Security News
This month, Mozilla has announced plans to phase out support for the Firefox web browser app on the Amazon Fire TV product line. Although Firefox will be no longer supported on Fire TV effective at the end of this month, Amazon Silk web browser app remains available to Fire TV users.
Mozilla volunteers have recently been flooded with online merchants and marketers' requests for their domains to be added to what's called a Public Suffix List. Public Suffix List is an initiative of the Mozilla community volunteers to maintain a list of top-level domains and domains that should be treated as one to prevent the mixing of cookies between distinct domains.
Mozilla's attempts to augment its income continued apace with an update to the company's VPN subscription service. The update, which has landed less than a year since Mozilla first launched the service, adds two new features.
Mozilla has announced that it will introduce a more privacy-focused default Referrer Policy to protect Firefox users' privacy, starting with the web browser's next version. Once updated, the web browser will automatically trim user-sensitive information like path and query string information accessible from the Referrer URL. This URL is sent together with the HTTP Referrer header between websites during subresources requests and navigating between sites by clicking on links.
A newly uncovered cyberattack is taking control of victims' Gmail accounts, by using a customized, malicious Mozilla Firefox browser extension called FriarFox. FriarFox gives cybercriminals various types of access to users' Gmail accounts and Firefox browser data.
The Mozilla Foundation has released its latest version of the Firefox browser, which comes with new privacy protections to squash cross-site cookie tracking, as well as a slew of security vulnerability fixes. "Total Cookie Protection confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site," said Tim Huang, Johann Hofmann and Arthur Edelstein with Mozilla on Tuesday.
Mozilla has revised the way the latest build of the Firefox browser handles HTTP cookies to prevent third-parties from using them to track people online, as part of improvements in build 86 of the code. The third-party cookies placed by these scripts can be read on other websites that also load tracking code and are often used to follow people from website to website in order to build interest profiles for behavioral ad targeting.
Dating has been a lot tougher for singles since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing many people onto dating apps to supplement the real thing. Most dating apps require users to enter a significant amount of information for safety purposes, but a new report from Mozilla has found that some of the most popular dating apps take a lot more data from you than you'd expect.
Mozilla has released Firefox 85.0.1 and includes a fix that prevents a Windows 10 NTFS corruption bug from being triggered from the browser. Last month, BleepingComputer reported that a bug in Windows 10 and Windows XP allows non-privileged users to mark an NTFS volume as dirty.
Chrome 89 also supports Web NFC, meaning that web applications can read and write NFC tags. Another new feature is the Web Serial API, which enables direct communication between web applications and devices with serial ports.