Mozilla and Google's "Don't-Be-Evil" Bulldozer 95
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla execs John Lilly and Mitchell Baker were interviewed at the WSJ's All Things Digital conference last week. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discussed the history of Firefox, proprietary versus Open Source development and the debut of Chrome and Mozilla's changing relationship with Google. A great interview. Well worth reading. There's video as well."
Bulldozer (Score:5, Insightful)
The bulldozer quote comes from the interviewer, not the Mozilla guys.
Sometimes it's best to make your own news.
Re:Fear of the computer (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, this makes the point that it is in Microsoft's interest to not make the computer too safe. If people become comfortable experimenting with their machines, they might learn they don't need Microsoft software.
Re:Fear of the computer (Score:5, Insightful)
That reminds me of something.
Imagine the average Firefox newbie. Do they really, really care if Mozilla is v2.0.2, v2.0.12, v3.0.10 or whatever. Why not just drop the whole "v3.0.10 is now available for download!" and just say "Update available. Want to update your Firefox?". Because anyone who knows the first thing about computers can go to Help -> About and check their version if they really want. To Joe Moz in the street who wants to browse and isn't yet a disciple, all the version stuff is just numbers. It means nothing. It's making their browsing experience a bit more complicated as opposed to a bit more easy.
Re:Can't See Comment Titles (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen, Amen, Amen. Ever since the move to a modern codebase (which was desperately needed), Slashdot has been a huge bugfest. What happened to the open source ideal of people being able to jump in and rapidly respond to bugs? And if Slashcode isn't open in this way, then why the hell not?
Re:Fear of the computer (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, I've been using linux for years and I'm skittish about an update which involves the kernel. If I have a presentation later that day or the next, I'll put it off until afterward. I don't want to be googling and dmesg'ing the bug in console for upward of an hour, when I have something else to do. It has happened...
Re:Put honest links in the @#$@ summary (Score:1, Insightful)
Absofrigginlutely!
Whenever I see a shortened link, I just assume it directs to goatse.
Re:Bulldozer (Score:1, Insightful)
What part of Google Update (bg service, auto startup, copies self to various tmp dirs so you can't add a rule to your firewall for it) is 'do no evil'?
Re:Fear of the computer (Score:3, Insightful)
But I doubt your friend should make it a habit of updating her "flash player" based on what some myspace page tells her.
See the thing is, it isn't that safe. The malware writers are really out to get people like your friend. And even "legit" software makers have done pretty dubious and stupid stuff (in addition to making pretty bad mistakes).
So some of them have been burnt so badly they've decided it's better to not install anything new anymore.
Even if as a result they are more vulnerable to being infected by malware that slows down their computers. The funny thing is most AV programs nowadays already make computers a lot slower, so if the malware disables the AV programs and runs, they might not notice the difference
The big problem is users can't tell the difference between an OK "update" and a not OK "update".
Truth is figuring that out is not an easy problem. In fact from a theoretical POV, it's harder than solving the halting problem, since:
1) They don't necessarily have meaningful access to a _true_ description of the program (or update in this case).
2) They don't know what all the inputs are.
A halting problem is: given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever. It's been proven to be unsolvable.
The update/install problem is: given a potentially false description of a program, decide whether the program will screw up your system or not. Go figure.
The people who make operating systems should make things easier and safer than that (I've proposed a way before, but we're getting off topic enough already).