Posted: March 21st, 2010
Dear Mozilla, Please Don’t Kill HTML5 Video! | Brian Crescimanno: “I’m a huge supporter of open formats; I always have been. One of the main reasons Microsoft was able to rise to its Monopoly-level dominance was the proliferation of the proprietary MS Office file formats. However, I have reason to believe that Mozilla’s decision not to support H.264 encoded video via the HTML5 video tag due to the ‘patent encumbrance’ of the codec, is a wrong decision and one that, unless they change their mind, will kill any hope of ushering a new era of online video distribution that exists without plugins. Mozilla has always been an organization willing to take a stand for what they believe in; and they believe in the open web.”
An interesting post arguing for the mozilla to support H.264 in the HTML5 video tag in firefox. Rethinking my position on the matter, I guess dual support for both Theora and H264 would be way to go right now. H.264-encoded internet video that is free will continue to be exempt from royalty fees until at least December 31, 2015. It won’t be a problem until 4 years from now. That’s plenty of time for Theora to improve or Google to open source VP8. With storage and processing power becoming cheaper, I can see Google flipping a switch on December 31, 2015 and Youtube becoming VP8-powered overnight. Google has the power to do that if the licensing terms of H.264 become “disagreeable”. Acquiring VP8 was about giving it bargaining power in the future licensing negotiations with MPEG LA or to give them a way out if necessary.
Granted, I’m not entirely sure that Theora isn’t up to the task, but that seems to be the dominant opinion. But 4 years is plenty of time to get it up to the task if it isn’t already. In the meantime, HTML5+H.264 or flash (yuch) seem to be the only options for internet video. Flash is way worse than HTML5+H.264 in every way (it’s proprietary, buggy, a security hazard and a resource hog). I don’t see any more freedom in Flash than in HTML5+H.264, do you?
So, Mozilla, I’m reversing my previous stance, be pragmatic, support both codecs. I hate flash too much (not to mention it won’t work on my iPhone and future iPad).
Oh by the way, you know that flash uses is H.264 right?
Posted: March 21st, 2010
Popular FF add-on AdBlock Plus blocking “Spread Firefox” images
LOL
But yeah makes sense and I agree with adblock’s decision.
Posted: January 24th, 2010
I’m going to skip the introduction and go right to the point: support Mozilla!
How? Use firefox and promote it.
Why? Because you want the web to be Free (not free as in “free beer” but Free as in Freedom). Because you value Freedom and knowledge!
Read these two blog posts:
HTML5 video and codecs by Mike Shaver, Mozilla VP of Engineering
Video, Freedom And Mozilla by Robert O’Callahan, Mozilla Developer
(originally via Slashdot)
If you use Firefox you are giving it a bigger market share and thus more power with content providers. After all, youtube would be worthless without viewers.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
What if a video site is online but no one can view the videos in it? Is it still a video site? Would it have any traffic at all?
I was planning on switching to chrome – after all, it is open source and firefox is slower, uses more resources and I prefer chrome’s UI in many aspects (but not all). However none of those things is nearly as important to me as keeping the web an open place and I believe in the importance of sites like youtube (we’ve all heard about videos on youtube documenting things like police abuse for example).
I’m no Richard Stallman and I not trying to turn anyone into Stallman but the choice between Firefox and Chrome is a close one to begin with. It’s not like I’m going to start promoting Linux (gNewSense at that) over OSX.
Posted: March 16th, 2008
+/-:
+ Faster
+ Lighter
+ Better default theme
+ Cool new features
- nothing so far
Download Link
Posted: February 28th, 2008
Fullread is a simple tool that helps you organize your online readings.
The way I use it: “web readings queue”
While I read my feeds I often click on links that open in new tabs and keep reading my feeds. When I’m done with the feeds, I start browsing the tabs that I opened. Often I don’t have time or patience to read them all so instead of having 30 or so tabs open in firefox at any given time, I simply add them to Fullread and when I have the time/patience I open my fullread queue page (fullread/lrei) and read the some pages, marking them for archival (sort of like when you archive mail in gmail). All my bookmarks in fullread are marked private so only I can see them.
In the future I also plan to use it as a full History of my web readings instead of just a Queue.
And yes I know fullread launched a while ago but I only got around to using it a while ago.
Posted: December 21st, 2007
Sadly, the most important addon I use, Google Browser Sync is still not compatible with Firefox 3b2. Google needs to stop slacking… or would need to if it had competition :/
Anyway a few other addons I use are also not compatible yet: Google Gears, DownThemAll, Adblock Plus and the Growl addon.
Oh well, guess I’ll have to wait in memory leak land for a while – at least until Google releases a compatible browser sync.
Posted: October 30th, 2007
For those of us who use multiple profiles in firefox, there’s a small surprise in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon – firefox is no longer compiled with -NO-REMOTE as default. What that means is that now you have to pass the -NO-REMOTE option to firefox if you want to use multiple profiles simultaneously. Example:
firefox -NO-REMOTE -P work
Basically, just add -NO-REMOTE to all your firefox shortcuts (I have one shortcut for each profile).
Posted: September 16th, 2007
The Register has this article entitled “A Defcon survival guide” which contains a list of measures you should consider taking when using public Wi-Fi.
EDIT: Yes I know this is more than a month and a half old – it has been one of my open tabs in firefox (which works as a sort of to read/to blog list) for that long.
Posted: March 13th, 2007
Note To Self: take a look at firekeeper – project page, project weblog.
Firekeeper is an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for Firefox. It is able to detect, block and warn the user about malicious sites. Firekeeper uses flexible rules similar to Snort ones to describe browser based attack attempts. Rules can also be used to effectively filter different kinds of unwanted content.
Other features of Firekeeper include:
* Ability to scan incoming Firefox traffic – HTTP(S) response headers, body and URL and to cancel processing of suspicious responses.
* HTTPS and compressed responses are scanned after decryption/decompression.
* Very fast pattern matching algorithm (taken directly from Snort).
* Interactive alerts that give an ability to choose a response to detected attack attempt.
* Ability to use any number of files with rules and to automatically load files from remote locations.
Posted: March 13th, 2007
I’ve been meaning to make a decent post explaining why you should use the NoScript extension in firefox but I can never get around to it and end up forgetting for months at a time only to forget all about it again so I’m gonna leave here the link, say “It’s a Good Thing” and leave you to figure out why.
Here’s a nice and recent example.
Javascript is pretty powerful and with great power comes great responsibility or something like that… I’m gonna go to sleep before I say any more weird stuff.
Posted: March 13th, 2007
I learned about Linux themes in Windows via the Tux Vermelho blog (in Portuguese) which in turn learned about it from the Tech by Colin blog (in English). I’ll mirror the instructions here just in case:
1 – Download the Belchfire to patch to make Windows accept new themes (hurray for MS crippleware) from here.
2 – Download a Visual Style (Colin recomends these):
* Clearlooks
* Human
* Plastik
I went with clearlooks (same one I usually use in Linux).
3 – Icons. Get the Tango Patcher. Previews here.
I went with Tangerine (though I usually use the OSX icons in Linux – they are just sooo purrty).
4 – Tango for Firefox and Tango/Tangerine for uTorrent. You may be able to find (some of) these themes for other applications too.
And that’s all folks.
Posted: February 1st, 2006
I’ve been a firefox user since 0.5 or 0.6 something like that. Before I was a mozilla user and for a while before that I even used Netscape. It’s safe to say that i’ve never been much of a fan of IE. I’ve used IE (even on linux over wine) too browse some IE-only webapages on a few occassions but most of the time I use it to access one specific webpage: it’s a local webpage that acts as a sort of “customization” of a remote website. It uses a bunch of ActiveX controls, javascript and stuff. It is a IE-only webpage. I decided to try out the new IE7 beta2, obviously I didnt make it my default browser and when I tried to open the local webpage with it, it opened it in firefox. Talk about being useful… IF I WANTED TO OPEN IT IN FF I WOULD’VE DONE IT WITHOUT IE! Damn stupid browser… sigh. Only 10 seconds into the new version of IE and I’m already trying to uninstall it – that’s a record. And yes, I said “trying”. Why? You would’ve thought that a company that incorporated an “Add and Remove Programs” app to their Operating System would’ve used it, especially with beta software… sigh. So I had a non-useful browser installed that I couldn’t install its slightly more useful previous version until it was removed – I knew that without even trying it, it’s the “Microsoft Way” not allow you to replace programs with their previous version. That’s when the hero of this story stepped in, CCleaner:
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! 
It can also uninstall programs, in this case it uninstalled IE7 and I’m back with IE6. And that’s how CCleaner saved the day. Thank you CCleaner
UPDATE:
OK SORRY! I was a bit pissed off when i wrote this post and a few people (namely Pedro Fernandes and Relax) already pointed out to me that you can remove IE7 as an update via the “add an remove programs” app.
Posted: January 12th, 2006
It has been all over the news for the past couple of weeks or so. The US-CERT released its Cyber Security Bulletin 2005 Summary and while I’m not one to doubt human incompetence the fact that this report was put together by someone who supposedly understands the concept of “operating system” makes me think it might’ve been more than just incompetence. At issue is the fact that the bulletin for some reason decided to divide the vulnerabilities by what operating systems they affected, to quote the report: “Software vulnerabilities are categorized in the appropriate section reflecting the operating system on which the vulnerability was reported“. So far so good. Unfortunatelly whoever put it together, apparently, doesn’t understand what an “operating system” is. So according to that Cyber Security Bulletin only two operating systems exist: Windows and Unix/Linux. And so under that classification, the US-CERT bulletin states:
“There were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities”
We all know how competent and umm… competent the press is. There is no point in blaming this on the “Microsoft Press Machine” though I’m sure they were happy to give a hand to the more useless members of the press, the fact is they didn’t have to. Out of the majority of the reporters out there, the few that actually understand anything about what they are reporting on are usually incapable of doing anything more than just copying a press release into a text processing program and changing the words a bit as well as occasionally asking for quotes from “experts” – people usually attached to a big company that has something to lose by telling the whole truth. And I’m not even going to mention their need for sensationalist headlines… oh wait I just did. All this said, it was obvious to everyone with half a brain that the words in the US-CERT bulletin were going to be interpreted/transcribed by the press as “Windows is more secure than Unix/Linux” or even more appallingly as “Windows 3X safer than Linux“.
I don’t know what makes me more sad: the fact that the tech press still doesn’t know that security of an operating system cannot be effectively measured by number of vulnerabilities alone, the fact that they don’t know that “Unix/Linux” actually consists of a large number of different operating systems OR that the US-CERT doesn’t know it – or at least decided to pretend it didn’t know, in which case the question becomes “Is it worse to be incompetent or corrupt?”
And now, for the facts. First of, like I said before, “Unix/Linux” isn’t an operating system but rather a large number of very different operating systems like for example IBM’s AIX, Apple’s Mac OS X, RedHat Linux and NetBSD. As if this mistake wasn’t big enough, somehow, the US-CERT decided that a vulnerability in firefox was a “Unix/Linux”-specific problem even though the majority of firefox users are probably runing it in Windows. You can argue that most open-source OSes include firefox as the default browser and this a firefox vulnerability is more or less analog to a IE vulnerability in Windows (even though IE’s integration into Windows is much greater than FF’s in any Linux distro) but the bulletin in question makes no distinction between software integrated into the OS and third party software.
When the vulnerabilities are properly broken down by OS, the picture we get is quite different:
All of Microsoft’s discovered security exploits for Windows only amount to a pretty reasonable 44. Microsoft products in total (including MS Office, Internet Explorer, ASP.NET and the like) comes to 122.
(…)
Individual Unix distributions faired very well: Apple Mac OS X clocked in at 21 vulnerabilities, tied with IBM’s AIX. HP-UX had only 15 vulnerabilities. SCO had only nine.
For the top Linux distributions, things look peachy. Red Hat had seven vulnerabilities; Suse 12; Debian 10; and Gentoo a mere five.
Non-Linux open souce distribution FreeBSD clocked in with 13, while ultra-secure NetBSD maintained its reputation with two vulnerabilities reported.
And like NewsForge pointed out, US-CERT’s own Technical Cyber Security Alerts shows a different picture:
* 22 Technical Cyber Security Alerts were issued in 2005
* 11 of those alerts were for Windows platforms
* 3 were for Oracle products
* 2 were for Cisco products
* 1 was for Mac OS X
* None were for Linux
And more:
US-CERT’s list of current vulnerabilities contains a total of 11 vulnerabilities, six of which mention Windows by name, and none of which mentions Linux.
And like RedHat said comparing Linux with Windows: “fewer vulnerabilities were critical and patches were brought out more quickly.“.
And to make matters worse, all this talk about windows being more secure than the so called “Unix/Linux” operating system, the whole WMF drama is unfolding: first an Exploit Released for Unpatched Windows Flaw, then a New IM Worm Exploiting WMF Vulnerability, followed by Microsoft to Patch WMF Exploit Early and what is a drama without a hero? More dramatic. In typical MS fashion, the final exclamation point: Two New WMF Bugs Found. For 7 days a fairly serious vulnerability remained unpatched by Microsoft… what more can I say?
As a result the computer security community will be drinking its milk from a carton with the word “MISSING” in the back, right above a picture of US-CERTs credibility. Will it ever be found?
Posted: November 10th, 2005
Kill Bill’s Browser – Switch to Firefox – That was funny. Gotta look into it’s sister page or wtv – Explorer Destroyer.
I’ve been busy up until this week and now I’m catching up to emails – down to my last dozen or so!!! I’m planing on blaming gmail for the emails that “never arrived” (and I’m sticking with that story). Someday I’ll catch up to my feeds… it just wont be any day with the next 1000 years or so…
Posted: October 10th, 2005
GODDAMIT!!!!
THERE IS SOME HIGHER POWER STOPPING ME FROM MAKING THIS POST. FIRST IT’S THE DAMN BACK BUTTON ON THE MOUSE THAN IT’S SOME WEIRD BACK BUTTON ON THE GODDAMN LAPTOP KEYBOARD. ARGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Sigh, moving on… A few days ago I mentioned changes to this blog, here’s what I’ve done so far:
* The sidebar from the old theme has been ported to this new one;
* Added a Contact page;
* DokuWiki – I’m already using it. Check it out here.
Coming Soon (soon as in sometime before the end of the universe):
* New About page;
* Photos section;
* Technorati tags;
* Wiki (PhpWiki);
* Add links and actually figure out how to integrate stuff.
Side Note: Main page XHTML is now invalid – good job!
Side Note 2: Spread Firefox is down.