Mozilla VP: “mistakes were made”

I love the language of Mozilla VP Mike Shaver’s non-retraction retraction regarding a Microsoft plugin for Firefox:

We received confirmation from Microsoft this evening that the Framework Assistant add-on is not a mechanism for exploiting the vulnerabilities detailed in the earlier post, so we’ve removed it from the blocklist.

Hee hee. In other words, there was not a security vulnerability, although we stated unequivocally that there was, and others quickly parroted same.

Shaver added,

“It’s not that we were wrong, but for the benefit of our users we have realigned our correctness vectors.”

(I might have made up that last quote.)

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An update: it looks like the security alerts were a joint effort between Microsoft and Mozilla. Perhaps my sarcasm was a bit hasty, it sounded like evasion to me. But it appears that indeed, Microsoft was driving it as much as Moz.