The Linux desktop 050310 1708

Mark Kent

November 22, 2004 - We've made an important update to the German language version of Firefox 1.0. The eBay search plug-in previously incorporated into the German language version of Firefox 1.0 referred to a URL of a partner company of eBay Germany, instead of to eBay directly. This URL was provided by eBay Germany. The Mozilla Foundation allowed this URL to be implemented not realizing the privacy implications. This was an error on our part. When this was brought to our attention, action was immediately taken.

An updated search plug-in for eBay Germany which refers directly to search.ebay.de is now available.

All previous installed versions will be updated over the next 72 hours through Firefox's update mechanism. The update may also be installed manually by installing the following extension:

Only the German language version of Firefox is affected.

We wanted to incorporate a search plug-in for eBay as we believe it would be useful to our users. The only purpose for any tracking mechanism was to measure the level of utilization. All the rumours about spyware are untrue and unfounded.

We regret this error and thank the community for their patience and buttistance in making this update.

pIk would have us believe Mozilla made us aware of this "plug-in" and how to disable it when it was first released. That's a lie.

You would have us believe spyware "Open source software is, err, open, so you can't hide these things." That's false as well.

More and more spyware is being targeted at the non-IE browser.

Spin that, I know you'll try.