756744 - Sometimes Flash Video Downloader logs the visited site in system.log

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect)

Description

[Gianluca]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
Build ID: 20120420145725

Steps to reproduce:

I just navigated some sites, closed tabs or changed the url in the current tab.


Actual results:

In the /var/system.log a line like this:
May 19 09:42:34 MACHINENAME [0x0-0x1a01a].org.mozilla.firefox[334]: REMOVE http://www.repubblica.it/
appears. Is not sistematic, it's occasional.


Expected results:

Logs line like these should not appears. I'm not sure if this happens even with anonymous navigation, but this is a form of tracking or browsing history that a user can't remove like the regular browser history.

Comment 1

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Do you have private browsing turned on?  Does this problem happen with a fresh profile (testing with private browsing turned off and turned on)?

I've never seen such messages in the system log, but then I never use private browsing.

It's impossible that this bug is in widget code -- widget doesn't do any networking.  For the same reason it's very unlikely that this bug is Mac-specific.

Josh, can you think of anything in netwerk that might be responsible for this?

Comment 2

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

If this problem doesn't happen with a fresh profile, it's likely caused by an extension.

Comment 3

[Gianluca]

I usually don't use private browsing.
I have some active extensions: is there a way i can investigate them for verifying if the message originates there?
I will try to use Firefox with a fresh profile and see what happens.

Comment 4

[Gianluca]

With a fresh profile, with some testing nothing happened.
But i have used grep to check my extensions. A lot of them use the function 'dump', but only one (Flash Video Downloader - Youtube Downloader 3.6.1) has code like this:
if( typeof this.media_pages[page_url] != "undefined" ){
	dump( "REMOVE " + page_url + "\r\n" );
	delete this.media_pages[page_url];
}
I have tested that is indeed this dump by modifying the REMOVE with some random text: in the logs i see the url (for example a youtube video url).

But why dump is writing on system.log? (and there's a way to prevent it?)

Comment 5

[Josh Aas]

(In reply to Gianluca from comment #4)

I don't think there is a way to prevent that except for just disabling the extension. We should file a report with them.

Comment 6

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

As you're probably aware, dump() in JavaScript code is the equivalent of printf() in C/C++ code.  It's very useful for debugging.

But dump() normally writes to STDOUT or STDERR (I can't remember which), and not to /var/log/system.log.  Might you have changed your /etc/syslog.conf file (and thereby changed what gets written to system.log)?

Also, there's a "browser.dom.window.dump.enabled" setting (settable in about:config) that defaults to "false".  Might you have changed this to "true"?

Good work, by the way, finding which extension is responsible for the REMOVE messages.  Take a look at the JavaScript code nearby the code that calls dump().  It's conceivable there's other code that explicitly writes to system.log.  The equivalent in C code would be the syslog() command, so the JavaScript command (if there is one) might have a similar name.

Comment 7

[Gianluca]

I see in fact some other logs by firefox that probably are made by that extension (messages like 'CHECK IS 37462384623', '423423333 > 323423243').
I have browser.dom.window.dump.enabled set to false. I tried to made some dump call from the js console but i see them only in the console that launched firefox, not in syslog (i launched via terminal for testing).
My syslog.conf is untouched, at least directly by me, for the file it looks like this:
*.notice;authpriv,remoteauth,ftp,install,internal.none  /var/log/system.log
I don't know if that includes the channels for the firefox dump.

Comment 8

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I suspect your Downloader extension is doing something strange -- either writing to system.log directly or somehow causing dump() to do it.

In that case Josh is right -- you can only stop this by disabling the extension.

You should probably open a bug with whoever's responsible for that extension.

Comment 9

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

> I suspect your Downloader extension is doing something strange -- either writing
> to system.log directly or somehow causing dump() to do it.

It's conceivable that the extension is replacing FF's dump() with its own dump().

Comment 10

[Thorin [:thorin]]

Cleaning up open/old privacy tagged bugs .... Flash support will be removed in Bug 1455897 (Dec 2020 is the plan), recommend closing this as WONTFIX

pinging ehsan :)

Comment 11

[Andrea Marchesini [:baku]]

I can answer here. Yes, let's close this bug.