Delicious Delicacies extension

August 22nd, 2004

Delicious Delicacies: Restore the legend.

Custom 404 page

August 22nd, 2004

www.squarefree.com now has a custom 404 page.

Porn sites recommend Firefox

August 21st, 2004

Linktoy:

IMPORTANT-Make sure you read this before using links on this page. Due to the ever increasing amount of nasty scripts and spyware being installed on peoples computers the ONLY browser I recommend for these links is FireFox.

Asianthumbs:

U.S. Department of Homeland Security recommends not using Microsoft's Internet Explorer because of security vulnerabilities... More details.

Get Firefox

Pornfu:

this site is optimized for mozilla firefox because internet explorer is gay. in fact, if you use IE, you have a 93% chance of getting AIDS. if you already have AIDS, you will get cancer instead.

Thanks to Asa for some of these links.

Update Sept 25, 2004: As part of my efforts to promote Pornzilla, I asked these sites to link to Pornzilla in addition to Firefox.

Opera’s least popular feature comes to Firefox

August 15th, 2004

The adbar extension displays Google ads related to pages you view. It works in Firefox 0.9+.

Hidden search results – answer

August 14th, 2004

Michael Lefevre and mpt gave correct, but incomplete, answers to the question in my previous blog entry in their comments. Part of Michael's answer:

You'd have to work out which bits of closed bugs should be queryable (if you give any indication of a result based on, say, summary or comment queries, you could be disclosing important bits of the closed bug).

Indicating hidden results for a summary query would indeed disclose an important bit of the bug: its summary. First, the attacker would query for bugs with summaries starting with "a", "b", etc. Discovering that at least one hidden bug's summary begins with "b", the attacker would query for bugs whose summaries start with "ba", "bb", etc. After a few hundred more queries, the attacker would have the entire summary.

Hidden search results

August 14th, 2004

Google sometimes hides search results to ensure that search results are varied:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 15 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included. [foo site:squarefree.com]

or due to bad laws:

In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results. [scientology site:xenu.net]

Bugzilla also sometimes hides search results, to protect confidential bugs such as undisclosed security holes. Unlike Google, Bugzilla doesn't tell you that there are hidden results for your search. This caused me to worry that potential employers would think I can't count. It also makes it impossible for Peter(6) and others to tell exactly how many release blockers there are.

When Bugzilla hides search results from you, why doesn't it inform you like Google does?

Hint: while "Because nobody implemented that feature" may be technically correct, that's not the answer I'm looking for.

Some people are never happy

August 4th, 2004
  • 114061 - Red star default desktop icon is offending to many people.
  • 222306 - Bird head of real Firebird logo in page header logo looks like a goose on fire.
  • 233525 - Background of Download Manager looks like one-finger-salute.
  • 246760 - New default theme looks like it was made be a 3 year old.
  • 254287 - Icon for 'Switch to an alternate stylesheet' looks like a soy bean speared by a hairclip.

Bounties

August 2nd, 2004

mozilla.org now has a security bug bounty program, which offers $500 to people who discover "critical" security holes. Meanwhile, Microsoft offers a $250,000 bounty for catching virus authors.