What the summary describes sounds a lot like long presses, which are supported even by my really old Gingerbread phone. I press a link in the web browser and the web browser takes me to that link. I long press (counting an extra split-second as a button press) and I get a "Context Menu". Same deal with Android menu options. Press camera and get camera, long press camera and you get a context menu regarding the camera icon.

The summary makes it sound like Apple is just late to the right mouse button party again.

Newly created, popular, and deprecated. That doesn't sound right.

Lavabit was a mixed bag, they had their pros and cons.

Pros:

* Provided free email service

* Simple

* Most of the features you expect from an email service

* Spam and virus filters were customizable and much easier than most other services.

* They shut down their servers instead of giving up Edward Snowden.

Cons:

* Buggy, bugs were never fixed, bug reports were never acknowledged

* Poor communication skills from the developers, both free and paid accounts

* Actively lied when they shut the service down. For about 2 days they insisted that it was just an upgrade, would be back up soon, and that our emails were not being lost. If they couldn't tell the truth for legal reasons they should have said nothing instead, there was no excuse for the lies.

* For about 2 days after the shutdown they continued to accept emails sent to users, instead of just rejecting them so the senders would know that the emails had not been delivered.

Lavabit is back up but I don't use them anymore because of their behavior the first time. They are just not trustworthy.

I'm glad that they did a study, because clearly somebody needed a study, but this seems really predictable. How could MS and Apple and these other subpar UI designers not predict that making it harder to tell what is a UI element would make it harder to navigate?

Hopefully next they'll figure out that increasing the number of clicks or keys and hiding the options (aka hamburger menu) also makes navigation harder and slower.

This wasn't until a few years after 2003, but after trying to install Mandrake Whatever and Red Hat 9.0, I remember installing Debian Sarge. It wasn't magic, but I remember thinking, "So this is what an easy install feel like." No crashes or anything, it just installed easily, 1 step at a time.

It looks like it might execute on a default distro, but it depends which packages you have installed. A heavy distro such as Ubuntu might have these packages by default.

The summary has a link to a good description of the bug from the bug's founder. It looks like the poorly written line is specifically intended to execute VBScript, so I doubt you could use another scripting language or executable binary. However, you could use VBScript to write arbitrary content to .bashrc, which you could cause to download an arbitrary binary and execute it.

Something like this happened to me. My email address was with a company called "Lavabit." Except they didn't give me 30 days, they shut down with 0 notice. After they shut down, they even lied to us, saying that our emails were safe, that they were having technical problems and would be back up in a couple of days.

It was a huge mess, I would have appreciated 30 days, but I still would have been upset like this guy.

I would hardly call this reducing functionality. Technically, sure. But a web browser is supposed to browse the web, and this API wasn't helping any.

The summary answers your question. There are no patches that address the known security vulnerabilities.

If someone creates a patch, they are welcome to submit it, and maybe the package maintainer will apply it.