There are two groups of developers here.

Ruby on Rails, the framework, had developers that knew about this general class of vulnerabilities - it's easy to write code that ends up being buggy.

GitHub, the web site (that runs on Rails, and hosts the Rails source repository), knew about the general class of vulnerabilities but not that they had these particular instances of them.

It appears that Homakov tried to get Rails to change the defaults so that these things can't happen unless you ask for them, and was rejected as making the framework more difficult for prototyping use; the opinion on the bug was something along the lines of "the developer using the framework should be protecting against this". He then demonstrated in frustration that this was a bad default, since GitHub is one of the leading sites using the framework and is developed by people generally thought of as knowing what they are doing.

It appears that this has worked and the opinion of the framework developers have changed, and no real damage was done, other than possibly reputation.

GitHub, overall, seemed to be collateral damage.

P.S. I don't think GitHub is open source; Ruby on Rails is.

Do you happen to know how the drive-by PDF exploit manages to keep root, then? I'm curious as I don't see how arbitrary code execution via a PDF vulnerability differs from arbitrary code execution via a cable - what sort of magic allows the former case to bypass the security checks that the latter can't duplicate?

That particular comparison keeps getting reposted as the proof that Theora is feasible.

Theora may or may not be comparable in quality to H.264, but that comparison doesn't tell me either way. It completely ignores the H.264 encoding process, which means that Theora has the advantage of taking however long it needs to compress things. Lots of things involve a time/space (memory or disk) trade off, that needs to be taken into account too.

I don't particularly like the licensing issues around H.264 / MPEG*, but that doesn't mean I am willing to take an unfair comparison either.

(Caveat: I'm a C++ programmer, working on code that has lots of macros.)

The debugger. You can mouseover variables in the source view, and it shows the data (reliably, and points to concrete classes). It lets you switch between threads easily, and shows backtraces you double click on to get to the relevant source code. It uses a normal GUI file browser to let you choose symbols to load, if you haven't set it up beforehand (also via a GUI), and warns when it's out of date. With lots of annoying config file hacking, it can let you display structures in a custom manner.

The closest I've seen on Linux was insight, and that was quite a few years ago (maybe it's improved since?). GDB has a huge barrier to entry, and being line-input based means there's no organization (I don't want my code to be displayed in the same place as my backtrace or my local variables). DDD doesn't reliably display my data, and when it does manage to do so visualizes anything C++ horribly.

I've tried KDevelop (3 and 4) a while back; it absolutely hated dealing with things that has an external build system (i.e. it doesn't work as a pure debugger). Debugging C++ in Eclipse was a joke when I tried it (the one time I did have to work on Java, though, it was pretty nice).

As a reference, I code in Komodo/Eclipse/vim (all on the same code base, depends on what I feel like), on a project that uses autoconf/gmake. That applies to both win32 (via msys+msvc) and Linux. I use MSVC as a pure debugger, not as a code editor.

Yep, that's his personal blog (in fact, explicitly not listed in Planet Mozilla by his choice).

The background is trees - he recently bought a nice wooden house somewhere; there's blog posts about that too.

Odd, your updates should end up in the sandbox (and due to AMO being silly, used to also mean your whole extension ends up on the sandbox, instead of having a last-reviewed version public).

This is of course assuming you haven't been marked as trusted; people who were on AMOv1 were grandfathered in, though I understand that's been mass-removed recently. Other "trusted" authors include google and various mozilla employees, AIUI (but unconfirmed).

They actually appear to embed the ad code directly into the page (you can see which campaigns the ads are for; the one that hit me was for Vonyage, near the bottom of the page). In my case, it wrote a weakly obfuscated script that redirected the whole page to sex-and-the-city.cn (... err, yeah) which redirected to protection-check07.

Poor NYT, they now have a special rule in my ad filters.

Umm, sounds like MS is complying with the BSD license to me! They're keeping the copyright statement in, and presumably anybody who gets a copy of whatever BSD licensed source in ftp.exe would still get the original BSD bits under BSD. For the second clause (copyright notice for the binary), see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306819 maybe? (Yes, the Windows XP release notes.)

They're quite free to add non-BSD licensed bits to it, of course, and still be compliant. They're also quite free to ship binaries under a different license. All that doesn't change the license of the original source code.

What's not okay is removing the original copyright / license. (There was an attempt to do so in one of the patches to the Linux kernel a while back; uproar ensued, the change never went in.)

Please don't use ftp.mozilla.org! That's the server used for things like nightly builds and other testing machinery.

Instead, please use the mirror network, http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/namoroka/alpha1/

Besides... linking to latest-trunk/ and pretending it's a release is always bad.

IE4 was also, IMHO, superior to NS4. Heck, I think IE3 was about on par. (I started with whichever Netscape had the throbbing giant blue N, in Windows 3.1 using Trumpet WinSock.) In fact, I believe we had specifically gotten a copy of IE4 on CD (separate from Windows 95) from some magazine or other to upgrade.

Seriously, causing the whole page to reload when you resize the window? WTF, Netscape?

And then the crapware installers would drop things into Firefox's main directory, instead of being an addon. Oops, now you can't even disable them!

Yes, some other piece-of-crap already tried that; removing it involved manually finding the .jar and the .manifest and killing them in the Firefox install.

http://code.google.com/p/parchment/ does that, yes. Well, not quite - it's a Z-machine interpreter.