So You Think You're A Techie?

I never thought I was programmer smart, but I always thought I had an understanding of computers. I'm the one friends and family call when their computers don't work right. Or if they want to buy a computer, what to look for. I'm a Mac guy, I'm superior! But apparently a lot has changed since the days of the if/then commands on the Apple II.

This weekend a lot of rumors and articles were written about 'unfixable' flaws in Firefox. Which if it had happened a month ago I wouldn't have cared. But recently I have migrated most, if not all, of my browsing to Firefox. Mainly because Blogger works better with Firefox( which Blogger says they are working on) and the ability to customize Firefox with themes(which I hope Apple does in their upcoming Leopard release). But after reading this, I apparently know very little.

(Beta News)"An error in the handling of JavaScript regular expressions containing a minimal quantifier," reads the Secunia advisory, "can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow." No more recent Firefox flaws have been added to Secunia's list since then.

The alleged flaw introduced last weekend at the ToorCon convention in San Diego was reported to also involve a buffer overflow triggered through the JavaScript interpreter, although reports have made it appear this is the first such flaw in Firefox's history - which is far from reality. The venue in which the alleged flaw was presented -- a session entitled "LOVIN THE LOLS - LOL IS MY WILL" -- promised attendees a mix of BIOS patches, AIM exploits and sexual innuendo.

Um, what? What makes it even worse is when you watch the video of the people involved. You really feel dumb. What the hell is a botnet? Needless to say, at the end of that article in the comments section, there seems to be some resolution to the Firefox flaws and peace is restored to the internets.