Mozilla fixes Firefox zero-day actively exploited in attacks

Once again, JS proves to be a security risk.

A famous one is HotJava. According to Wikipedia, it was also the first web browser to support Java applets.

Video and audio I mentioned.

Extensions are tricky, right, but more from privacy standpoint cuz after all you can just expose too much

And also we'll pay for a bypass of the wasm sandbox. (Actually, looking at our table, I'm going to try and get the bountyamount upped...)

Nobody would care about Mozilla in 2024 without Firefox, but Firefox development seemingly takes a back seat to a variety of other pet projects that Mozilla’s management tries (and keeps failing, over and over) to chase.

For example, they’ve been trying a pivot to become a community-focused privacy company the last couple of years, yet are fine with implementing ad topics.

AFAIK didn’t Safari advocate against it over privacy concerns? If so, what is Mozilla doing?

Or their partnering with a shady company for removing data from data brokers.

Before the privacy pivot, there was the “we want to make browsing better” pivot with their acquisition of Pocket that went nowhere.

From the outside Mozilla looks like a low-scoring charity grift you’d find on CharityNavigator with how far they deviate from the missions they claim to support.

It’s obvious that laying off people that were working hard at making more robust the flagship product of the non-profit wasn’t going to result in a an increase of security in this product. Could the whole lay-off have been prevented? That would require some number analysis here, and insights I lake.

Could at least some termination have been avoided? Freezing the income of the CEO until some agreed metrics improve, and use the amount thus spare to save some employ salary was certainly an option here, wasn’t it?

Claiming "think of my family, look how much more some other people earn elsewhere" while almost simultaneously (at organization level at least) putting so many people in a jobless position, that’s a rather bold cognitive dissonance to throw at the world to my mind.

If pointing out "odd financial priorities" of a non-profit is flame bait, one might wonder how humanity is supposed to mend all organizational dysfunctions it can ever fall into.

If you run multiple GPUs (so one for your GUI and the rest for whatever else you want to do), PCIe passthrough for the latter is pretty straightforward these days.

You can set up a dedicated gpu qube for the former - recommended but optional.

In my usage I've never felt the need to share stuff other than the network/sound/storage stuff that qubes make just work. Other devices tend to be just plug them into the particular VM that needs them. YMMV.

I would say that perhaps containers could do just as well, or some other technology. The thing qubes brings to the table is that other people are doing most of the heavy lifting to make a usable desktop out of a highly virtualized system.

There may be path dependent reasons why qubes approach isn't the best possible... but it doesn't matter because so much stuff just working is worth so much. That the compromise we always make when running a distribution... one could meta-x butterfiles and write your own kernel from scratch, or whatever. Or you can run a system created by others. Their system may have decisions you disagree with or are objectively bad, but they saved you 12 months of tinkering with the dynamic linker-- well worth it. :)

For me, the alternative of having my whole laptop compromised by some browser zero day or because a malicious party sent me some malware document was just not viable. I was already carrying two laptops for isolation, and suffering some anxiety from the residual risk. But in my case I've been targeted specifically (due to cryptocurrency bullshit), a friend and former colleague was hit with an astonishingly sophisticated attack that used stuff like BMC vulnerabilities on his web server and then traversal with X11 forwarding and stuff like that all to just break into his desktop.

So I'd probably be using qubes today even if I could only move the mouse with my tongue and the computer was slowed down to the speed for a 486sx. But the incorrect belief that it would be that kinda hit really delayed my adoption. It's a hit, it's real, but at least for my usage it was far smoother than I expected.

I think right now the only obvious wart I experience is that full screen video stutters pretty badly. So I just don't watch video full screen on the laptop now. There are things that might fix it, but I haven't bothered even trying.

There are benefits I didn't expect too. For example, The operating system image in a normal application VM isn't persistent, only your home directory. So you can just scribble all over the OS install in an app vm and it'll go away when you restart it. If you want it to be persistent you change the underlying templatevm. So to get something working I can totally take a chainsaw to my configuration confident I won't get stuck with anything broken. Once I figure out the changes I can apply just the required steps in a template.

Another benefit is that updating fedora versions is a riskless breeze--- install a new template vm. shut down your app vms, click to change template. Restart them if some particular app vm is broken, switch it back and worry about it when you have time.