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from the what-browser-will-you-use-to-read-the-report? dept.
Eric Rescorla has a blog post over at Mozilla about the technical details on the recent Firefox add-on outage. He covers the background of how they use certificates, how they tried to mitigate the damage from the outage, how they worked to solve the problem without breaking more things, deployment of the replacement certificate, and why it took so long to fix.
Recently, Firefox had an incident in which most add-ons stopped working. This was due to an error on our end: we let one of the certificates used to sign add-ons expire which had the effect of disabling the vast majority of add-ons. Now that we've fixed the problem for most users and most people's add-ons are restored, I wanted to walk through the details of what happened, why, and how we repaired it.
There were a lot of work arounds discussed here and elsewhere, some of them quite stupid so, lastly, remember to undo any temporary work-arounds that might have been deployed last weekend.
Earlier on SN: In Firefox All Extensions Disabled Due to Expiration of Intermediate Signing Cert
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:40AM (1 child)
Isn't it a little weird how all these bad internet-related things all happen at once? Oh shit, you have to upgrade your Firefox only to undo new privacy-raping settings hidden in weird places, then you have to upgrade your Adblock only to find out that you have to do the same and it still doesn't block some obvious ads. Oh, and in the new Firefox you had to upgrade to, now you find some choices you had before taken away outright or hidden in about:config.
It's obvious as fuck that there was a motive behind this "bug." It smells as shitty as a gay man's mouth after rimjobbing an Indian.
(Score: 3, Informative) by linkdude64 on Saturday May 11 2019, @07:05AM
I refused to downgrade to Quantum, so to get (most) of my addons back I just moved laterally to FF55 Developer edition. Ported over my profile, meaning history and bookmarks, logins, etc. Was a bit of a pain, but worth it. Fuck them. I agree that the "Whoops, now you have to update!" angle is shady as fuck. If my addons were disabled without an update, then I'm assuming there's no e-fuse that's preventing them from re-enabling. There must be some technical reason, so I'll have to read TFA and see if they address it.