Has Firefox already matched IE privacy features?

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RE: Has Firefox already matched IE privacy features?

It's interesting to see that the comments quickly turn to IE bashing by Mozilla fanbois - instead of highlighting the abysmal 'journalism' in the article itself. Perhaps by dropping in a IE vs. Mozilla comparison the author was intentionally 'lighting the fuse' on the inevitable flame war, in an attempt to avoid having to do any real research into the article itself.
The linked paper simply outlines a mechanism for beefing up the security of "self-signed certificates" used in SSL/TLS communications, to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks. Yup, that's *security*, not *privacy*. So strike one against the credibility of the article/author for not being able to differentiate. The link is a paper that highlights a mechanism that anyone could implement; sure they implemented a FF plug-in, it doesn't really mean that FF itself has really done anything. There's strike two. Self signed certificates are inherently unsafe, and Mozilla and IE *both* jump up and down calling this out to the user. Having a discussion as to whether it's actually beneficial to the users of the Internet to introduce a "notary service" that simply identifies "suspicious" certificates would have been a much better article, but instead we have a piece that jumps on the hyperbole bandwagon. Sigh. Strike three.
It's interesting to note that the implementation is a C++ plug-in, that's distributed in a compiled form, that comes from an un-trusted source that gets to run in the context of the FF browser. Perhaps an article on how naive users can get their box pwned by installing such software would be a better start...?

Posted by: Nonsensical Opinionate   Posted on: 08/27/08  (Edited: 08/27/2008 @ 10:58) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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