On 31-12-11 16:28, Aaron Konstam wrote:
I solved my Firefox 9 homepage. No ones posting gave the best solution
but some were close. All the responses helped me understand Firefox
better so thank you all.
Now the solution:
I noticed when the bing search page was displayed www.bing.com did not
appear in the address window. Rather the following address was
displayed:
search.conduit.com/?ctid=CT2857572&Search source=13
I would like someone to tell me why that address displays bing. But
anyway in about:config there was the variable: HomepageBeforeUnload
that that web address as its value. I changed its value to:
http://www.google.com
and all was well. You notice there is no reference to bing in that web
address that gave me bing. So there is some mystery left.
Glad you were able to solve this mystery. I had a look at
www.conduit.com. They seem to facilitate those annoying toolbars and
apps to drive content traffic to their paying overlords. Shady business
if you ask me. I thought this was pretty much limited to the Windows
world but apparently it does not matter which OS you use. Perhaps you
installed an application or Firefox plugin which then modified Firefox.
The reason you get bing via search.conduit.com/... is probably because
they are just a referring gateway where they get paid for sending search
traffic to Bing (which is not uncommon, Google does that too).
Here is a fine example why one should only install software from trusted
sources (meaning just use your distro's yum and perhaps a trusted well
known 3rd party repo):
http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Download-com-apologises-for-bundling-1392501.html
And here is a report from Threatexpert.com which analyzes some malware
on a Windows box which also changed the search engine to bing via a URL
similar to yours (search the page for CT2857572):
http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=e269b52a679e9cc07c5441a5bd78097b
Nasty stuff.
Regards,
Patrick
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