Nasty problem with SuSE/Firefox update
I've been running with SuSE beta 10 for over a month now (more about that in a later post). Yesterday I received, via susewatcher, an update notice for a Firefox update from 1.0.6 to 1.0.7. An update for Mozilla 1.7.12 was included as well. OK. I clicked on the 'Start Online' button and updated both. Big mistake.
Turns out that the Firefox update was polluted with someone else's personal extensions, specifically Beagle Indexer. That extension, along with two others, were placed in the main extensions directory with root privs. I would have never known about Beagle except it was broken, and produced the following error alert every time I hit a web site.
Not only was this annoying, it became extremely annoying on Google Mail. I lost count of the number of times the opening page triggered the alert. I opened the extensions dialog and saw the Beagle Indexer in all its glory. What was ominous is that the update button was missing. I should have taken a hint right then that any attempts to do anything was going to fail, but I didn't.
To cut to the chase, I tried to remove it as root. When that failed, I tried to edit the file extensions.rdf in the main application extensions directory. That left Firefox in a broken state (no icons, no menu bar, nada, zip). In frustration I uninstalled Firefox (along with its "international" package), then used Konqueror to go to the Mozilla site and download the official Firefox. I installed that, added a link out of /usr/bin, and got on with it. That's what I'm using now. And the funny (or sad) thing is that the Firefox installed seems snappier than either version that came from SuSE.
OpenSuse Gets Hacked
All this took place the day after I found out that opensuse.org was hacked by the "IHS IRAN HACKERS SABOTAGE." I'd gone there to check on things and found the following quaint front page.
I have to stop and think about how such a thing could happen. Hacking sites for political messages is so old school that it's positively ancient. If the opensuse site was running a current distribution and properly installed, then this shouldn't happen. Netcraft shows opensuse is running Apache 2 on Netware. Netware? Oh brother. In any event I will spend the money and purchase Suse 10. It's available now on Amazon among other sellers. I think I'll leave opensuse and its update repositories alone in the future.
Turns out that the Firefox update was polluted with someone else's personal extensions, specifically Beagle Indexer. That extension, along with two others, were placed in the main extensions directory with root privs. I would have never known about Beagle except it was broken, and produced the following error alert every time I hit a web site.
Not only was this annoying, it became extremely annoying on Google Mail. I lost count of the number of times the opening page triggered the alert. I opened the extensions dialog and saw the Beagle Indexer in all its glory. What was ominous is that the update button was missing. I should have taken a hint right then that any attempts to do anything was going to fail, but I didn't.
To cut to the chase, I tried to remove it as root. When that failed, I tried to edit the file extensions.rdf in the main application extensions directory. That left Firefox in a broken state (no icons, no menu bar, nada, zip). In frustration I uninstalled Firefox (along with its "international" package), then used Konqueror to go to the Mozilla site and download the official Firefox. I installed that, added a link out of /usr/bin, and got on with it. That's what I'm using now. And the funny (or sad) thing is that the Firefox installed seems snappier than either version that came from SuSE.
OpenSuse Gets Hacked
All this took place the day after I found out that opensuse.org was hacked by the "IHS IRAN HACKERS SABOTAGE." I'd gone there to check on things and found the following quaint front page.
I have to stop and think about how such a thing could happen. Hacking sites for political messages is so old school that it's positively ancient. If the opensuse site was running a current distribution and properly installed, then this shouldn't happen. Netcraft shows opensuse is running Apache 2 on Netware. Netware? Oh brother. In any event I will spend the money and purchase Suse 10. It's available now on Amazon among other sellers. I think I'll leave opensuse and its update repositories alone in the future.
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