Re: [opensuse] REPOST: Most interesting...and possibly disturbing about Flash (and Firefox)?

On 09/12/09 23:39, Basil Chupin wrote:
I came across this when I went looking for "about:blank":

The term "about:blank" is also the generic name for a group of
variants of the CoolWebSearch
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoolWebSearch> malware
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware> program group.

but apparently may also be used for advertisements.


It is also interesting to see how many of the sites I usually visit have
"about:blank" which NoScript disallows.

about:blank is a web browser's way of displaying a blank, empty page.
For example if you open a new tab, the page that is displayed is
about:blank. If you go to the preferences, there is an option to set
your home page to a blank page (about:blank).
Blank really means blank, no scripts, no html, nothing. So in that sense
its perfectly safe. The location bar in Firefox is just displaying it's
default text instead of the URL so that new users know what it's for.

The about: namespace in general is used for displaying local
browser-specific information, like the about:config and about:plugins
you already know.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About:_URI_scheme

about:blank in Internet Explorer can be hijacked by certain Windows
malware (so that it no longer displays a blank page, but ads, and since
about:blank is used everywhere you see a lot of ads) but that does not
mean the url about:blank itself is malicious, especially on Linux.

So I don't think there is any need to be paranoid, I think NoScript is
just offering you an option to block webpages using blank pages. I have
seen some bad websites open lots of blank windows in an effort to
confuse the user; maybe that's what NoScript is trying to stop.

try these in firefox 3.0+, all harmless: about:robots about:mozilla
about:credits

Regards,

Tejas
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