Making Firefox load about:blank correctly
[bridged from https://mastodon.social/@hsivonen on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyRe-boost for the edit. Not true after all, it seems.
Henri Sivonen
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyI wonder if suggested fixes accompanying LLM-discovered security bugs are a net benefit or a net hindeance. I now have both the experience of not taking the bot fix and getting a new security bug report about my fix when the bot fix would have avoided it and the experience of spending too much […]
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyBoosting Slovenian domain sales at the expense of Anguilla.
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyThe minimum age for Adobe ID is 13 years (unless obtained via school). You need an Adobe ID to read e-books wrapped in Adobe Digital Edition DRM. People under 13 are not supposed to read books (in a way not involving school)?
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy@suihkulokki No. The HTTP version has nothing to do with the content. Servers support multiple HTTP versions and are placed as reverse proxies in front of older servers that can have ancient content.
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy… Later, I was able to remove support for non-UTF-8 file paths for C++ callers by pointing out that we had already accidentally shipped the JS part as UTF-8-only without calamity.
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyAside: Sometimes the problem is that too many people are paying attention and have concerns. In Firefox, we got rid of support for non-UTF-8 local file paths on Gtk platforms by happy accident. A colleague added a file access API for front end JavaScript, made it UTF-8-only, and at review time […]
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyAnd we do support unlabeled UTF-8 in local files. Browsers can in practice assume that local HTML files are finite and not massive. Python/Ruby/Java have to deal with larger files and also with streams. Fortunately, before Hololens was canceled, before layoffs, and before putting Copilot into […]
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyI have a canned answer for why we aren’t doing this for the Web platform: https://hsivonen.fi/utf-8-detection/
The key difference is that the Web behavior is consistent across operating systems and supports Existing Content out there on the Web. The Python/Ruby/Java behavior wasn’t consistent […]
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyNow if glibc could remove non-UTF-8 behaviors that are obsolete but can still be triggered by mistake. (To get an idea of major distro reality: Ubuntu is young enough to have always defaulted to UTF-8, Red Hat switched in 2002 and Debian, unreasonably late, in 2007.)
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyPython shipped https://peps.python.org/pep-0686/ just now in late 2026 to make the implicit text file io encoding UTF-8 on Windows, too. The PEP says Java did this in 2022 and Ruby in 2020, both of which seem unreasonably late.
A running theme of #Disinfo2026h this year is about the US as FIMI actor.
In a completely unrelated turn of events, a few sponsors pulled out at the last moment, including the @eudiplomacy.bsky.social (yet another case of our institutions making me ashamed to be European).
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyReviewers feeding not-yet-public papers to in-cloud LLMs seems relevant to accusations related to math breakthroughs.
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy@syvash To encapsulate `unsafe`.
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyI’m again skewing the statistics for how many UTF-8 decoders the average person writes per year.
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyWe keep teaching people that your code—not the compiler or the computer—is broken, and then as a browser developer I look at a crash report and one of my first thoughts is that the CPU is defective and I’m just annoyed at how much time from multiple many people is required to become confident […]
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyC++ being very C++ again: https://dryperspective.github.io/posts/complement-of-true/
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyGood to see a TV review outlet publish a guide for using “smart” TVs offline without the surveillance instead of just saying that “dumb” TVs aren’t available. https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/how-to-use-smart-tv-offline
@lemay.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyReposted by @hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gyThinking about how for years teenagers and curious nerds were prosecuted and thrown in jail because poking at a web site was a clear sign of being a ☠️ CR1MIN4L H4CK3R ☠️ Now it's all like oh no! the computer did an oopsie! no one is to blame, nothing can be done! ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gySome see a security hole. Some see an AGPL compliance mechanism. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1000222/meta-muse-ai-filesystem