Yesterday, I wrote about racism in a reality tv-show. Today, I will discuss some of the things that has been happening in the cricketing world. South African batsman Herschelle Gibbs came under fire during the first test match against Pakistan for using racial slur against Pakistani supporters. He was reportedly heard saying that “Pakistani supporters were behaving “like bloody animals” and something should be done about the “fucking Pakistanis” (Source). ICC promptly suspended him for 2 test matches. However, it does raise the question if he got a rough deal. Players are under a lot of pressure in the ground. And the jeering and abusing from the crowd doesn’t help matters. According to media reports Gibbs himself and Paul Harris who was standing at the fence received a fair amount of abuses. Gibbs made the above comment while talking to his teammates on the pitch. As, I said yesterday, racism can not be tolerated under any circumstance. However, opinion is divided over the nature of the comment. Calling someone animal is an abuse, but doesn’t indicate racism. However, the term ‘fucking Pakistanis” can be interpreted as a racial slur. It is something that is debatable. My belief is that he should be punished for abusing the supporters but two test match ban may be a bit harsh. At the same time, the crowd also needs to be disciplined. Their behaviour should be monitored by guards, and they should be thrown out if found misbehaving.

Meanwhile, Sunil Gavaskar has sparked off another controversy by calling Barry Richards racist.
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As many of you may already know, Indian film actress Shilpa Shetty is currently living in the Big Brother (UK) house. She has reportedly been paid a whopping sum of money by channel 4 to participate in the reality show. I started watching this series of Celebrity Big Brother as all the television shows I watch are in the middle of a season break and I was interested in seeing how Shilpa Shetty was doing in the house. And to sum it up in one sentence she is having a really tough time in there. The behaviour of fellow female house members towards her has been absolutely appalling.

First it was Jackie who refused to call Shilpa by her name and referred to her as “the Indian”. Soon, her daughter Jade and Jade’s boyfriend jack joined in on the act. During a conversation with Jade, Jack used a very offensive term for Shilpa which was censored. Most people believe he either called her a ‘fucking paki’ or a ‘cunt’. However, without a doubt the word was extremely offensive as it troubled even the nasty Jade.
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As I mentioned in my previous blogpost, couple of days ago Opera and iDefence lab announced that opera v9.x suffered from two highly critical vulnerabilities. Both of them have been patched in the latest release v9.1. However, the timing of the announcement has created a fair amount of controversy. Today I read Asa Dotzler’s blogpost - Opera fails to notify users at risk
He says :

Not telling the user that an update is a critical security update and that the unfixed versions of the browser are vulnerable to remote attack is just wrong.

By adopting this practice, Opera is doing their users a great disservice. If Opera has fixed any serious security flaw, the only responsible way to ensure that users are safe is to clearly and consistently explain to those users that the latest release of the browser has fixed security flaws and users should immediately update or face real dangers on the web. Opera should be using the press it gets around releases to forcefully proclaim that previous versions of their browser are unsafe and should not be used. Failing to use the loudest microphone they have to reach their users in cases involving user safety is simply unacceptable.

Asa Dotzler is (in)famous for bashing Opera (for ridiculous reasons) in the past. However, this time around he does make a valid point. Failing to mention in the changelog that you have fixed a critical vulnerability is shabby. Have a look at the timeline of events :

11/16/2006 iDefence notifies Opera about this.
11/17/2006 Opera sends a response to iDefence.
11/17/2006 Opera releases a weekly build of v9.1. Doesn’t say anything about the vulnerability. Between this time and 18th Dec they release several weekly builds. None of the changelogs contain any information about the security vulnerability.
12/18/2006 Opera releases 9.1 final in which this has been fixed. However, the changelog fails to mention this.
01/05/2007 Opera and iDefence jointly releases details about these security holes.

Its baffling that they waited for 3 weeks before going public with this piece of information. In the past they have always revealed the security vulnerabilities fixed in the changelog, and their response time is generally around a couple of days.

Opera has also received flak for downplaying the seriousness of these exploits. If properly exploited (which is difficult but not impossible) it can allow execution of arbitrary code, which can be very dangerous. Yet, Opera Soft chose to classify them as moderate (apparently their reasoning is that the vulnerability is difficult to exploit).

The problem with not declaring that an update has security fixes is that many users (especially those having slow internet connections) may not download the newer version, which they think has only cosmetic additions. The fact that opera doesn’t have a proper update system doesn’t help either. In spite of the fact that in a normal upgrade majority of the files are unchanged users have to download the entire setup file. Opera should either add an update system like Mozilla Firefox or start distributing smaller setups with only the newer files.

However, I would like to state that I do not believe that Opera did this on purpose. It’s probably a mistake/slip-up on their part.

Update (8th Jan) : Opera has issued an clarification regarding this issue.

It is important that both parties do respect each other: if a fix is included also in development snapshot builds that reach a public audience (like the weekly builds on this blog), fixes for the vulnerability are not announced: this is a form of respect both for the reporter and for all the users that only upgrade to stable releases. Making the vulnerability public knowledge before a stable version fixes the issue would leave lots of users vulnerable. Serious reporters do not announce vulnerabilities before vendors have a fix in public builds - and vendors do not announce vulnerabilities before the reporters makes their discovery public, in order to properly credit them.

You can read the entire clarification here. Hopefully this would end this unfortunate controversy.

It’s time again for some Opera stuff. There is some good news for Opera fans. According to Market Share opera’s market share has increased from 0.52% in the beginning of the year to 0.87% in December. It’s currently in 4rth position; well behind Internet Explorer (79.64%), Mozilla Firefox (14% - which is an increase of 4.5% from Jan ‘06) and Safari (4.24%). Netscape is now just behind Opera with 0.85% (it had 1.17% market share in Jan ‘06). So, Opera v9 is indeed making some headway.
Opera 9 has already impressed a lot of Techies. eWeek chose Opera as one of the Top Products of 2006. Digit – leading tech magazine in India now includes Opera in its list of essential software.

However, Opera’s market share is still small enough for major websites to completely ignore the browser. The latest offender is Askx - the new Web 2.0 avatar of the search engine Ask.com. And again the problem is due to lousy web developers. You can find more info on this here.
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