Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Yet another post about firefox extensions

Previously I have written about various useful extensions for Firefox. Recently I have tested quite a few extensions that didn't make my "install these first" list and although I do not think any of these are of the "you are not browsing right if you do not have this" grade, but I find some of them rather nice additions to my web experience.
  • CustomizeGoogle - is one of the subtle, yet extremely powerful extensions. Once you install it, suddenly your experience with Google search, GMail, Google Calendar and other Google products just becomes nicer. You get Google Suggest keywords while you type, GMail auto-redirects to an encrypted version, you get links to other search engines in your search results, Google Images starts to actually point to images etc.
  • SpeedDial - if you ever used Opera, you already know what this is about. Basically, it adds a special location (you can configure it to be your home page) that shows thumbnails of several (nine by default) sites of your choice with handy shortcuts to go straight to these sites. I used to keep a lot of tabs open at all times in my Firefox sessions, in order to have all the reference documentation I need at hand at all times. Now I just assign relevant pages to my Speed Dial and voila, CTRL-1 gives me a tab with Apache 2.2 manuals, CTRL-2 - tab with MySQL reference manual etc. Or I can just open a new tab and click on whatever I need right there. Again, I can see people saying that this is just an unneeded addition to bookmarks and bookmark toolbar. Bookmark toolbar takes screen space. Bookmarks are nice, but since you cannot assign shortcut to a particular bookmark (as far as I know), Speed Dial actually does speed up getting to your favorite sites even if just a little bit. As an alternative, one can always use bookmark keywords (one of the more obscure Firefox features). For example, you can bookmark Slashdot.org and assign keyword slash to it. Then you use CTRL-T to open new tab, CTRL-L to switch focus to the location bar, type slash and hit enter. This is much faster, then browsing bookmarks menu with a mouse (especially for the keyboard oriented people like me), but not as fast or visually friendly as using Speed Dial extension. After all with Speed Dial you do not need to remember keywords. Note: Obviously some of these arguments are useless for people who use mouse more then keyboard. But I would guess that with one of the mouse gesture extensions you should be able to map Speed Dials to gestures.
  • Secure Login - this one is even more subtle. If you are using Password Manager to remember your login information, you might sometimes be annoyed that it fills out your login info weather you actually want it or not. The Secure Login will change this behavior to a more appropriate. Every time there is a login form on the page, Secure Login will search the Password Manager for a fitting login/password combo and if it finds one it will highlight the form fields with yellow, light up an icon in the status bar and may, if configured, even play a sound. It will prevent the P.M. from filling the info into the form. Pressing a shortcut key or clicking a toolbar button will fill the form and submit in one motion (or just fill the form if you are so inclined). It can warn you if the form is attempting to submit something to a domain different from the page the form is located on and will show a popup to indicate where the form will be sent.
  • Resizable Form Fields - does exactly what its name suggests. It allows you to resize text fields, text areas, combo-boxes and lists. Well... most of the time at least. I have seen a few sites where it doesn't work (probably due to absolute positioning or some other CSS tricks). But where it works it is a nice feature to have.
  • TrashMail.net - will add a menu item "Paste a disposable email address" next to Paste. When used it will use trashmail.net site to generate a temporary email address. This is very useful when trying to read an article from some suspicious site that requires registration.
  • BugMeNot - will use the bugmenot.com login database to login into those annoying sites that require you to register in order to read. New York Times is one of the popular examples. Yes, this is a morally questionable practice, but those compulsive registration dudes are just soooo annoying and I am not a lawyer to be able to properly read their "Privacy Policy" documents :)
  • URL Fixer - this is probably the subtlest one. It will quietly fix basic typos in URLs. Ever typed www.google.con or wwww.gmail.com? No more.
  • ScrapBook - this is one of the more non-obvious and extremely powerful add-ons. ScrapBook will allow you to properly gather and organize the data you mine on the web and will give you some tools to properly work with the materials. On a more particular note, ScrapBook will allow you to save a page or a fragment of a page completely to your hard drive. It will allow you to organize these fragments and pages into folders (same as you would organize bookmarks). It will allow you to mark up (same as with a highlighter pen) parts of the pages you saved and add notes and annotations. Since ScrapBook will actually save the data locally you will not worry about the data going off line or changing at the original location. This is a beautiful tool to do research on the web.
These are the extensions for a common user of Firefox that I have recently added to my add-on arsenal. Stay tuned for my post about some other extensions which are more useful to developers, hackers and power users.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

VirtualBox - the VMware alternative

Yesterday I have discovered VirtualBox. In short, VirtualBox is yet another virtualization package. It provides more or less the same function as VMware, Xen, Qemu and VirtualPC. At the moment it is happily running a FreeBSD world build as a guest on my Fedora 8 workstation. I cannot say that my testing of this product is complete, as far as first impressions go, this is fairly favorable. Out of the features Lets split these impressions into three usual categories.

The Good:
  • Support virtualization extensions of the modern CPUs
  • Seems less I/O intensive then VMware
  • Works on FreeBSD
The Bad:
  • The GUI is somewhat clunky
  • No script to automatically configure the kernel module and network
The Ugly:
  • In order to activate the kernel module, I had to guess the location of the module source and run make && make install from CLI.
  • In order to activate bridged networking I had to manually configure ethernet bridging
  • Once the VM crashed without any reason
  • Sometimes FreeBSD guest seems to have some problems with the virtual CPU.
Overall the experience was not all bad. There are some things which I think can be smoother, but it works. Good luck to the developers.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

MySQL features I would kill for.

It seems that nowadays there is a trend in writing "top 10 features I want software X to have". I have seen at least two such posts about
MySQL, here and here. So, since I have been working with MySQL for a while, here is my list:

  1. File per table backup mode for mysqldump that would work with --single-transaction flag

  2. Clustering without the NDB in memory storage

  3. Ability to turn logs (query, binary, slow queries) on and off without restarting

  4. Ability to setup log filters (such as log queries using particular table into a separate file or log queries scanning more then 10K rows)

  5. Ability to use bound variables in prepared statements properly (such as use variables in LIMIT or pass table names in the variables)

  6. Proper implementation of views (proper, as in not involving running a select every time a view is queried)

Success of Ubuntu

I think that the existence of this blog post is a clear indication that Linux is succeeding on the Desktop :)

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Fedora 7 and ATI binary drivers. An Ugly Hack.

There is a known problem with the recently released Fedora 7 and ATI video cards.
  • Most recent driver (version 8.37.6) causes X server to segfault
  • Older drivers do not support new Xorg versioning system (server reports 1.3 and driver expects >7)
  • Xorg open source ATI drivers do not have support for anything past Radeon 9250 (due to ATI not disclosing specs)
  • Xorg VESA driver doesn't support either 3D acceleration or multi screen and is generally rather slow
All this caused Michael Larabel (who seems to know most about the state of ATI drivers for Linux) to warn people not to upgrade to Fedora 7 just yet.
So, what do you do, if you already upgraded (like me)? Well, if you have single monitor and don't play games much, you can probably live with VESA driver.
Otherwise you can temporarily downgrade your X server to the supported version. Here is a short HOWTO:

  1. Login as root
    su -

  2. Add freshrpms repository
    rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/7/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
  3. Install ATI proprietary drivers
    yum install ati-x11-drv

  4. Start ATI even daemon
    service atieventsd restart

  5. Download and install old version of Xorg server
    wget http://ftp.cica.es/fedora/linux/core/test/6.91/Prime/x86_64/os/Fedora/xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.2.0-6.fc7.x86_64.rpm
    rpm -U --force xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.2.0-6.fc7.x86_64.rpm
  6. Uninstall newer Xorg server
    rpm -e xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.3.0.0-5.fc7
  7. Prevent YUM from upgrading Xorg again
    sed '/metadata/aexclude=xorg-x11-server-Xorg*' /etc/yum.conf
  8. Configure Xorg to use ATI drivers using aticonfig
    1. CTRL-ALT-F1 to switch to console and login as root
    2. telinit 3
    3. aticonfig --initial for single monitor or aticonfig --initial=dual-head for dual monitors
    4. telinit 5
This is it. At this point you should have proper, 3D accelerated setup.
Most of the directions I have taken and adapted from this thread at fedoraforum.org

Update: There is a new release of the ATI drivers that works with Xorg 7.3 (somewhat). It is packaged by both freshrpms and livna and therefore there is no need to downgrade the X server anymore

Friday, May 11, 2007

Quest for web log analysis software

I am currently searching for a web log analysis package for our site. I have to say that the more I look at the available options the more disgusted I get. Basically what I am looking for is wel log analysis software with following features:
  • Reading data from web server logs (not using custom javascript to record hits)
  • Storing log data in a SQL database, so I can use SQL to generate custom reports
  • Capable of generating custom reports with custom graphs and charts
  • Capable of reading custom log formats (such as Apache LogFormat strings)
  • Able to "drill down/zoom in" into the reports for more information
  • Running on Linux, BSD or Solaris.
It seems that to get all of these is close to impossible.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Blogs are offensive

According to the report created by ScanSafe, 80% of all blogs contain "offensive" and/or "unwanted" content. I haven't read the report myself, but according to the post about it at Ars Technica, it is enough for a blog to have one instance of one of the "bad words" to be considered offensive. I suppose this is one of the rare cases where I prefer to stick with majority. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Web statistics from the command line

There are a lot of web statistics packages out there. And some of them are good. To name a few, there is Analog (especially when paired with Report Magic), AWStats and Visitors. There are also excellent commercial packages (but they don't pay me to advertise :) ).  Most of these have one particular problem. They generate a number of static reports. So if you just want to see how many hits your site received per day during last week they are excellent. Unfortunately if your question is more like "What are the top 10 pages hit by users with Internet Explorer who were referred to us by Google?" all of these programs become rather useless.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

First look at Thunderbird 2

As most of you already know, Thunderbird 2.0 was released today. I have been running the 2.0 release candidate for some time now, so I can share my opinions of the new version, while the going is still hot.

Good Stuff



New default theme and icons

I have found both new icon theme and the new user interface controls theme to be slightly better looking. There are no major changes here, just everything looks a little bit crispier, a little less intrusive, a little better organized and a little aesthetically more pleasing.
Unlimited tags
This is not as much a new feature as a fix of an old bug. Older versions of Thunderbird used to allow you to tag messages using either manual tagging or filters. Tagged message would be colored into particular color, so you can at a glance find out what emails you have received or what is left to do in your inbox. Unfortunately at the same time previous versions of Thunderbird would kill this feature by providing a fixed set of five pre-made tags (you could edit the labels, but you couldn't add your own). The new version still defines the same set of five tags for backward compatibility, but will happily allow you to add any number of your own. You can easily tag your messages by hand with the first nine tags in your list by pressing number keys and you can define message filters to tag messages with particular tags.

New Gecko Engine features

Since new Thunderbird is based on the same version of Gecko (the rendering engine under Mozilla products) as Firefox 2, it inherits some features from it. Spelling checks while you type, auto-completions etc.

New mail notification

The new version is able to notify you about incoming mail by either playing a sound or flashing a small pop-up (self-destructing in a few seconds) with subjects and senders of new messages.

Better support of large IMAP folders

Thunderbird 1.x used to consistently crash on me when I tried to manipulate 10K+ messages IMAP folders with it. Thunderbird 2 seems not to notice the difference between a 15K messages in a folder and 15 messages in a folder.


Bad Stuff



Finer customizations (they are there... but they are not)

Something bit me to customize the "such and such wrote" message that appears on the top of quoted message in your replies. And to my surprise, to do this you need edit some obscure configuration files in Thunderbird profile directory. Yes, it is documented extensively on the Tips and Tricks page, but I think this would not sit well with a casual user. Same goes for many other features that Thunderbird has, but you will never find out about them unless somebody tells you.

Some icons are inconsistent with previous releases

Took me some time to get used to the new junk mail icon. Not a big deal though.

Still no "Reply to All" shortcut of any sort

This is especially annoying when you are trying to CC on some of your business correspondence to some people (say your boss and your team) and every time you reply to a message you cannot just hit CTRL-R or some other key, but actually need to go through the menu to catch all the addresses in the original message. I suppose there has to be an extension for this somewhere, but so far I couldn't find it.
Update: Ctrl-Shift-R does reply all. I should have RTFM'd more


Conclusions



  • If you are already using Thunderbird, you should strongly consider upgrading. The new Thunderbird is leaner, meaner, faster and with sharper teeth :) The only reason to wait is if you are using some specific extensions not yet available for the new version

  • If you are not using Thunderbird and you do not require Outlook-like abilities such as calendar, to do lists, exchange compatibility etc., but only use your mail client to send and read email you should definitely consider giving Thunderbird a try.

  • The general feeling about the new Thunderbird is that it is not a huge leap forward, compared to previous versions, but a lot of small useful improvements making the overall experience of using it a much more pleasant one.

Monday, April 9, 2007

Freedom vs. accountability in system administration

One of the standard security measures on a contemporary UNIX system is sudo command. For those unfamiliar with it sudo allows a user to run commands under privileges of another user, so for example a regular user can run a command as root. This, at the first glance, seems very similar to su, but sudo allows a very fine configuration of what exact commands are allowed to be run by what user and coming from what host and sudo, as opposed to su, doesn't require the user to know root password. Also, sudo will log every use of itself, weather succesful or failed therefore leaving an audit trail of administration command used on the system. Sudo is exceptionally good, for giving regular users fragments of root power where they need it. For example using sudo you can give your developers rights to restart development database server or development web server or give them rights to use network sniffers etc. One of the other things sudo seems to be good for is to record actions taken by system administrators, for accountability purposes. It all seems very simple
  • Create regular users for every administrator
  • Configure sudo to allow administrators run any command as rot using sudo
  • Disable the actual root logon
And voile, every time one of the administrators does something that requires root privileges, he is forced to use sudo and his exact command line is logged for potential future audit. Or that would be the idea. Unfortunately there are two things that prevent this from being an administration audit panacea. Namely,
sudo /bin/bash
and
sudo vim /var/log/secure
, where the first one will run interactive root shell (allowing one to start running commands as root directly from the shell without any logging) and the second one starts editor on the sudo audit log (log name may be different on different systems) allowing to delete or edit any audit lines one deems unsightly (for example change your user name to somebody else's in that line that says rm -rf /oracle :) ). What are the ways to prevent this?
  • Exclude potentially dangerous commands such as command shell and editor without arguments from the sudo config
  • Set a strict list of administration commands that is allowed for execution by administrators
  • Use external auditing mechanisms such as auditd daemon
  • Use external privilege restriction mechanisms such as SELinux.
The first way is obviously bad. This is a classic example of "enumerating badness" where you are trying to enumerate every pattern you are trying to catch instead of enumerating every pattern you do not want to catch. Also, this approach is just plain impossible to implement, since there are too many ways to run a shell or an editor without triggering the sudo restrictions you might impose. The second way might work somewhat in a big shop where each administrator is given a particular piece of the system to work with, so web administrator is setup to run web server administration commands and nothing else and database administrator only has access to database administartion etc. Unfortunately this approach also has its faults. For one, somebody has to have full access to the system, at least so that sudo configuration can be changed when staff moves around. Also, in situations such as debugging a difficult to catch problem on the server an administrator may benefit greatly from access to unusual tools and such use can be difficult to predict. Third and fourth way are definitely worth loking at and probably worth implementing, but discussion is a bit out of scope of this article. I will make write another article someday on administration of SELinux and auditing with auditd some other day. Returning to uses of sudo, the question is where you want to draw the line between the convenience and freedom of action of your system administration staff and having a trustworthy audit trail. In big companies this question has only one answer and that is "we want to have a trusted audit information no matter at what cost" while in smaller shops, accountability may be less of a concern due to more trustful relationships between the staff and sudo logs may be enough for a basic "who did what to the system" logging.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Firefox extensions to install first

It happens to all of us sooner or later. My Firefox profile could not bear my continuous abuse and committed suicide without even writing a note. This event, albeit unfortunate, was not unforeseen. I knew, that if I keep switching back and forth between Firefox 1.x and 2.x, install and remove all sorts of suspicious extensions and tinker with about:config settings, I will eventually be punished. So, I assessed the situation and figured that if I am careful I will not lose anything important. I have backed up my corrupted profile, started and shutdown Firefox to create a new one, copied my bookmarks, stored passwords and saved sessions and called it a day. Once I started Firefox again though it still didn't look friendly, so I started adding extensions. Here is my list ordered by importance.

What did I install:
  • Tab Mix Plus - Is only the best tab manager extension I have seen so far. It makes tab switching behave in a logical manner (like windows on alt-tab and not in a dumb loop) it adds a lot of useful tab related functions such as lock tab or duplicate tab. Locking is a way to make sure that wherever you click this tab stays on the same page and links are opened in new tabs, this is highly useful for browsing lists of things, be that google search results, bookmarks or craigslist.org listings. Also Tab MIx Plus replaces the built-in Firefox two feature of crash recovery and turns it into a complete session management. You can save and restore multiple sessions including closed tabs and windows (oh, did I mention that you can undo tab close with Tab Mix Plus?) and other information.
  • Adblock Plus and Adblock Filterset.G Updater - Unless you are a masochist and enjoy intrusive advertising you need these extensions. Yes, you really do. This extension effectively bloxk most forms of banners, flash ads, popups (even the ones built-in popup blocker doesn't catch) etc. The updater will download current set of patterns, so you don't have to train the blocker yourself and will keep it updated.
  • del.icio.us firefox extension - A very convenient way to keep your bookmarks online. Includes a "Bookmark This" button that will open a new window allowing you to tag, describe and save current page.
  • Deepest Sender - There are a few blogging extensions out there that allow you to post blog entries in a comfortable (or not so comfortable in some cases) way. I have chosen Deepest Sender as my personal favorite. It supports all the major blog engines (in my case Live Journal, Blogger and WordPress), allows for simple formating, allows direct source editing and has a simple preview. I guess I would prefer a few more WordPress specific options, but I have yet to find a better blogging solution.
  • Colorful Tabs - All this extension does is paint your tabs carious semi-random colors (the colors cannot be assigned, but it will make sure that no two neighboring tabs are the same color) and slightly fades away tabs which are out of focus. You cannot imagine without trying just how much easier it is to navigate multiple tabs with this extension. Albeit your tab bar starts to look much less officious.
  • GreaseMonkey - a generic extension allowing you to execute custom JavaScript scripts on pages you choose. Using these scripts you can enhance usability of popular sites, add missing features, change look and feel etc. Pre-made scripts can be downloaded from UserScripts.Org site.
  • Web Developer and FireBug - The first one is the web developer's multi-tool. It is a tool bar that includes all features that you could possibly want when testing the web site you are working on. Cache disabling, headers, authentication, security and other information, window resizes for different resolution simulation, element outlines etc. etc. etc. And where Web Developer leaves off, FireBug comes in. Normally hiding in the status bar icon FireBug will tell you exact lines in CSS that affect particular tag, tag that corresponds to particular element, how long it took to load and render any of the page requirements, what scripts have been loaded and much, much more.
There are several extensions I didn't install because I personally didn't find them useful, but which should still be mentioned.

What I didn't install:

  • Sage - is the most popular RSS reader extension. I do not use it, because I don't like side bars and I am quite happy with my external RSS reader which happens to be Liferea
  • All-in-One Sidebar - is a great tool for people who use side bar a lot. It integrates downloads, extensions, source view and other features into the side bar and allows for custom side bar panels.
  • ScribeFire - is another popular blogger extension. It even supports some WordPress features better than Deepest Sender, but the interface is a little cumbersome and the Live Journal support is very buggy.
So, at this my browser is ready for action again. I will be back soon with Firefox extensions for web site testing.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

A FreeBSD experiment

About a year back, there have been some activity around a post by one of the FreeBSD developers  regarding FreeBSD being ready to compete with Linux (and I suppose by proxy with Windows) as a desktop system. Back then I wanted to play around with FreeBSD once again (my friendship with UNIX started with installing FreeBSD 2.2.4 on my home computer), but found some features lacking for a proper support of my favorite UNIX desktop (that would be GNOME). A few days ago I figured it was a good time to take a look at what the BSD people came up with in the desktop department. I have done some probe installs in VMware, so now I am ready to try it on my home computer. So far (after those test installs) I figured out two main things about FreeBSD.
  • A lot of things are very different from Linux.

  • Well, this would be natural and expected, since FreeBSD is not Linux. But it has been a long time since a new system confused me and now I am refreshingly confused. The aspect I found especially confusing is disk allocation. I still hope to find a reasonable documentation on what the relation is between partitions, slices and labels is and how the information about the layout is stored etc. Since all of base system in FreeBSD is developed as part of the FreeBSD project, a lot of basic commands work in unexpected ways. This is not a problem though, I was ready for it and now I seem to cope well with the differences.
  • The community is extremely rude to new users.

  • This, unfortunately, is a problem I didn't expect. For years of working with Linux, I have gotten used to people being willing to help and if not at least not being outright evil. Not so in FreeBSD world. On one of the test installs, I messed up my disks by trying to switch to a different boot manager. I couldn't boot my system and I didn't want to reinstall, since I have configured and installed and compiled a lot of stuff on it. So, being a newbie I went to #freebsd channel and asked for help. To my surprise, I was immediately told that the only way for me was to reinstall entire system. I have expressed some doubts about this, since I was pretty sure that my data was still intact on the system, but was told again, that the only way was to reinstall and restore from backup if I had one. At this point I figured that this was a big usability hole for a modern operating system, but I figured that I will get a second opinion before I destroy my data. Some 10-15 minutes later, some other channel member took pity on me and told me that the reinstall was only suggested because I was on a wrong channel. I was supposed to ask for help on #freebsdhelp. I went to that channel and while my question was ignored for a while, I kept digging through man pages and mailing lists and other documentation and found my answer. By that time, someone on #freebsdhelp told me to shut up because I didn't use proper terms for disk allocation units. If I wasn't stubborn and didn't have enough prior computer knowledge, at this point I would be reinstalling my system from scratch. Why? Because I asked a question on a wrong channel. Mind you that the "right" channel jst plain ignored my question, which, while being better than the previous experience, also didn't help much. I am still going to try FreeBSD. Albeit I doubt I will ever ask for help from anybody in FreeBSD community.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Fun with MySQL query optimizer

A few days ago, after a minor bug fix in our site code, suddenly, the load on the database server dropped about 50%. I was obviously interested in what caused such a major improvement and found out a few interesting things. To demonstrate, this fascinating phenomenon, lets create a database:
CREATE DATABASE test;

create a table
CREATE TABLE `table1` (
`f1` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`f2` char(10) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`f1`),
KEY `an_index` (`f2`)
);

and populate this table with some values
DELIMITER $$
DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS `test`.`populate_table1`$$
CREATE PROCEDURE `test`.`populate_table1` (ct INT)
BEGIN
PREPARE q1 FROM 'INSERT INTO table1 (f2) SELECT ?';
SET @x = 0;
REPEAT
EXECUTE q1 USING @x;
SET @x = @x + 1;
UNTIL @x >= ct
END REPEAT;
END$$
DELIMITER ;
CALL populate_table1(100000);

And now the evil magic begins (query results skipped for brevity)

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Web security and the autocomplete attribute

In this day and age, most web browsers offer some sort of a form autocompletion feature. IE, firefox, opera, saphari all have it. The browser will offer you to store your logon information and common form fields such as first name or address and fill them into appropriate forms. As far as I am concerned this feature was a blessing for the web security. Now, you would think, a user can choose proper, secure passwords for his various web sites without writing them down on sticky notes and without reusing the same ones over and over again.

Unfortunately this is not entirely true, since not one browser I know would allow for an easy and obvious way to backup the passwords and an easy and obvious way to use these from a portable medium such as a USB key or a mini CD. I know, that with a bit of skill, you can export IE and opera settings and backup firefox profile, but who is going to bother? This should be something the browser does for you transparently, for people to actually get into a habit of using such a feature properly. But back to the point. In Microsoft implementation, the autocomplete doesn't automatically fill the fields. If you go to a login page of some site it will present you with a choice of usernames and once you pick a username it will fill in the password if it was stored. Not very secure. Especially considering that by default every time you fill a form IE will prompt you to turn autocomplete on and once it is on, there is no indication, that your username is being stored. It will prompt for password. So, on a publicly accessible computer this feature becomes a privacy and security horror?

Not really. If you do not turn this feature on by default and do not bug user about it, no one in their right mind will turn it on on a public computer and a nicely evil restrictive user policy will help against those not in their right mind. Firefox also has a similar feature, where it will ask to remember your username and password, but the default answer is no and it will not remember your username by default without asking. So, what is the Microsoft solution? In IE 5.5, a new feature creeps in. The autocomplete attribute. Now anybody who is trying to design a login form can turn off the autocomplete for a particular form, or even for a particular control. Firefox, in a fit of moronic exitement, follows suite and implements support for this new non-standard attribute without thinking about consequences. I am fairly sure Opera recognizes autocomplete as well. So, for example, when browsing Chase online banking site you are not going to be prompted to remember the password you are entering. So, this is a good thing. You do not want to leave your bank account wide open, do you? No, I am not. But this is not a good thing. Why? Because it takes control over security from me, the user. Now, Chase Manhatten Bank decides that my bank login information is sensitive enough not to store it anywhere and not me. A lot of sites follow suite and use autocomplete attribute left and right without any regard to the actual risks of user accounts falling into the wrong hands. Some web site analyzer programs actually throw out a warning if they find a password field without autocomplete=off. So, now I cannot decide for myself if particular piece of information is important or not, this has been decided for me.

Promoting personal freedoms is a good thing, but do these restrictions actually help. Lets imagine a scenario where it helps. A user comes to an internet caffe and goes to check his bank account. When prompted to save his account information on a public computer that doesn't belong to him he inexplicably clicks yes (and mind you that just hitting enter wouldn't help, since even IE doesn't choose to store the password by default) and walks away. The next person goes to the same computer, happens to be an evil bandit, finds his username and voila all his money is gone, all his base are belong to us and the bandit is in his base killing his dudes. Well, this is bad, so instead we never offer him to remember his password. So, to accomodate to the fact that he has to remember his passwords once again by himself, the user in our example and a lot of other users revert back to the ways I described at the beginning of this post. They use the same password everywhere (or two, or three), they choose simple, easy to remember (and easy to crack) passwords, they leave sticky notes with passwords on the monitor etc. etc. etc. So to protect some shmuck who doesn't know that fire burns and guns kill MS have inconvenienced a lot of reasonable people into lowering their defenses. Is that still a Good Thing?