User Upgrade or vandalism?

Yesterday morning I got up, logged into my machine and booted my browser. And discovered that the interface had changed, all my stored data was lost, my profile was corrupted, and the browser was locking into a restart cycle. Not want you want at 7a.m., but I honestly thought I’d been hacked or had a hardware fail. When I restarted, I had to run checkdisc because the corruption had spread to data.  

The cause: The Mozilla Foundation. 

Computer Rage
Kevin Curtis
Buy This
at Allposters.com

I have updates turned off on Firefox, which you might be aware of after their last attempt to trash my machine update my browser (details here). Despite all browser updates being turned off, and Mozilla Maintenance Malware Service being disabled, they’d done a forcible push to upgrade me to Firefox Beta.   In the process it destroyed my stored sessions and profiles, caused conflicts with two add-ons which actually caused corruption on my harddrive, and locked my browser into a crash/restart cycle. For the first time in my entire career I had to system restore my own machine.  

This isn’t a user upgrade. This is vandalism.  

Worse, ignoring the fact that updates have been declined and sending them anyway, is hacking.

Now, Firefox says that you should allow updates for security. There’s a problem with this: 
a) I can block updates and have a browser that may be hacked and my data taken, stored somewhere out of my control and used for purposes I am not aware of.
or
b) I can allow updates and know for sure my data is being taken, stored somewhere out of my control, and used for purposes I am not aware of. 

Now under case a), I can lock the browser down to prevent extras running. The update process removes this lock-down every time it updates, opening your browser to external access and running programs you don’t want.  

Specific Examples:
I don’t have flash, and video was disabled.

• Firefox’s forcible update to Beta enabled both of these, which opens a security hole that wasn’t there.

I had ActiveX disabled.

• Not any more.

I had Java disabled.

• Yeah, gu ess…

I had very limited data going out to the web.

• Firefox now sends my data in unencrypted format over the web, saying exactly which site I was on, my add-ons etc.

I have sync turned off.

• Firefox keeps trying to turn it on, a.k.a. take stored password and user data and store it unencrypted in the cloud.

I had updates turned off.

• Firefox ignored this, pushing unwanted software onto my machine and doing significant damage. 

Fortunately I was the only one hit – my co-workers were warned, booted their machines offline, and blocked the update.

Five hours, Mozilla. Five hours to recover lost data caused by your system intrusion. I should be charging day rate.  

The most damning part is that it doesn’t matter what I switch my settings to, every time I open Firefox now, updates are turned back on and it keeps trying to get me to use sync. I’ve g iven up. I’m not switching my settings anymore. I’ve switched my browser.  

Opera does for some of it, and I’ve another couple of alternatives for specific purposes.  I know the new one I’m using is not as secure. But it has a 1% chance of sharing my data, compared to Firefox’s 100% – and it has less chance of wiping out my PC. 

Update: To my complete horror, I found out this morning that the update from Firefox destroyed my SQLite databases and systems. I found this out because it did it again when it tried to update again. This is the second system restore in two days, and sadly Firefox is no longer a browser I can have on my system even as a backup. It’s done too much damage.

Alternative browsers:
Opera – Yes, I am an opera user right now.
Chrome – not so good if you want privacy
IE – useless to XP owners now (MS, you’re losing a m arket here, charge an annual maintenance fee…).
Seamonkey – opensource Firefox from Debian
Firefox 28 – yes the old version still floats around. I can throw my own .exe of it up if people like.
Safari – normally a Mac browser, but there are versions for windows. 

There are also a few new contendors:
Whitehat Aviator – Looks nice, but give it a few months to let it get over teething problems
Midori – crashes on install because of broken dlls, so not for the non-technical who can’t fix this.

Iceweasel is a problem. It is a good linux browser, but some of the windows versions floating around come with unwanted extras, and rumour has it a trojan, so it is probably not worth taking a chance on.

But I am still bloody furious. An entire unnecessary repair job because Mozilla can’t honour update preferences.

Sick Computer
Pop Ink – CSA…
Buy This at Allposters.com

 

---

This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  User Upgrade or vandalism? - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/02/19/user-upgrade-or-vandalism/ was published on February 19, 2015 at 8:55 am.

Podcasting? Maybe not for me...

I’ve been working with podcasters at work so I thought I might try linking a podcast to this blog as a nice feature. Since I don’t have time to read every post out I was looking for an automatic Text to Speech solution. Podcastomatic offers this free as does iSpeech, so I thought I would try them out, starting with Podsomatic.

You can find the RSS for the Podsomatic feed here:

http://podcastomatic.com/podcast/tirialerror-blog/feed.rss

Unfortunately I couldn’t find any examples of blogs using this, so I was going in blind. Set up was very simple – give the blogs URL and it does the rest automatically. It really is that simple.  The result is an RSS feed which links to the seperate podcasts for your blog articles. You can run any of them by clicking the .mp3 link below the article.

The voice is clear but robotic and the pronounciation is close but slightly off for more unusual words. It is also di stinctly American “Lonjitood” instead of “longitude” (the UK is closer to Lon-gi-tewd).

What I could see taking some time is working out how to link the podcasts to the actual blog posts for users, and I’m not sure how long they retain each cast. Are they permanent, and if not, can you download them and add them to the blog?

I’ll try iSpeech out with a different blog shortly for comparison.

---

This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  Podcasting? Maybe not for me... - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/02/09/podcasting-maybe-not-for-me/ was published on February 9, 2015 at 10:52 am.

Moving to Wizzley...

A few more of the classic articles have moved to Wizzley, but two in particular should hold the attention:

http://www.wizzley.com/Great-Western-Railway – The story of the Great Western
http://www.wizzley.com/Longitude – John Harrison’s watches

These were purple star lenses, Lens of the Day on Squidoo and receiving 1,000 hits a day even as the site closed down. On Hubpages they were delisted for being low quality despite similar high traffic.

I just wish it was easier to tell Google it needs to redirect…

---

This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  Movi ng to Wizzley... - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/02/08/moving-to-wizzley/ was published on February 8, 2015 at 2:23 pm.

Blogging live, and 50 Wizzleys...

You might notice the blogger account getting updated more frequently. I’ve moved from my alpha system to a beta API, so while the posts may not look pretty, the content should port and the issues with broken connection should stop.

Not bad for someone dealing with their yearly bout of pneumonia.

Drawn: The Painted Tower (PC CD)

What I haven’t managed to do is complete many more Wizzley lenses, since my brain is rather fuzzy at the moment. However I have managed to port fifty across, so I now get the improved ad rate. I just need to get another 50 re-written to get my account to maximum.

In fact I have completed one lens in the last two weeks:

• http://www.wizzley.com/drawn

about the excellent Drawn video game trilogy. These are the games that got me back into PC gaming after a fifteen year break, so believe me, they are good!

(And I am sorry Wizzley, but I just can’t bring myself to call them wizzles! I think I’ll stick with lenses – it’s shorter than “single-page, multimedia-enhanced, transaction-enabled articles”.)



This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.
 Blogging live, and 50 Wizzleys... - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/02/06/blogging-live-and-50-wizzleys/ was published on February 6, 2015 at 3:43 pm.

Kind of bittersweet

It’s far enough away from Christmas to mention this one now.

Sad: Having a very sad event in the family just before Christmas and stopping to pick up some cards for the affected.
Annoying: Being accosted by a more than usually obnoxious member of the Smile brigade: “Come on, smile, it’s Christmas. Everyone should be happy. You look like someone’s died, not like you’ve bought your Christmas cards!”
Priceless: Holding up the two condolence cards I just bought and watching his face…

Moral: Sometimes when people aren’t smiling, there’s a very good reason.

This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.
 Kind of bittersweet - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/02/06/kind-of-bittersweet-2/ was published on February 6, 2015 at 3:23 pm.