Rubenerd

This is another post that’s been sitting in my Drafts folder since the 20th of June 2008. In trying to clean out this backlog I’m finishing and publishing these posts now, even if this particular story is somewhat outdated. Cheers ^_^

Robert Vamosi over at Defence in Depth has reported that Mozilla Firefox 3 has suffered a vulnerability since being released on the 19th of June.

Less than one day after its launch, Firefox 3 has a vulnerability.

According to Tipping Point’s Zero Day Initiative, the vulnerability, which it rates as critical, was reported within the first five hours of Firefox 3’s release.

Although the Zero Day Initiative team does not offer specifics until the vendor has a chance to patch it, the blog post did say this vulnerability, which also affects Firefox 2, requires user interaction and could result in an attacker executing arbitrary code.

There were the usual posts from people ignoring past trends and decrying that Internet Explorer is therefore obviously better, but by some miraculous feat of asserted association, Tbird1996 somehow managed to twist the story into a anti-Mac fanboy story.

..ok…it’s better than anything that MS has to offer. Mac guys…sorry you’re soooo insignificant…and when Linux get just a little further down the road…we’ll all be better for it.
(why do the Mac people trash Linux so badly when their OS is based on Linux…?’ eh?)

Don't get me wrong, I hate it when vocal Mac users loudly proclaim everyone else as stupid for not having Macs, but I do agree it's a superior platform for many uses. I also don't like it when generalisations are made, by people on either side of an argument. This was my response:

I’m a Mac user and I love Linux. Most Mac users I know acknowledge Linux as a positive force. Please don’t whitewash entire groups of people.

Oh and for the record, Mac OS X is not based on Linux. Please check your facts before submitting such comments.

Though to be fair, I actually "love" FreeBSD and "like" GNU/Linux, but I suspect if he thought that they were the same in asserting that Mac OS X is based on them, he/she wouldn't know the difference.

For what it's worth, Mac OS X is based on NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD with a Mach kernel. Despite having a few GNU userland tools and common commands, Mac OS X and Linux have almost no code in common, and one is certainly not derived from another! The funny thing is a 30 second look on Wikipedia would show this.