URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Mint

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Tarh331_Dad
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Joined: November 17th, 2021, 2:07 pm

URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Mint

Post by Tarh331_Dad »

[NOTE: So far, this appears to be unique to Linux Mint; I tried it on both Win7 and Win8, but they seem to be completely unaffected.]

Everything was fine last night.

It started this morning, when I was still on version 2.53.09, so I upgraded to version 2.53.10, and it still does it.

You can go to "bing.com", and everthing is fine.

And you can even "Deep Link" successfully to a Bing search, such as

https://www.bing.com/search?q=seamonkey

But once you start to do anything at Bing, such as typing a search query and then hitting the "Enter" key, all open Seamonkey windows are immediately killed.

Similarly, if you have just one Seamonkey window opened at Bing, and if you click on the "X" in the very upper right corner of the window opened to Bing, so as to kill that particular window, all open seamonkey windows will be immediately killed.

As of this writing, Bing must be throwing some sort of Javascript-Fu at Seamonkey [on Linux Mint] which is utterly exploding & catastrophically destroying the mozilla Javascript interpreter.

I've never seen anything like this before; the closest I've ever seen was the trick you could do to crash an NT4 server by sending it a carefully crafted ICMP packet which immediately blue-screened the NT4 operating system.
Last edited by Tarh331_Dad on November 17th, 2021, 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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LinuxUserSince1991
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Location: Los Angeles area

Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by LinuxUserSince1991 »

Confirmed on Pop!_OS (which is not my normal Linux--Kubuntu is, but I'm using a loaner right now).

I went to bing.com and typed "linux" in its search box. BAM!!! SM shut down just like that!

ETA: Why on earth are you using bing?! :?: :shock: :lol:
Tarh331_Dad
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Joined: November 17th, 2021, 2:07 pm

Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by Tarh331_Dad »

LinuxUserSince1991 wrote:ETA: Why on earth are you using bing?! :?: :shock: :lol:
1) Bing tracks you infinitely less than does Google.

As above, we haven't upgraded any of our Windows machines beyond Win8, and we will never upgrade to Win10, on account of the tracking.

2) Bing actually gives far better results now than does Google.

Google has deleted [shadow banned] so many politically incorrect topics of conversation that Google results are now largely nonsensical fiction & propaganda & lunacy.
v_v
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Joined: September 18th, 2021, 8:57 am

Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by v_v »

Tarh331_Dad and LinuxUserSince1991,

Bing.com is working very well for me in 2.53.10. Also I see that in both of your cases your user agent strings contains "Firefox/68.0". You might wish to try a user agent string using "Firefox/60.0". See Frank Lion's "Posted November 16th, 2021, 11:40 am" post at " http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 8&start=90 ", and some of the follow-up posts in that thread.

v_v
Last edited by v_v on November 20th, 2021, 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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LinuxUserSince1991
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Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by LinuxUserSince1991 »

v_v wrote:Tarh331_Dad and LinuxUserSince1991,

Bing.com is working very well for me in 2.53.10. Also I see that in both of your cases your user agent strings contains "Firefox/68.0". You might wish to try a user agent string using "Firefox/60.0". See Frank Lion's "Posted November 16th, 2021, 11:40 am" post at " viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3071978&start=90 ", and some of the follow-up posts in that thread.
Very observant of you! Thanks for the heads-up. I'd change it except for one thing: I'll never, ever use bing. Or anything else from M$. After going to bing yesterday.....I felt the need to take a shower.......
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LinuxUserSince1991
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Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by LinuxUserSince1991 »

Tarh331_Dad wrote:
LinuxUserSince1991 wrote:ETA: Why on earth are you using bing?! :?: :shock: :lol:
1) Bing tracks you infinitely less than does Google.
DuckDuckGo and others don't track you at all! I'm not saying I regularly USE those, just that they're out there. I have all my Google and browser settings to be as private as they can be, and, frankly, I don't care if Google tracks me because I don't do anything that exciting online!
2) Bing actually gives far better results now than does Google.
Then it's come a long way. I remember TRYING it several years ago--I searched for "linux." Its results? *ALL* were windows-related! Every result (at least on the first page, which is as far as I went) had something to do with windows, like how it's such a superior OS.... *SMH*
Google has deleted [shadow banned] so many politically incorrect topics of conversation that Google results are now largely nonsensical fiction & propaganda & lunacy.
For the things I typically search for, this just isn't an issue. But whatever floats one's boat, you know? :)
trevoz
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Joined: December 12th, 2005, 9:40 pm

Re: NON-URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on

Post by trevoz »

Tarh331_Dad wrote:
As above, we haven't upgraded any of our Windows machines beyond Win8, and we will never upgrade to Win10, on account of the tracking.
You do realise that the Microsoft "telemetry" was backported to both Windows 7 and Windows 8 via updates?
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-Px-
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Re: NON-URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on

Post by -Px- »

trevoz wrote:
Tarh331_Dad wrote:
As above, we haven't upgraded any of our Windows machines beyond Win8, and we will never upgrade to Win10, on account of the tracking.
You do realise that the Microsoft "telemetry" was backported to both Windows 7 and Windows 8 via updates?
1. Not all.
2. Most of those in optional updates which can be not installed
Tarh331_Dad
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Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by Tarh331_Dad »

UPDATE: Concerning bing.com, Seamonkey is now crashing on both Win7 and Win8.

Simply attempting to go to "bing.com" on Win7 will immediately kill Seamonkey before it even has a chance to fully open a Bing window.

And the Win8 behavior is now just like the Linux Mint behavior - attempting a search at Bing, or closing a window at Bing - will hard crash mozilla and all open Seamonkey windows.

OTOH, for the time being, Firefox appears to be immune to this attack vector on Linux Mint.
Last edited by Tarh331_Dad on November 20th, 2021, 7:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Tarh331_Dad
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Joined: November 17th, 2021, 2:07 pm

Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by Tarh331_Dad »

It looks like Bing requires upwards of 150 file downloads to render a single basic window to the end user.

I apologize, but as an amateur, it would take me on the order of months to wade my way through that much code [searching for the attack vector], and I simply do not have that much time on my hands right now [unless I got really lucky, and the rogue code were in the first five or ten file downloads].

Image
Last edited by Tarh331_Dad on November 20th, 2021, 7:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Tarh331_Dad
Posts: 7
Joined: November 17th, 2021, 2:07 pm

Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by Tarh331_Dad »

For the record, I downsized that screenshot repeatedly, but there's some nasty code on this bulletin board that keeps resizing the picture to 100% width, which in turn ruins the display of text on this thread.

Sorry.

To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing I can do about that.
Tarh331_Dad
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Joined: November 17th, 2021, 2:07 pm

Re: NON-URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on

Post by Tarh331_Dad »

trevoz wrote:
Tarh331_Dad wrote:
As above, we haven't upgraded any of our Windows machines beyond Win8, and we will never upgrade to Win10, on account of the tracking.
You do realise that the Microsoft "telemetry" was backported to both Windows 7 and Windows 8 via updates?
If you've got some URLs which you could post, I'd love to read about that.

I pay moderately close attention to these sorts of things, and I hadn't yet heard of Win7 nor Win8 uploading telemetry.

Thanks.
Tarh331_Dad
Posts: 7
Joined: November 17th, 2021, 2:07 pm

Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by Tarh331_Dad »

UPDATE:

I followed the instructions on this old 2018 thread [some fellow from "Poland" took the time to write it up very carefully]: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14804588

1) about:config
2) I accept the risk
3) general.useragent.site_specific_overrides , toggle to "true"
4) Right click for "New"
5) New string value
6) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

So I guess I'm advertising Firefox something or other on Windows 7.

Anyway, it seems to be satsifying Bing's curiosity for the moment, and I can use Bing again on Linux Mint.

Knock on wood.

If anyone has a better user agent string which I should try in Part "6)", then do tell.

Thanks!!!!!
v_v
Posts: 157
Joined: September 18th, 2021, 8:57 am

Re: URGENT: Bing.com is killing all Seamonkey windows on Min

Post by v_v »

tarh331_Dad,

Did you see my "Posted November 17th, 2021, 8:38 pm" post above? Did you follow through?

[and frg posted a link to a similar thread right after my post above]

v_v
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