Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Great Java news · 2008-02-25 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
It appears that Sun released a beta version of their new Java plugin, much earlier than I expected. The important thing is: this plugin no longer relies on the ancient OJI code in Mozilla’s codebase to implement things like LiveConnect (integration between JavaScript and Java applets). Instead, the new plugin uses the same scripting interfaces as all other plugins as well. This will reduce the number of issues significantly — nobody really felt responsible for the complex OJI code lately, and Adblock Plus seemed to trigger lots of issues. I guess that OJI will still stay around at least in Firefox 3 but it will no longer be used, and maybe in Firefox 4 it will be removed entirely.
Statistics, statistics, statistics · 2008-02-19 12:39 by Wladimir Palant
Of course, we all knew that Addons.Mozilla.Org was sitting on a huge pile of statistically usable data. But honestly, I never really believed we would ever see a significant amount of it. Do you remember that server that would pull publicly accessible extension download counts from AMOv2 every day and display the data in graphs? I missed that one a lot now that the download counts are considered private.
Releases now tagged in CVS · 2008-02-11 21:58 by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, some people want Adblock Plus releases to be clearly marked in CVS. So I tagged all past releases of Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper — future releases should be tagged automatically. So, if you want to know what the source code looked like when Adblock Plus 0.7.2 was released, here it is.
Vulnerability or feature? · 2008-02-06 15:50 by Wladimir Palant
pdp over at GNUCITIZEN claims to have found a vulnerability in some common OpenID libraries. And I really tried hard to understand what he means and how it is related to the title of the article. In the end, I got the impression that he simply explains in a lengthy way that anybody could run an OpenID server and use it to log into OpenID-enabled services without having to register. Now isn’t this the whole purpose of OpenID?
Adblock Plus for MicroB - great, but... · 2007-12-28 00:20 by Wladimir Palant
Today I looked at my logs and noticed lots of unusual referrer spam. For example, I saw people coming to adblockplus.org from wikipedia.org — not a particular article but the main site. Adblock Plus is not that famous yet so I investigated a little.
Keeping an eye on plugins · 2007-12-15 01:00 by Wladimir Palant
It seems that one critical aspect of browsing is finally getting the much deserved attention: plugins. As a regular browser user you are hardly ever reminded of their existence, yet over time I learned that they have a very significant impact on browser’s stability and memory usage. For Adblock Plus, a significant percentage of all reported issues is related to plugins. Part of the problem is the fact that plugins are basically independent programs and the browser has hardly any control over what they do.
What is going on with Internet Explorer? · 2007-12-06 12:43 by Wladimir Palant
So now we know: the next Internet Explorer version will be called Internet Explorer 8. What a surprise. Thanks, Dean, for telling us. What we don’t know is just about everything else about Internet Explorer 8 because the IE team has been maintaining strict radio silence about it. And what we get is a bullshit answer that “the whole world relies on Internet Explorer and we must be very careful about what we say.”
Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam · 2007-11-28 03:08 by Wladimir Palant
Today’s spammers always find interesting questions to ask:
Are you currently accepting advertising on your website adblockplus.org?
Predictable whitelists strike again · 2007-11-05 17:18 by Wladimir Palant
A little more than half a year ago I wrote an article on how security solutions using whitelists are better than those using blacklists. At the same time I noted that even using whitelists is not always enough — for example when your whitelist is predictable and the attacker can make sure the whitelisting rule applies to him. NoScript extension was the example I used, and its author reacted by adding “XSS protection” assuming that this would invalidate my claims.
Interview responses - a summary · 2007-09-29 01:24 by Wladimir Palant
This month Adblock Plus got some great publicity. Regardless of how this sudden interest for a niche product started and regardless of what all these articles actually said — this is very good because it makes Adblock Plus more widely known. But I spent quite some time answering interview questions and most of the time these answers didn’t get anywhere. In quite a few cases I had a strong suspicion that the reporter already knew what he was going to write before asking questions. He would then throw away any answer that didn’t fit into his scheme. I would hate to see all this time wasted, so I want to publish a summary of all that I’ve written in email answers over the month (unfortunately, I don’t have recordings of phone interviews).