C|Net’s Firefox Fear Mongering
Cnet’s news.com would like you to know that Firefox 1.5, the newest version of the browser, has an unpached exploit that has been made public. That’s right, an exploit! You know, those things that take advantage of serious security flaws in an application? Oh my god!! Run for the hills!!!11oneoneuno
Yeah, so here’s the problem: IT’S NOT A SECURITY ISSUE RETARDS..it’s a bug. There exists a flaw with the history.dat file that could crash the browser and prevent it from starting if the title of the page is long enough. That’s is. No system access or arbitrary code execution. Yet, Cnet decides to sensationalize the damn thing like it’s the Firefox apocalypse. What’s worse is that many people on Slashdot are unable to actually reproduce the crash.
Shame on Cnet and it’s editors. I hoped they would have better standards than say, the Weekly World News, but it looks as if I was wrong.
Update:It looks as if Cnet has updated the article’s content to reflect the nature of the bug slightly better, but not by much and the title is still over the top.
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