Mozilla, reading the room extremely well, seemingly just recently flipped the switch to enable-by-default sponsored weather results from AccuWeather in every new Firefox tab you open. Clicking "Learn more" takes you here, with zero information on if your location is sent to AccuWeather every time you open a new tab: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-items-on-firefox-new-tab-page
Probably only noticed because I normally have a blank new tab page but this showed up after updating Firefox!
In part 2 of his #Exchange series, @chudypb describes the ApprovedApplicationCollection gadget. He also covers a path traversal in the Windows utility extrac32.exe, which allowed him to complete the chain for a full RCE in Exchange and remains unpatched.
https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2024/9/11/exploiting-exchange-powershell-after-proxynotshell-part-2-approvedapplicationcollection
I really try to like Firefox, but the last 5 minutes really captures the kind of papercut that happens often:
- I open a new tab and firefox informs me it has updated itself and needs to restart and won't allow any further operations until it does so.
- Fine, I close and restart.
- I reopen Firefox to find a brand new sponsored weather widget on my otherwise blank new tab page - from a source I would never otherwise visit.
Thanks for breaking my flow and the privacy breach, I guess.
The promised writeup of how I discovered that the Feeld dating app was protecting private data by doing client-side filtering: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70061.html