Mozilla foundation: empowering bloodthirsty dictatorships worldwide since 2003, and counting

When Netscape kicked the bucket, and AOL made it open source, Mozilla foundation was founded to continue the development. Needless to say, that they totally FUBARed the glorious Netscape suite, they also created and perpetuated privacy defeating measures in their products.

The email client Thunderbird indexes messages to facilitate searching. It indexes them upon receiving, and keeps data in the index files indefinitely, even if a message is later deleted, and the folder compacted.

This has the implication: imagine for a moment, that you are a political opposition of a cruel dictatorship in the 3d world, and you received an email from your peer, related to your political activity. You read the message, and realize, that it may implicate you and your peer, should you be arrested, and your PC searched.

What is the next natural step a reasonable person would take? I would think of deleting the message. Piece of cake: hit Del, bingo! The message is now gone. But is it gone forever? Probably not, as the physical file on disk only flagged the message as deleted. So being intelligent, you right click the folder in Thunderbird account tree view, and select Compact. Not it is really, physically deleted from disk. Not!

The from address of your peer is still in the index, and if you search for it, it will show up in the drop down under the search box - that simple! No complex forensics is required, any dumb a$$ goon of a 3d world banana republic can do that.

You would think, that as soon as this has been brought to the attention of enlightened developers of Mozilla foundation, they, as everyone, who are enjoying the fruits of highly developed democracy, rush to fix this minute inconsistency in their code, would you not? NOPE! Mozilla's response was "FU, go STFU."

Even after extensive back and forth, explaining the rudimentary simple way to exploit their current state of software, and just as rudimentary fix, they continued to insist on pushing back on the premise, that Thunderbird should not be treated as a secure way of deleting emails.

Up to this date Thunderbird is indexing email addresses, and keeping them indefinitely. If it is fine from the Mozilla foundation's perspective, that they are hell bent on empowering 3d world's dictators for imprisoning, torturing and murdering their political opponents for the only reason, that fixing that code inconsistency does not help Mozilla foundation to get a larger cut of advertising money, then we, their users, should take a stand and become their former users.

P.S: Mozilla foundation, I am completely, totally uninterested in any PR spin and justifications you might want to produce in connection to this post.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 12:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 470 words, total size 3 kb.