate business-critical data handling that "doesn't need support". Oh sure, they'll all swear they won't ever need support, when they buy/borrow/smuggle in Elephant Brand Cheapo Data Splicer Time Limited 30 Day Trial Edition (Siberian Language Localisation) Cracked By Hackerzb0y13, but when it comes to the day before yearly financial reports are due, suddenly it'll be "Oh by the way, can you please recover my budget spreadsheet files so I can do my presentation at eleven? I think my computer has a virus, because it's coming up "file unreadable, retry ignore?"".
If you work for a company, your software needs support. Trust me on this.
a netbook or a tablet. (And I think they're really synonymous functionally - it's just a matter of whether you need/want a physical keyboard.
How absurd! It's patently obvious that removing the keyboard from a portable computer turns it into a completely different kind of device, not even a kind of computer really, which requires a whole different operating system and a completely incompatible set of applications all provided by a different vendor, with your data locked up in its own proprietary micro formats.
I mean, otherwise people could just mix and match keyboarded and keyboardless portables and desktops at will, as if computers were some kind of ubiquitous data-processing device, and then where would we be? Back in the jungle, that's where.
And of course if you want to read a book on a computer - well that's an entirely different kind of thing, and you need a whole new class of device just to even think about doing that. It's just common sense!
When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html.
That was Linux 1998.
Linux/Gnome/Firefox 2011 is more like:
You arrive at the airport. There is one shiny ticket counter with a single flashing button called "Book a Flight!" There's nowhere to enter a destination. You push the button, and you are automatically allocated a seat on the next available flight to somewhere. Your luggage is whisked away by a serving robot, which then diligently saws it in half so it will fit in the under-seat space. You don't need to do a thing! At the boarding gate, the destination changes every five minutes, and you get to go wherever the latest destination is. It's a surprise!
Once on board, the seat automatically reconfigures itself to something almost but not exactly matching your height, and the whole plane's decor (and the location and flushing mechanism of the toilet) changes every five minutes. You can push a button to delay the changes, but if you push it more than three times a door will open beneath you and you will be dropped out into the sky without a parachute. If you want to sleep, though, you can press a special "Long Term Support" button which lets you push the button twenty times before the door opens.
You can play music and videos on the in-flight entertainment console, but half of them won't display until you give signed permission from your lawyer. An attractive stewardess visits you every minute asking if you need anything, and giving you a shopping cart of items to buy, and a locker to store all the goods in your pocket, and especially your wallet and the names and addresses of all your friends. But she won't promise that the locker is secure, in fact she laughs when you ask for a key, because privacy is silly.
Sometimes, when the decor reconfigures itself, the entire passenger deck will vanish and dump you into a barren cargo hold until you open a locked panel with a pocketknife, twist fifteen coloured wires together, count the number of sparks, and enter the result into a slide rule attached to ticking gearwork. But it's okay because there's a grubby diary in another locked panel with notes scribbled by the last passengers to take the flight, suggesting which wires you should cut and which you should twist. Sometimes the notes are wrong; sometimes they are just a string of insults. Sometimes following the notes will mean a wall doesn't reappear, or half a seat, or the plane may just stall entirely. But the answer is always in there somewhere, and it's very rare for the plane to completely crash nowadays.
Good news, everyone who came for the Atomic Caviar Banquet: we've successfully determined that yes, irradiating wild Alaskan salmon with pi-neutrino flux does improve both the flavour and supermarket shelf life. And the side effects are very minimal. Hardly any at all. Just a quick point of order, if you've actually eaten any of the Atomic Caviar, we have a superb team of xenobiologists in the surgical annex who'd like to have a chat. We'll have those flesh-eating parasites scrubbed from your blood and you'll be up and breathing again in no time. The iron ribcage is free of charge.
if Firefox fails to adopt rich client-side interfaces, developers will simply move on to other browsers.
Great, they're welcome to them.
As a web user (the natural prey and rival of web developers) I want less "richness" in my client-side interface, not more. I want the web developer to be extremely restricted in what they do, so that I as the user can choose how I want to view the site, and the malware developers have less ways to spoof my operating system.
tldr: "rich content" is a synonym for "doing it wrong"
Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want.
ROFL.
Let me know when they have an enterprise story other than "go away you lousy business cretins, we don't like your type and your nasty automated installation ways. No security patches for you! Btw we heard you liked random UI changes, here's all your buttons, foom, now they're gone! Beg for us to put them back! Beg on four legs and bark like a dog! Nope, too late, we'll do something even stranger for the next release."
I take it your ancestors where dragged kicking and screaming out of the cave
If going out of the cave meant their lungs exploded from exposure to hard vacuum, they probably were.
Fortunately they bred before doing that, so we're descended from a bunch of dead-end atmosphere-breathers who have a strange fondness for environments where your eyeballs stay inside your skull.
Feeding children in Somalia, now there's a serious undertaking... first you'd have to invade the country to get rid of the Islamic warlords who are not allowing aid in to feed the children now
++ this.. The correct answer to "why are there starving children in $country?" is "Because at least some of the people running $country want children to starve."
Modern water filtration and purification is built on technology invented by NASA.
Care to bak up that assertion with facts? Apollo and Shuttle used cryogenic hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells to generate water; I don't see this technology being used at all commercially on Earth (it would be a nightmare to ship and store just for starters).
But really, it's his ship. It's where he lives, He owns the friggin place. The command is four syllables. He should really just have to say "tea."
Nah, this is Star Trek. If they let the writers think about it, they'd probably have him say something like: "Computer! Accept Picard voice override Delta Theta Epsilon-twelve, personal replication configuration Tango, Echo, Alpha Nine, on my mark, engage... er, wait, cancel auto-destruct sequence..."
From what I remember replicators converted energy into matter.
Which suggests that if you could hotwire a Star Trek replicator to run in reverse (as presumably they must do, to recycle used matter), you've just put several dozen hydrogen bombs worth of E=MC^2 into every household kitchen every time Mom recycles the dishes. And to download patterns, every one of these devices must be connected to something approximating the Star Trek Internet. Which as we've all seen, gets zero-day hacked by aliens approximately three times a week.
There is nothing that could ever possibly go wrong with such an idea. Let's deploy it immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
But what is true is that the Slashdot editors or the submitter has decided that instead of even mentioning the patch, they would just focus on the exploit.
But of course the patch has automagically applied itself to every BES server in the world, instantly, leaving no window of vulnerability while sysadmins scramble to apply it.
I mean, that's what patches do, right?
Here lies Mozilla Firefox 2004-2011
tragically taken from us in a laser-shark jumping tournament mishap.
Mourned by beloved siblings Thunderbird and Seamonkey, and disinherited siblings Sunbird and Songbird.
We take comfort in the fact that he died as he lived,
mad screaming insane.
"I don't need to see a version number - just give me the latest shark you've got!"
Of course the right thing is to write it to be independent from version numbers, but test it with a certain version number (or version range
That's fine as long as you can get all your testing done within about two hours every six weeks, so you can fix your app before the security guys have to push out Firefox X+1 to patch the flood of security exploits.
They seem to be in full-on competition mode, now. Competition for what?
Certainly not Internet Explorer's market, or they wouldn't be raising a middle finger to every corporate sysadmin in the world.
I'm out of words, this must be sabotage.
Listen all y'all!
Hi. Thank you, Mozilla developer, for your willingness to talk to us. Sadly, talk isn't enough, because it's not your talk we have a problem with but your actions. Explaining why you made a decision that a large chunk of your userbase directly and loudly asked you not to doesn't change the fact that you still went ahead and made that decision. In many people's dictionaries, doing something that breaks other people's work, and which isn't actually your decision to make, is exactly the definition of arrogance.
That you somehow manage to still "feel" humble about your one-sided decision-making doesn't change that you actually did it. Sorry. I know you feel bad about being called the bad guy here, but that's because you are one of the bad guys.
Or at least, you're one of the guys representing the organisation whose software is now no longer allowed to be supported by the IT division of the organisation where I work. Is that what you wanted? Dunno, but it's what happened, so perhaps you should try to understand why?
Again, sorry that you are so upset about this. I wish I could do something to help.
No, I don't think you understand at all. We're not upset about Mozilla's decision to abandon the enterprise. This has nothing to do with anybody's feelings. We're simply pragmatically and unemotionally dropping Firefox like the ticking security timebomb it has now become.
See, your software used to be an asset in the Enterprise. Due to your colleague's decisions, it's now become a liability. That's usually considered a bad thing, no?
The thing you could do to help would be to talk to your colleagues at Mozilla, and get them to reverse the decision they made. Primarily, make it so we in the Enterprise world can have long term security patches to Firefox separately to API breakage. We don't want new features. We want not to be rootkitted by every script kiddie who comes along. With what you've done, we now can't guarantee that. So, we're going back to Internet Explorer.
There was a time, around 1999 if I recall, when Mozilla seemed to think that it wanted to compete with IE. Now it seems like you've shrugged and decided to abandon even trying to compete with Microsoft and just stay a home browser. That's fine if you want to do that, but some of us in Enterprise world would really, really, really, love to use Firefox at work -- and we were this close to getting authorisation to do it -- but now you've made it impossible. So, we're having to abandon you. I'm surprised that you're okay with this. I really am. But as I said, this isn't about emotions, it's about rational decisionmaking.
If you want to have us as eyeballs and mindshare, please stop breaking our security patches (or write your software so it doesn't have zero-days in the first place, that would be super neat, but that seems to be impossible right across the industry right now, so we'll settle for patches like everyone else). But now that you've done the damage, it'll probably take about five years for us Enterprise types to trust you again.
Does that help explain our problems with why merely feeling "humbled" at working for super-awesome Mozilla doesn't really cut much ice with us corporate IT types? What we'd like to see is actual actions. If you could take that message back to your colleagues, we'd be much obliged.
Thanks.
As for keeping some old software, we tried this but our IT people refused to allow it "because it could not be supported". WTF??? we were not asking for "support".
I can see you've never worked in IT.
Protip: There's no such thing as an employee using a piece of software to do corporate business-critical data handling that "doesn't need support". Oh sure, they'll all swear they won't ever need support, when they buy/borrow/smuggle in Elephant Brand Cheapo Data Splicer Time Limited 30 Day Trial Edition (Siberian Language Localisation) Cracked By Hackerzb0y13, but when it comes to the day before yearly financial reports are due, suddenly it'll be "Oh by the way, can you please recover my budget spreadsheet files so I can do my presentation at eleven? I think my computer has a virus, because it's coming up "file unreadable, retry ignore?"".
If you work for a company, your software needs support. Trust me on this.
a netbook or a tablet. (And I think they're really synonymous functionally - it's just a matter of whether you need/want a physical keyboard.
How absurd! It's patently obvious that removing the keyboard from a portable computer turns it into a completely different kind of device, not even a kind of computer really, which requires a whole different operating system and a completely incompatible set of applications all provided by a different vendor, with your data locked up in its own proprietary micro formats.
I mean, otherwise people could just mix and match keyboarded and keyboardless portables and desktops at will, as if computers were some kind of ubiquitous data-processing device, and then where would we be? Back in the jungle, that's where.
And of course if you want to read a book on a computer - well that's an entirely different kind of thing, and you need a whole new class of device just to even think about doing that. It's just common sense!
When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html.
That was Linux 1998.
Linux/Gnome/Firefox 2011 is more like:
You arrive at the airport. There is one shiny ticket counter with a single flashing button called "Book a Flight!" There's nowhere to enter a destination. You push the button, and you are automatically allocated a seat on the next available flight to somewhere. Your luggage is whisked away by a serving robot, which then diligently saws it in half so it will fit in the under-seat space. You don't need to do a thing! At the boarding gate, the destination changes every five minutes, and you get to go wherever the latest destination is. It's a surprise!
Once on board, the seat automatically reconfigures itself to something almost but not exactly matching your height, and the whole plane's decor (and the location and flushing mechanism of the toilet) changes every five minutes. You can push a button to delay the changes, but if you push it more than three times a door will open beneath you and you will be dropped out into the sky without a parachute. If you want to sleep, though, you can press a special "Long Term Support" button which lets you push the button twenty times before the door opens.
You can play music and videos on the in-flight entertainment console, but half of them won't display until you give signed permission from your lawyer. An attractive stewardess visits you every minute asking if you need anything, and giving you a shopping cart of items to buy, and a locker to store all the goods in your pocket, and especially your wallet and the names and addresses of all your friends. But she won't promise that the locker is secure, in fact she laughs when you ask for a key, because privacy is silly.
Sometimes, when the decor reconfigures itself, the entire passenger deck will vanish and dump you into a barren cargo hold until you open a locked panel with a pocketknife, twist fifteen coloured wires together, count the number of sparks, and enter the result into a slide rule attached to ticking gearwork. But it's okay because there's a grubby diary in another locked panel with notes scribbled by the last passengers to take the flight, suggesting which wires you should cut and which you should twist. Sometimes the notes are wrong; sometimes they are just a string of insults. Sometimes following the notes will mean a wall doesn't reappear, or half a seat, or the plane may just stall entirely. But the answer is always in there somewhere, and it's very rare for the plane to completely crash nowadays.
7. Then comes the running, and the screaming.
Krill, Baby, Krill.
So crustaceans: crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles.
A View To A Krill
The Krilling Fields
Natural Born Krill
Dressed to Krill
Wilbur Wants To Krill Himself
Krill Bill
Good news, everyone who came for the Atomic Caviar Banquet: we've successfully determined that yes, irradiating wild Alaskan salmon with pi-neutrino flux does improve both the flavour and supermarket shelf life. And the side effects are very minimal. Hardly any at all. Just a quick point of order, if you've actually eaten any of the Atomic Caviar, we have a superb team of xenobiologists in the surgical annex who'd like to have a chat. We'll have those flesh-eating parasites scrubbed from your blood and you'll be up and breathing again in no time. The iron ribcage is free of charge.
"rending engine"
It tears your machine asunder when it tries to display a page? I think I have one of those installed already.
if Firefox fails to adopt rich client-side interfaces, developers will simply move on to other browsers.
Great, they're welcome to them.
As a web user (the natural prey and rival of web developers) I want less "richness" in my client-side interface, not more. I want the web developer to be extremely restricted in what they do, so that I as the user can choose how I want to view the site, and the malware developers have less ways to spoof my operating system.
tldr: "rich content" is a synonym for "doing it wrong"
Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want.
ROFL.
Let me know when they have an enterprise story other than "go away you lousy business cretins, we don't like your type and your nasty automated installation ways. No security patches for you! Btw we heard you liked random UI changes, here's all your buttons, foom, now they're gone! Beg for us to put them back! Beg on four legs and bark like a dog! Nope, too late, we'll do something even stranger for the next release."
Older browsers get the old "Choose file" button upload method.
Which was never broken and worked just fine, thank you very much. Why did it need to be changed?
complete access... robust security... complete control
Given the abysmal security state of today's operating systems, you'll be lucky to get one of those at once.
I take it your ancestors where dragged kicking and screaming out of the cave
If going out of the cave meant their lungs exploded from exposure to hard vacuum, they probably were.
Fortunately they bred before doing that, so we're descended from a bunch of dead-end atmosphere-breathers who have a strange fondness for environments where your eyeballs stay inside your skull.
Why do we have manned research stations in Antarctica?
To fulfil our Treaty of Gotham obligations with the rocket penguins.
You have seen Batman Returns, right?
Feeding children in Somalia, now there's a serious undertaking... first you'd have to invade the country to get rid of the Islamic warlords who are not allowing aid in to feed the children now
++ this.. The correct answer to "why are there starving children in $country?" is "Because at least some of the people running $country want children to starve."
Modern water filtration and purification is built on technology invented by NASA.
Care to bak up that assertion with facts? Apollo and Shuttle used cryogenic hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells to generate water; I don't see this technology being used at all commercially on Earth (it would be a nightmare to ship and store just for starters).
But really, it's his ship. It's where he lives, He owns the friggin place. The command is four syllables. He should really just have to say "tea."
Nah, this is Star Trek. If they let the writers think about it, they'd probably have him say something like: "Computer! Accept Picard voice override Delta Theta Epsilon-twelve, personal replication configuration Tango, Echo, Alpha Nine, on my mark, engage... er, wait, cancel auto-destruct sequence..."
Tea, Earl Grey Hot, is a lot better.
No-cloning theorm
Tell that to Tom Riker.
From what I remember replicators converted energy into matter.
Which suggests that if you could hotwire a Star Trek replicator to run in reverse (as presumably they must do, to recycle used matter), you've just put several dozen hydrogen bombs worth of E=MC^2 into every household kitchen every time Mom recycles the dishes. And to download patterns, every one of these devices must be connected to something approximating the Star Trek Internet. Which as we've all seen, gets zero-day hacked by aliens approximately three times a week.
There is nothing that could ever possibly go wrong with such an idea. Let's deploy it immediately.