Resolved Chinese characters in menus and dialogs - don't know what they mean

1.The name extention came first. More recently it was changed to Add-on. In fact, you have Options|Add-ons. Are extentions the same as add-ons. Probably not. I think that Extentions and Themes make up Add-ons. What are Themes is obvious, while Extentions are, in many ways exactly that. A way to make a browser do more, and, in many ways provides links to perform certain operations.
2. I remember that way back when certain programs, like Shockwave Flash, Quicktime, Java, etc. could work directly from the browser, were called Plugins. Java or Flash are, certainly not Plugins, but with the help of .dll files which are located in the Plugins folders, can be used directly from the browser, not requiring an external download. The programs send these .dll files to programs like Netscape. Firefox does not need these files,which may be called helper file, but can detect the presence of these programs, and use them. The major difference between Extentions and Plugins, lies in the fact that the latter can be used by many programs, while extentions have more limited scope.

 

Westside,

It seems that the roles of extensions, add-ons, and plugins have evolved over time, so now they all appear to exist in a pool of "helper items" or something like that. Thank you for pointing out the distinctions between them.

Frank

 

I neglected to comment if a good AntiVirus and Firewall are enough, using an outdated program. My answer is that the protection is essential, but is it sufficient. There have been, over time, updates because of certain vulnerabilities. I would say that if someone wants to mess with javascript, no protection may be sufficient.
Plugins have never changed, while extentions are particular to a certain version of a program (thus the incompatibility of certain extentions in new programs).

 

Westside,

You say, "I would say that if someone wants to mess with javascript, no protection may be sufficient. "

I'm using the FF add-on NoScript, and I don't allow any websites to run scripts unless I've been there long enough to determine that it's a safe site or a safe item to run.

Thanks for the information.

Frank D

 

This is quite an interesting thread. I came here based on Googling for cyberlynk.net, which I also had visited in order to install a Microtek Scanner driver. The most interesting thing is, I am using a MacBook Pro, running Mac OS X 10.5.8, and downloaded the disk image of the driver. I thought the ftp link to a Korean web site looked a little hokey, but have no idea where Microtek is based. At any rate, I mounted the disk image and double-clicked the installation meta-package. The installer ran fine up until the point of writing the 'receipts' (basically an installation manifest that can be used later to verify checksums and permissions). At that point, the machine stopped responding smoothly, and as I clicked on various menus, Asian characters and various phonetic spellings appeared (such as Kwit for Quit). As well, character kerning was messed up in various menus and dialogs. This occurred across many applications, not just Firefox. I could get nothing to respond. I finally had to shut down the machine with the power switch. Subsequently, it would not boot. Booting verbosely, I saw that it could not start the DNS responder daemon, and was stuck in a loop attempting to do so. It couldn't find the executable. Booting into single-user mode, I discovered that the file permissions on the root directory were set to read,write,execute for the owner (root) only. In unix, the execute bit on a directory determines whether you have permission to traverse it. I did chmod 755 on the root directory and was then able to boot, but could then run no applications. Turns out the /Applications directory was set to the same permissions as above, and had also had its user/group ids changed to '501', a non-existent user/group. I again rebooted into single-user mode to fix these issues and then ran the disk permissions verify part of Disk Utility. It found numerous errors, as well as several binaries it refused to fix because they had been altered. These were 'interesting' binaries, such as the ppp daemon and the vpn daemon. I downloaded the 10.5.8 Combo updater and re-installed, which resolved those issues.

Then, just to verify that it was indeed the Microtek installer at fault, I re-installed it, and the same issues occurred again -- in fact, I had a terminal window running and after the installer started, could no longer use the 'ls' (directory listing) command because the root directory permissions had already been changed.

It looks to me like the MicroTek installers are compromised and include a trojan, for both Windows and Mac. I have not had the Chinese character problem repeat other than while the installer is running. Interestingly, if I do the custom install, the components for the 'ScanWizard' software are labeled 'ScanWeird'.

I plan to write to MicroTek to point out the issue. I still don't have working scanner software. While the software is installed, the Scanner Finder doesn't find my scanner on the USB or FireWire busses.

--Rubinstien