Please help: 133 open tabs and counting
Update: Thank you. I wasn’t expecting so many comments, let alone so much excellent advice! I’m working out a better workflow and will reply to individual comments when I have the time.
It would seem that I have 133 tabs open in Firefox (Aurora), and that number was obtained after an intensive tab-closing session. There are no duplicates in the list, as I use Pentadactyl to switch tabs by searching titles.
I need your help.
The problem: Firefox is starting to slow, but I can’t just call a tabocalypse – most of the tabs contain unread information that I need now or will need in the next few days. Bookmarking has helped me avert similar crisises in the past, but it just isn’t fast enough. I have 2564 bookmarks in delicous and at least a hundred important bookmarks in org-mode, but tagging and sorting unread links takes way too long.
So: How do you deal with information overload? If you rely on Google to find all old information, is that sufficient? Are org-mode capture templates a fast solution? And, most importantly, are there Firefox extensions that transparently offload old tabs to disk, or do away altogether with the distinction between open tabs and recently visited sites?
Please help. Thanks, Natan.
Why Yahoo is Irrelevant
Earlier, I ranted about the poor quality of answers on Yahoo Answers. In 2006, information on Yahoo Answers was of higher quality, and the site was hailed by TechCrunch as Yahoo’s long term strategy for overtaking Google:
Yahoo earlier this year oddly admitted that it’s not their goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. “We would be very happy to maintain our market share,” CFO Susan Decker told Bloomberg… I think that they decided to lose the algorithmic keyword search battle and focus their resources elsewhere in order to win the search “market share” war…
Yahoo! is sensibly looking change the battle ground by providing a different type of search, one not based on complex mathematical algorithms but one that could answer questions like “how will mankind save the planet?” Putting this question into Google resulted in no search results being returned and yet you could pose the very same question on Yahoo! Answers and would probably get a few hundred answers if you were not famous and several thousand if you were.
What went wrong?
If you read Forbes, you may remember a 2010 article, titled Stop Focusing on Your Core Business, which suggested that Yahoo had failed because they couldn’t move fast or enter new markets. I can’t understand how anyone can think that, considering that even this run-on sentence only covers 25% of the 72 businesses that Yahoo has ever been involved in. Rather, Yahoo’s mistake was utter incompetency and a chronic lack of focus. They focused on width over depth, and they lost everywhere as a result. (StackOverflow is the counter example: They focused on community and quality, and the resultant community is indisputably excellent.)
If you follow Hacker News, you surely know the most common advice given to startups: pivot. Pivoting is swell, but here is a more fundamental lemma that Yahoo would do well to study: Don’t make half-assed attempts.
A search for the word “pivot” on Hacker News returns 1,923 results, a search for “core business” only 594. That’s a shame. Google succeeded because they knew their core business was search, and they provided the best damn search results anywhere. If you’re creating a startup, or writing a piece of software, you should focus on competency in the narrow problem space you choose. There may eventually come a time to expand - hell, if you’re there, you shouldn’t be reading this blog post – and note that most areas Google expanded to were related to selling ads (Gmail, Google Maps) or improving search results (Google Plus). They always focused on consumer problems and provided solutions that were better for consumers.
If you read until here, you should try Freeversation, my new take on online anonymity. With Freeversation, you can have private and anonymous conversations with friends and colleagues. You always know who you are speaking to, but not who said what. We have no plans to offer any unrelated services 
Yahoo Answers Considered Harmful
The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity
– Voltaire
Information on Yahoo Answers is not just wrong, it’s downright harmful. I haven’t deliberately searched on Yahoo Answers for a long time, but the results often show up in Google.
Take the issue of using hand sanitizers on open cuts: not only do the top results on Google lead to dangerously wrong Yahoo Answers, but the users who provided them were rewarded for their answer.
Don’t use Yahoo Answers.
Bypassing Little Snitch
“Little Snitch informs you whenever a program attempts to establish an outgoing Internet connection. You can then choose to allow or deny this connection, or define a rule how to handle similar, future connection attempts. This reliably prevents private data from being sent out without your knowledge. Little Snitch runs inconspicuously in the background and it can also detect network related activity of viruses, trojans and other malware.” — Little Snitch website
Foreword
Programs like Little Snitch instill users with a false sense of security. Mac owners often use Little Snitch to prevent pirated applications from dialing home and to ensure that cracked versions of software don’t contain spyware. Nothing could be more naive: If an attacker can run code in the right context, it’s game over. Apps like Little Snitch can’t possibly prevent that.
Keep in mind that this specific attack could have been prevented, but there are more insidious ways to bypass Little Snitch. The security model is broken by design.
How to bypass Little Snitch
Once a binary is allowed access to the internet, Little Snitch will continue to allow access even if the binary changes. On OS X, applications are usually installed by dragging them to the Applications folder. This means they are owned by the user who installed them. Firefox and Chrome take advantage of this to auto-update without the root password. We can use this to overwrite binaries.
We bypass Little Snitch by replacing a trusted binary with our own executable; it will execute with the network-permissions of the original app.
Example
We need a binary that connects to the internet and we can’t use an interpreted language. For your convenience, here is one such program.
Download it. Then compile as follows:
brew install curl && brew link curl make
You can ensure that Little Snitch is working by running ./payload.
Lets backup Firefox and replace it.
mv /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox{,.orig}
mv payload /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox
That’s it. If you were writing a program that needed network access without permission, you would do this programatically and execute Firefox. That’s not the case here, so launch Firefox manually and examine /little_snitch_example.txt
Lastly, you probably want to use Firefox again:
mv /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox{.orig,}
Closing Notes
In real usage, you should examine ~/Library/Application Support/Little Snitch/rules.usr.xpl to pick the right binary.
Lastly, all testing was done on Snow Leopard. You may need to tweak this for Lion or the App Store.
About Me
20 year old undergrad in CS & Physics, co-founder of Freeversation, faux CEO of Politician Market, and former software developer at Check Point.
I am interested in social startups, information security, and robotics. Read more about me
Contact
Email aantny [at] gmail [dot] com. If it's interesting, I can code it.