Mozilla Names New Chief, but Reaffirms Open-Source Commitment
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John Lilly, the chief operating officer of Mozilla, the developer of the open-source browser Firefox, will succeed Mitchell Baker as the firmâs chief executive.
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Mozilla security chief first panned a pair of Firefox bugs  as low-level threats but hours later changed her mind.
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The debut of the full-release version of an open-source browser that can actually challenge Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Internet Explorer has been cause for celebration among open-source advocates.
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Mozilla will today launch the nearly-final version of Firefox, its open source web browser, ahead of the 1.0 product launch on 9 November.
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New CEO brings passion and an eclectic background to help him chart a new course for the Linux vendor.
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Well, for those of you who are interested, here&#39;s my take on the Mozilla Foundation&#39;s current, major projects. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit and open-source organization that develops Mozilla and all of its related apps.
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Firefox continues to bite into Internet Explorer's market share. But users and analysts say that Mozilla hasn't changed its laissez-faire attitude about trying to get IT managers to formally adopt the open-source browser.
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Mozilla has hired three of the five top employees at Humanized, a small company known for its innovative work to provide more intuitive user interfaces, but will not reveal their identities.Mozilla confirmed the hirings through its public relations firm on Wednesday, but would not disclose their names. On the Humanized Web site, only five people are listed on the company&#39;s &quot;Who We Are&quot; page: developer Jono DiCarlo, President Aza Raskin, web and systems architect Scott Robbin, Vice President Atul Varma, and Treasurer Andrew Wilson.In a statement attributed to CEO John Lily, Mozilla said that the deal bringing the three to the company is not an acquisition and no intellectual property is changing hands. The Humanized recruits joined the Mozilla Labs team on Wednesday and will be working on the&#160;Firefox browser&#160;as well as other projects in the labs, he said. Eventually, the three will start blogging and reveal their identities and the nature of their work at the company, a representative from Mozilla&#39;s PR firm added.Both companies are intentionally close-mouthed about the exact nature of the exchange between them. Reached at the Humanized Chicago office, Wilson, who also does system architecture and programming work, said he&#39;s not at liberty to discuss the specifics of the deal or say who exactly is moving to Mozilla.However, he offered that &quot;all of us will remain in Chicago for the next two months to make the transition happen.&quot; He confirmed that Humanized has not actually been purchased, so it&#39;s unclear exactly what that transition entails and what the fate of the company&#39;s Enso project is, or how it might fit into Mozilla&#39;s plans.Enso user-interface software is available free and, according to information on the company&#39;s Web site, was designed to make it easier to perform daily tasks that require the use of various applications or functions.Enso runs in the desktop background and allows users to type in simple commands to access applications instead of leaving the window or application they are in to go to another one. For example, if a user wants to open Firefox from the current screen, instead of having to find the Firefox icon or go to the Start menu in Windows, Firefox can be opened by holding down the Caps Lock key and typing in &quot;open firefox.&quot; Performing calculations and acquiring word definitions also can be executed in a similar way from within the user&#39;s immediate screen view.Humanized&#39;s Raskin is handling inquiries about specifics, Wilson said, but Raskin did not return an e-mail requesting comment Wednesday.Aside from the Firefox browser, Mozilla also has an open source e-mail client,&#160;Thunderbird. But the browser is more popular and has been more influential in the industry, igniting the first spark of competition in many years against Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer browser when it was launched in November 2004.No matter who from Humanized has joined Mozilla, it&#39;s apparent the company is getting some brilliant young minds to help them galvanize any future UI innovations the company may be plotting. If their Web-site bios are any indication, Humanized is run by wunderkinds. DiCarlo, for instance, graduated from college at the age of 17 with a degree in physics before earning another degree in computer science from the University of Chicago, while co-founder Raskin started the company when he was 21 after co-authoring a physics textbook at 19.
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Mozilla Corp. has hired a former Microsoft Corp. security strategist to help lock down its open source products against online attacks.
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As the number of downloads of Mozilla Foundation&#39;s open source browser Firefox 1.0 continues to soar (4.7 hits by Nov. 19), people are asking what will established browsers do in response?
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InfoWorld - Window Snyder, chief security officer at open source browser maker Mozilla, is caught in the crosshairs of the raging browser vulnerability battle.
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(InfoWorld) - While stopping short of volunteering to host the event, Mozilla chief security official Window Snyder said that it could prove helpful for the open-source community to meet at its own conference to debate secure coding, vulnerability reporting, and product patching issues. In a recent interview with InfoWorld, Snyder -- whose official title with browser maker Mozilla is "chief security something or other" -- said that she would back a meeting of open-source software developers centered on a discussion of security issues. Working at Microsoft as part of its Secure Windows Initiative prior to joining Mozilla in 2006, Snyder helped organize Blue Hat, the software giant's now annual closed-door meeting with security researchers. Security has vastly improved in the open-source community over the last several years as an increasing number of contributors have stepped up to identify software vulnerabilities and help ward off potential attacks, but such a meeting of the minds could help developers improve their products even further, Snyder said. The event wouldn't likely adopt the same closed-door approach as Blue Hat, to which media members and other security industry onlookers remain uninvited, and security researchers and open-source developers would need to focus on both existing issues, such as improving vulnerability disclosure methods, and emerging topics, such as new threats aimed specifically at open-source technologies, according to the expert. If created, the event would likely take on the same grassroots feel of smaller security research conferences, such as the annual ShmooCon gathering in Washington, she said. "It would take a lot of work to coordinate, and we would need a lot of people to organize it, but something like [an open-source Blue Hat] could be very useful," Snyder said. "Anyone who wanted to contribute would have to be welcomed, and the idea would have to be to help people make their own security decisions more intelligently rather than to put pressure on people to change the ways they build things." Backers of the open-source model have long defended that they enjoy a significant advantage over makers of proprietary software -- such as Microsoft -- in the area of finding and patching security flaws in their products. Unlike Microsoft, which keeps its code under wraps and issues monthly updates that typically contain patches for multiple vulnerabilities that have been publicly identified by researchers, open-source companies like Mozilla -- perhaps best known for its Firefox browser -- have legions of contributors who attempt to find and fix any problems in its freely-distributed code on an ongoing basis. The ability to respond to problems so rapidly, and tap into a wider group of security experts in the form of the larger open-source community currently makes Firefox a more secure alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and other proprietary software products, Snyder contends. By meeting as an industry, open-source security experts could also glean more detailed feedback from researchers, she said, as open-source flaws are typically only approached as an element of any published papers issued by security technology vendors. "The majority of reports that come out of the security researchers have a tremendous amount of knowledge, and we would love to get further involved in the overall process and understand the coding implications of what they find," Snyder said. "We could get more suggestions on building out our architecture in the future, which is something we always want to have an eye on." Overall, the security expert said that the open-source model continues to prove itself as advantageous in fighting off attacks, especially as Mozilla continues to hear from a growing number of people who are actively scouring its products for potential issues. "Transparency continues to be one of Mozilla's key factors for success," she said. "Some people might see it as an obstacle in terms of doing security with the whole world watching, and at times it can be a challenge, but we have ten thousand people testing our nightly builds, which is a lot more than you find on your typical browser development team."
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InfoWorld - While stopping short of volunteering to host the event, Mozilla chief security official Window Snyder said that it could prove helpful for the open-source community to meet at its own conference to debate secure coding, vulnerability reporting, and product patching issues.
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(InfoWorld) - In a public mea culpa, Mozilla's chief security officer acknowledged Monday that Firefox includes the same flaw that the company called a "critical vulnerability" in Internet Explorer during a two-week ruckus over responsibility for a Windows zero-day bug. "Over the weekend, we learned about a new scenario that identifies ways that Firefox could also be used as the entry point," said Window Snyder of Mozilla. "While browsing with Firefox, a specially crafted URL could potentially be used to send bad data to another application. "We thought this was just a problem with Internet Explorer," Snyder continued. "It turns out, it is a problem with Firefox as well." The argument over responsibility for a flaw that involved both Internet Explorer and Firefox began two weeks ago when Danish researcher Thor Larholm argued that Internet Explorer contained an input validation bug that passes potentially malicious URLs to other applications. Larholm called out Firefox's "firefoxurl://" protocol as one that Internet Explorer mishandled. He staked out the position that Internet Explorer was to blame, while other security experts said it was Firefox's fault. As fingers pointed, Mozilla patched the Internet Explorer-Firefox interaction bug by releasing an update, Version 2.0.0.5. Even so, Snyder and others continued to argue that Internet Explorer was the problem. "Microsoft needs to patch Internet Explorer," Snyder said last Wednesday. That same day, Asa Dotzler, director of community development, contrasted what he said were the differences between Microsoft and Mozilla on the bug. "We think it's Firefox's job to ensure that users are protected from malicious Web sites when they're surfing the Web in Firefox. Apparently, Microsoft doesn't think the same for Internet Explorer," Dotzler said then. Friday, Jesper Johansson, a former Microsoft security strategist but now a security program manager at Amazon.com, spelled out how Firefox was as guilty as Internet Explorer of failing to validate input. In a post that leaned on the metaphor of "glass houses," Johansson showed how Firefox passes potentially malicious URLs to other applications, including the multiple-service instant messaging client Trillian. "Firefox is subject to the exact same flaw that they blame on Internet Explorer. Firefox also does not escape quotes in URLs before it passes them on to protocol handlers," he said. Snyder did not credit Johansson by name for alerting Mozilla to the Firefox bug, but she admitted that the flaw should have been spotted. "We should have caught this scenario when we fixed the related problem in 2.0.0.5," she said. She did not specify when a patch would be issued, but one is in the works, according to an entry in Bugzilla.
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With the release of its latest Firefox 2.0.0.5 browser, open-source software maker Mozilla claims to have fixed a number of potentially serious vulnerabilities in its flagship product.
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Mozilla has released the second alpha version of what is slated to become the Firefox 3.0 Web browser, which is due in users' hands during the second half of the year.
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Window Snyder, formerly of Microsoft, now heads up security at Mozilla, the company best known for its open-source Firefox Web browser.