Re: Has Mozilla been hijacked?

[Travis Crump <pretzalz@techhouse.org>]

Michael D. Crawford wrote:
> I would be surprised if this could happen on Linux, but I think somebody 
> has hacked my browser.
>
> Sometimes web pages that I have open spontaneously change to one of two 
> commercial sites.  one of them is http://download.find.com/  I forget 
> which one the other is.
>
> I have Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020622 
> Debian/1.0.0-0.woody.1
>
> In looking around for programming contracts in the past, I have seen 
> people post requests for software that would hijack someone's homepage 
> setting.  What these programs were supposed to do is set someone's 
> homepage to a commercial site, and prevent them from setting it back (or 
> cause the browser to ignore the user's preference).  I get the feeling 
> something like that has happened to me.
>
> I would be surprised if the URL's for either of these sites were planted 
> on purpose by either the Mozilla or the Debian developers.
>
> I can't figure out what is making this happen.  Sometimes it seems to me 
> that the pages change to a new URL without me clicking anything.
>
> Thanks for any help you can give me.
>
> Mike

It is a known bug in Mozilla.  I am not sure if it has been fixed since 
I am using the workaround, but the workaround is to add 
'user_pref("browser.fixup.alternate.enabled", false);' to your 
user.js[create it if needed in the same directory as your bookmarks file 
and prefs.js file.  You can also add the pref to /etc/mozilla/prefs.js 
to fix it globally for debian builds].  What happens is that for some 
reason Mozilla tries to load "find".  This obviously fails so it then 
tries www.find.com which is what you are observing.  Adding the 
preference stops it from trying to load www.find.com and it should just 
error out on "find" which is better that the current behavior you are 
seeing.