speaking of articles

WTF? I'm not sure how many of you are aware of the security firedrill we had this week, but if you are a Mozilla, Firefox, or Thunderbird users, you should certainly check this out.

I'm not quite sure what's wrong with the press but somehow some of them failed to realize what actually happened this week and jumpted to some pretty negative and alarmist conclusions.

I've been in this line of work for about 5 years now,and I've never seen a better turnaround on fixing a software vulnerability than what we did this week. Our security team, in conjunction with other security researchers, identified and fixed a vulnerability in how the Mozilla applications hand off requests to the Microsoft Windows operating system and our QA and release team (which includes me) delivered an updated release and a less than 1K patch in about 24 hours time. I call that a huge success.

Apparently Jay Wrolstad doesn't agree, wasn't paying very close attention, or was simply opting for the sensationalism that seems to sell more papers these days. Well, I think he's wrong and I think that pretty much anyone who looks at the facts will agree that he's wrong.

What can be done? Well, the Mozilla Foundation press folks are gonna try to contact this fellow as soon as the week starts. Before that happens, though, a lot of people are going to be reading his alarmist headline and walking away with the wrong idea about Firefox and the amazing response we mobilized to solve this security issues.

You all can help prevent the spread of this false impression by reading the article here and down at the bottom where it says "Post/Read Msgs" and "Ratings: Would you recommend this story?" letting Mr Wrolstad and his editors know what you think of this. It sure didn't take me long to find the big "1" rating on that story. I'd have found it sooner if I wasn't looking for a "0".

update: name calling of any kind will result in your post being removed and your access to post at this and other mozillazine weblogs being revoked. please keep it civil, here, in the mozillazine forums, and in comments at other websites. thanks.

update2: I've read some comments that are suggesting that this is a fair and balanced article. I disagree. I don't think it's really fair to title or allow your article to be titled something as misleading and sensationalist as that. I don't think it's fair to suggest that one quickly fixed flaw will make people who are fleeing the vulnerability beleaguered IE decide not to -- nor should it. (Now if the author had mentioned IE's scores of unpatched IE vulnerabilities that have been sitting around for ages or had mentioned that the recent hole in IE that still allowed Scob to get rip off untold numbers of IE users' bank accounts is still unpatched and can be exploited using the alternate activeX control, shell.application...)

You can disagree, and feel free to do so vocally (though politely) but you're not going to convince me that this news item is "objective". I'm sure I'm not the only one and that's why I'm pointing this out to my readers so they can judge for themselves.