Firefox will be coming out with a new version shortly which will fix a flaw which “could be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected host.” The Mozilla people had earlier come up with a patch for this flaw, which, according to those who found the flaw, didn’t work.
My God! How could this be? That’s only supposed to happen to evil Microsoft, not when the good guys, pure of heart and all that, write software.
And then, when an inexcusable flaw is found, not only is it not fixed right away, but the fix doesn’t work?
There must be a conspiracy! Someplace, somewhere, somehow!!!
Yes, there is a conspiracy. A bunch of people wrote the code, and people make mistakes, the most horrible of which is not thinking of absolutely everything.
And open source doesn’t change that reality one single bit.
The simple reality is, the more popular programs like Firefox become, the more it will be targeted for attack, and the harder bad guys look, the more they’ll find.
This does not make Firefox bad. This does not make Firefox, worse, or no better than IE. It does mean Firefox is not and never will be perfect, which really should not come as a shock to anyone grounded in reality. I use Firefox 95% of the time these days, and that’s not going to change, simply because I never listened to the delusional.
And if you refuse to believe that, you’re crazy.
You know, there’s are a lot of crazy people out there.
For sure, Firefox fanaticism is but a tiny, fairly harmless drop of water in the loony Internet ocean. Come to think of it, look hard enough and deep enough, and I’m not sure you’ll find anyone completely sane. Not me, not you.
We’re all crazy, the only differences among us is how often and about what.
I don’t mean “menace-to-society, lock-them-up” crazy, just “irrational and incapable of processing any information contrary to their beliefs on one or more subjects” crazy, and if reality doesn’t correspond to their view, well, they change it.
What does this have to do with computing? Well, the Internet has not only expanded exponentially the ability of people to communicate, it has expanded exponentially the ability of crazy people to communicate.
What does this mean? Well, at best, you get insane people calling each other crazy.
That’s awful enough, but this looks awfully good compared to insane people of like ill-mind getting together, saying how smart and good and wonderful they are, then tossing out anyone who points out that the would-be emperors have no clothes.
It’s like a mental hospital in which the schizophrenics get together in a corner and compete on who has the most and best hallucinations. Or psychotics competing on how many people are out to get them.
Whatever that is, it’s certainly not good for the mental health of individual, group, or society, and we as a species are crazy enough without the technical enhancements.
The original purpose of free speech was not to make people feel good, but rather to have an open marketplace where ideas could compete. Competition means only the best ideas win.
What we see in these mental ghettoes is the exact opposite, a rigged game where only certain ideas can win, regardless of merit.
A rigged game is no game at all. A rigged reality which keeps out any and all inconvenient notions like being wrong about something is no reality at all.
There’s no shame in getting crazy about something, we all do. It is the refusal to see reality that is bad, and hiding yourself away so you can’t see it is even worse
All you do is create a virtual reality just as unreal and fake as the Matrix.
Think about it.
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