Category Archives: Software

That “fix” I blogged about yesterday for the Shmoo Group's Firefox exploit gets unfixed when you close and re-open your browser.

Information on a more permanent but alas more complicated fix can be found at tech.life.blogged.

UPDATE: This item was originally posted at 7:22am this morning. Some time between then and now, Firefox posted an update which fixes the problem. Quick work! [For the windows users who wrote me with their worries, the file you want is: firefox-1.0.en-US.win32.installer.exe . Just download it, then run it.]

Joho the Blog: The Myth of MythTV

“Shouldn't be a problem” in linux-talk means that it requires only one Linux Day to get up and running, where a Linux Day equals 8 hours of hacking by someone who knows linux inside out (Greg), 12 hours of “helpful suggestions” from a Windows user, and two pizzas.

You could write the same thing about Windows, only sometimes the problems are insoluble, but the selling point is that the problems tend to happen when you add something after the initial install.

Someone has come up with a Firefox exploit — one that doesn't affect IE users!

You can find links to the details, at Boing Boing: Shmoo Group exploit. Here, however, is the simple info on how to protect yourself (probably):

1) Goto your Firefox address bar. Enter about:config and press enter. Firefox will load the (large!) config page.

2) Scroll down to the line beginning network.enableIDN — this is International Domain Name support, and it is causing the problem here. We want to turn this off — for now. Ideally we want to support international domain names, but not with this problem.

3) Double-click the network.enableIDN label, and Firefox will show a dialog set to 'true'. Change it to 'false' (no quotes!), click Ok. You are done.

I say “probably” because even though this fix works for me, there are reports that it doesn't work for everyone. The test of the exploit is here.

In Slashdot | Intuit Disables Features in Quicken To Force Upgrades, Slashdot discovers a very annoying Quicken problem…that I wrote about in May, 2004 (see Annals of Software Obsolescence: Intuit is Evil (Quicken Dept.)).

It's an odd feeling to be that much ahead of the Slashdot crowd. This sort of feeds a growing suspicion I've been having that Slashdot isn't as cutting edge as it used to be.

I need a Firefox plug-in that would let me right-click on a case citation to a federal reporter or a state reporter citation and would return the URL to a copy of that case online somewhere other than pay sites like Westlaw.

This media neutral citations tool at Inchoate is cute….but that's not enough!

I am all for people building in functionality into my browser, and am gleefully downloading extensions that make Firefox a better browser every day. (I'll post a list of the best ones in due course.)

But.

An egg timer?

Of course, there's a story behind it.