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Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

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Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#431

Post by bigbugbag »

exelius wrote: post #21
proaralyst wrote: post #7

Looks like it's a promo for Mr Robot, which is really not ok. > What's happening? Are you a fan of Mr Robot? Are you trying to solve one of the many puzzles that the Mr Robot team has built? You’re on the right track. Firefox and Mr Robot have collaborated on a shared experience to further your immersion into the Mr Robot universe, also known as an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). The effects you’re seeing are a part of…

Seems kind of like it is part of an ARG. I can't say I'm totally against something like that; Mozilla's gotta make money somehow, and as long as it's not selling out user privacy it's a better tradeoff than Chrome.

> Mozilla's gotta make money somehow

Actually they do not. their revenue is at an all time high despite the market share reaching an all time low.

https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-revenue-jump-fuels-its-fir... https://www.computerworld.com/article/3240008/web-browsers/m... https://www.ghacks.net/2017/12/02/mozillas-revenue-increased...

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#432

Post by kbenson »

bigbugbag wrote: post #423
kbenson wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unknown Mozilla developers can distribute addons to users without their permission "In related news, unknown website developers can distribute programs and run them in your browser. Additionally, it's been determined that browsers sometimes download changed versions of themselves without your permission. Worst of all, we've determined that sometimes the program you download and run yourself on your computer does st…

> "In related news, unknown website developers can distribute programs and run them in your browser. Additionally, it's been determined that browsers sometimes download changed versions of themselves without your permission. Worst of all, we've determined that sometimes the program you download and run yourself on your computer does stuff it didn't say it would do!" No they can't, despite mozilla removing the option…

> No they can't, despite mozilla removing the option to prevent this, I have an extension preventing website to run code in my browser without my permission. it happens to be one of the most popular firefox extension: noscript. (also umatrix and request policy).

You've conflated third party javascript with javascript in general. You can turn off javascript entirely, but unless you do so, that website is generally able to ship javascript to you as included scripts from the same domain or in a script section or inline with attribute handlers.

> No the browsers do not download changed version of themselves, they do not have the administrative permissions required to install programs on my box. I get my update from the official distro repository on my terms.

Yes, they very often do. Currently, they generally ask if you want to restart using the new version and give you that choice, but they are often downloading newer versions of themselves ahead of time to speed up this process.

Whether they have permissions depends entirely how you installed the application. If it wasn't installed globally, user permissions are all that is needed.

> I do not download and run programs, they come from the distro repository. This is a matter of trusting the package maintainers but up until now this has served many people well.

Good! I hope you've also never ever piped wget output to a shell for some application's quick installer. I also hope you've never installed any programming language module through that language's package manager and not your distro's package system, because those are notoriously bad at making sure there's not holes through which bad stuff can happen either.

Regardless, it's possible that the package you downloaded, no matter the source, can do something other than stated.

> It seems you guessed wrong and it does not work the same for everybody, some of us have chosen to take the extra step required for this kind of misadventure to be unlikely.

Actually, I don't think I guessed wrong because I wasn't guessing anything, and I never said it works the same for everybody. I believe, since I was careful to qualify my statements, that each is easily proven correct, and I've done so.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#433

Post by bigbugbag »

a254613e wrote: post #379
exelius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems kind of like it is part of an ARG. I can't say I'm totally against something like that; Mozilla's gotta make money somehow, and as long as it's not selling out user privacy it's a better tradeoff than Chrome.

However they're experimenting with selling user privacy to 3rd party companies, with small percentage of users in Germany (it's enabled by default).

Come on! their business model has been exactly that since they created the corporation to stop illegally collect money from google.

The whole partnership with google to put its search engine as default is about enabling google to profile firefox users and shows them ads.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#434

Post by throwaway2048 »

sp332 wrote: post #77
linkmotif wrote: post #63

I checked out FF for the zillionth time the other week after the Quantum release hoping to love it, but the deep Pocket integration was just too offputting. Turning it off requires some Googling. There were other irritating commercial things too. It’s a shame. FF is probably the most important open source project in the world and it’s a shame they do stuff like this. I’m still on Chrome :(

Firefox bought Pocket. So it's a first-party feature.

I cant help but feel mozilla bought pocket because they wanted to justify the included adware nature of it as a first and foremost priority, after all the supposed logic of including it was all about reducing costs for mozilla..

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#435

Post by bigbugbag »

tamriel wrote: post #34
exelius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems kind of like it is part of an ARG. I can't say I'm totally against something like that; Mozilla's gotta make money somehow, and as long as it's not selling out user privacy it's a better tradeoff than Chrome.

> Mozilla's gotta make money somehow They're a nonprofit; they're not allowed to just "make money". And, they already take donations.

Mozilla foundation (the non profit) set up Mozilla Corporation (the for profit raking in hundreds of millions of dollars) when the IRS investigated the foundation about tax fraud.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#436

Post by rnhmjoj »

notanote wrote: post #387
rnhmjoj wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are probably true. Using an i5 @4.3GHz it takes 2.5/3 hours to build. To test changes you must set up a compiler cache or it's going to take forever.

That seems a little slow. I compile nightly for my own use and it takes around 20 minutes on a haswell i5, using tmpfs for the build directory.

20 minutes sound like a dream, I don't know why it's so slow for me. Maybe because I'm using Nix to build it and the source is on an SSD. I can't use tmpfs because it doesn't fit in memory without adding swap.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#437

Post by bigbugbag »

djsumdog wrote: post #175
tamriel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I merely challenge the notion that a nonprofit -- which proudly tumpets its benevolence and non-profitness -- should get a free pass for covertly installing advertising arrangements, just because they need to "make money". Their charter and marketing is all about defending the internet from the companies doing shady things to make money, so they can't have their cake and eat it.

There is a difference between a non-profit and a non-for-profit (most health insurance companies are the later; go try and figure that out). Firefox gets most of its donations from corporate sponsors. That's why the default search and switched back and fourth between Yahoo and Google; it's all about the amount of money they contribute for that. I'm not sure, but Pocket might be another example. User contributions are…

You're confusing mozilla foundation and mozilla corporation here. The default search with google and yahoo is not donations for the foundation but a commercial contract with the corporation.

I'm not sure mozilla even gets a significant amount of donations compared to their commercial contracts.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#438

Post by bigbugbag »

IncRnd wrote: post #88
hbosch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the the term “non-profit” is more about how an organization spends the money, rather than how they make it. Non profits and charities definitely bring in money through channels other than donations...

Non-profit orgs are such due to legal designations that give them favorable tax treatment. In return they promise to organize and operate only to fulfill a charitable mission. The mission of Mr. Robot (content sniffing) has nothing to do with the charitable mission of Mozilla, "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all."

The charitable mission of mozilla ended with their deal with google in 2004. Let's not forget that mozilla had frozen 15 millions dollars because of the IRS audit related to this deal and mozilla status, ending up settling outside of court for 1.5 millions.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#439

Post by lsh »

bigbugbag wrote: post #406
zie wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have fun in Lynx. that's probably the only browser that wouldn't do something like this. Well maybe Safari, not because Apple wouldn't, but because they just don't care enough about ad revenue. Chrome: They leech everything they can get away with, granted it goes only to Google, but you know it's just to feed their never-ending ad-revenue goal. MS: They bypassed IE only ads, and went on to build ads into the entire O…

what about otter ? waterfox ? uzbl ? poseidon ? netsurf ? falkon ? k-meleon ? Iron ? Iridium ? Liri ? Min ? To cite some of the browsers you overlooked in your snarky comment.

Vivaldi!

+1 for mentioning Otter though - those guys are doing amazing work

https://vivaldi.com/ https://otter-browser.org/

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#440

Post by bigbugbag »

tamriel wrote: post #92
dekrg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very common misconception about non-profits that is not true. The details depend on local laws, but generally a non-profit only means that the owner of the non-profit can't take the all of the actual profit (money) directly out of the non-profit via dividends. Things like non-profits must be focused public good or they can't pay high (or any) salaries are urban legends that have no basis in reality.

The key word is "just". That's not a misconception I share. I understand Mozilla can and should make money to further its mission. But unlike a for-profit, making money isn't the mission of Mozilla. So needing to make money can't be used as a justification for doing naughty things against the public good.

Making money may not be the mission of the mozilla foundation, but it is the mission of the mozilla corporation fully owned by the mozilla foundation.

And money it makes, in the hundred of millions, for serving its users to the worst known worldwide privacy offender, collecting and profiling user to sell advertising.

The "good" non profit charity foundation is governing the "evil" for profit corporation giving away users to the worst opponent of the mission of the charity. Quite a contradiction in this.

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