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Comment Re:FF Codebase Is A Stinking Pile Of Garbage (Score 2, Insightful) 426

by collinstocks (#26291595) Attached to: Google Tells Users To Drop IE6

It's your type of thinking that caused Netscape to fail.

True, it had a terrible codebase. This was from trying to add features at a rapid pace in order to compete with IE at the time of the browser wars.

However, at some point a genius like the parent AC came along and decided that the entire codebase had to be rewritten.

This left them in the dust, with IE claiming nearly 100% marketshare.

What they should have done was rewrite code a bit at a time. The code could slowly improve, and they would still remain competitive. This is the course that has been chosen for Firefox.
The Courts

New York Times Sued Over URL Linking 74

Posted by samzenpus from the can-you-sue-for-heat dept.
Davros writes "GateHouse Media, which publishes more than 100 papers in Massachusetts, accuses the Times of violating copyright by allowing its Boston Globe online unit to copy verbatim the headlines and first sentences from articles published on sites owned by GateHouse."
Privacy

Browser Privacy Test 133

Posted by samzenpus from the which-one-works-best-in-a-frozen-home dept.
lazyforker writes "A NYTimes blog post reports the results of security researcher Kate McKinley's tests of various browsers' (FireFox, Chrome, IE, Safari) privacy protection mechanisms. Specifically she tested their cookie handling. She also examined their handling of Flash's cookies. In summary: Safari on Mac OS X (in the 'private browsing' mode) is not so private ('quirky'). Safari on XP is not private at all. Flash behaves awfully everywhere."
Earth

Is the Yellowstone Supervolcano About To Blow? 877

Posted by timothy from the four-horsemen-dressage dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, Yellowstone National Park has been having a very unusual number of earthquakes. Many of the most recent tremors have been deeper underground, an ominous sign. Combine that with a rapid rise in elevation over the past three years, and the possibility that earthquake activity from surrounding areas could trigger such an eruption on its own, and you've got the possible warning signs of a supervolcano eruption that would wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental US, plunge global temperatures, and wipe out a very significant chunk of world food sources. Here's a little more info to make your New Year brighter!"
The Courts

Capitol Records Flooded Internet With MP3s, Says MP3Tunes CEO 168

Posted by timothy from the how-much-carrot-how-much-stick dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In court papers filed in New York in Capitol Records v. MP3Tunes, the CEO of MP3Tunes, Michael Robertson, has accused the plaintiffs EMI, Capitol Records, and other EMI record labels of flooding the internet with free MP3s of their songs for promotional purposes, 'free to everyone (except, apparently, MP3tunes).' His 10-page declaration (PDF) provides exact details of specific song files, including the URLs from which they are being distributed free of charge, both by paid content distributors, and by EMI itself from its own web sites."
Microsoft

400,000 PCs Infected With Fake "Antivirus 2009" 353

Posted by timothy from the please-keep-up-now dept.
nandemoari writes "The second month of Microsoft's campaign against fake security software has resulted in the removal of the rogue "Antivirus 2009" application from almost 400,000 infected PCs. Microsoft claims that December's version of the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) — the free utility included in Windows Update every month — specifically targeted 'Antivirus 2009.' According to Microsoft, MSRT removed the rogue application from over 394,000 PCs in the first nine days after it was released on December 9."
Software

The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008 198

Posted by timothy from the not-the-transom-of-the-novel-white-jazz dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008." Along roughly similar lines, davidmwilliams points out the year in review of the iTWire's "Linux Distillery" column.
It's funny. Laugh.

Banned Words List Carries Its First Emoticon 333

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bet-they-have-power-in-the-upper-penninsula dept.
DynaSoar writes "Lake Superior State University in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ('The land of four seasons: June, July, August and Winter') has just published its 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Besides such unsurprising inclusions such as 'green' corporations being 'game changing' due to concern with their 'carbon foot print,' this year's list contains an emoticon for the first time — not a smiley face or variant, but the 'heart' symbol made from the characters 'less than' and 'three.' It's perhaps a sign of the evolution of language, or at least of this volunteer linguistic watchdog group, that a symbol compounded of two characters, neither of them a letter, is considered not only a word, but a particularly egregious one."
Bug

Microsoft Zunes Committing Mass Suicide 785

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-bet-a-bricked-zune-is-still-warm dept.
jddeluxe writes "There are multiple reports springing up all over the internet of a mass suicide of Microsoft 30GB Zune players globally. Check Zune forums, Gizmodo, or other such sites; the reports are spreading rapidly, except apparently to the Microsoft official Zune site."
The Internet

Wikipedia Almost Reaches $6 Million Target 412

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-remember-what-heat-felt-like dept.
An anonymous reader noted a story discussing the aftermath of the Wikipedia fundraiser and says "The writer suggests that Wikipedia can earn $50-100 million a month by a simple text ad. He also suggests that contributors should be financially rewarded and that the lack of financial reward is the reason why 98.3% of registered Wikipedia users are inactive. What do you think? Should Wikimedia Foundation put ads on Wikipedia? Should contributors be financially rewarded? What compensation structure would be best?" Personally I think the independence of Wikipedia is great, and any advertising would not only compromise that integrity, but give contributors a sense of entitlement that the site is better off without.
Security

The 2008 Malware Challenge 29

Posted by samzenpus from the dirty-tubes dept.
John Hering writes "With over 25 papers submitted, the results of the 2008 Malware Challenge are in. Malware has become an ever-present danger in today's connected world: The 2008 Malware Challenge was created to help increase awareness and understanding of the threat associated with malware by challenging contestants to reverse engineer and analyze real world malware from the wild."
Privacy

Sex Offenders Must Hand Over Online Passwords 630

Posted by samzenpus from the give-it-up dept.
mytrip writes "Privacy advocates are questioning an aggressive Georgia law set to take effect Thursday that would require sex offenders to hand over Internet passwords, screen names and e-mail addresses. Georgia joins a small band of states complying with guidelines in a 2006 federal law requiring authorities to track Internet addresses of sex offenders, but it is among the first to take the extra step of forcing its 16,000 offenders to turn in their passwords as well."
Technology

Why LEDs Don't Beat CFLs Even Though They Should 685

Posted by samzenpus from the light-it-up dept.
TaeKwonDood writes "LEDs don't beat CFLs in the home yet, but it's not simply because PG&E is getting rich making people feel like they are helping the environment buying CFLs made in China that are shipped to the US using a lot more fossil fuels than they save. It's a problem of indication versus illumination. However, some new discoveries are going to change all that."
Privacy

Oregon Governor Proposes Vehicle Mileage Tax 713

Posted by timothy from the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide dept.
tiedyejeremy writes "As covered by the Crosscut Blog, the Governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, is proposing a change in the funding of the Oregonian transportation system that drops gasoline taxes and, by way of GPS tracking, taxes the number of miles driven, to the tune of 1.2 cents per mile. The reason for the proposed change is that lower fuel consumption via fuel efficiency will leave the system underfunded. The concerns involve government tracking of the movements of vehicles within the state, though this has been denied by ODOT official, James Whitty. I'm wondering how this affects people using the Interstate System and private roads, and if the outputs can or will be used by law enforcement to check alibis."
Security

CCC Create a Rogue CA Certificate 300

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-even-faked-this-dept dept.
t3rmin4t0r writes "Just when you were breathing easy about Kaminsky, DNS and the word hijacking, by repeating the word SSL in your head, the hackers at CCC were busy at work making a hash of SSL certificate security. Here's the scoop on how they set up their own rogue CA, by (from what I can figure) reversing the hash and engineering a collision up in MD5 space. Until now, MD5 collisions have been ignored because nobody would put in that much effort to create a useful dummy file, but a CA certificate for phishing seems juicy enough to be fodder for the botnets now."

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