[LINK] The Australian IT site.

[Craig Sanders]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 07:05:33AM +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote:
> Jan Whitaker wrote:
>> uh-oh. I opened the Telstra page and it crashed firefox!  That hardly ever 
>> happens. It froze on loading something from ths.news.com.au . The error 
>> signature is:
>> ModName: npswf32.dll
>
> What the hell is it doing causing a Dynamic Link Library to load.  I'm 
> guessing this is Winders, and judging by the name it might be an SWF 
> library.

according to a google search, npswf32.dll is part of shockwave flash. it
was installed when shockwave was installed.

it's perfectly normal - to be expected, AND unavoidable - that
multimedia content on a web page that relies on a plugin will trigger
the browser to load that plugin (and any required libraries).


of course, most flash content (and javascript) is worthless garbage, or
worse than worthless (spyware, or buggy & crash-prone, or both). which
is why it's a bad idea to let any web site run any arbitrary code they
want on your browser/your computer. run firefox with the NoScript and
AdBlock Plus plugins.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

To the best of my recollection, Senator, I can't recall.