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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

#451
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) One day you wake up and somebody is watching TV in your living room. 2) you freak out. Who is this guy? I didn't invite anyone last night! 3) The guy turns around and it's just your mate Chad. He didn't mean any harm, just wanted to watch TV and hang out. 4) This is not on, Chad is a psycho. Intentions don't really matter: they've just demonstrated a scary and invasive capability without any warning. Minimizing it…

This "scary and invasive capability" has been included in almost every larger piece of software for years and is widely accepted to be a mostly good thing - it's called automatic updates. Considering updates allow pushing native, even admin-level code, this capability of pushing little bits of JS becomes benign in comparison. Therefore, the only thing that's left to worry about are their intentions. And I, for one, w…

From great power comes great responsibility. We try hard to ignore that these things can be done, and we are reminded so brutally, it's always a shock. Maybe I've given the keys to my house to Chad years ago, for emergency purposes; that didn't mean he could come in anytime and start cracking Mr Robot jokes.

> I, for one, would rather trust the goodness of Mozilla's intentions than Google's or Microsoft's.

Me too, but when a company bases his reputation on a certain platform ("we will not spy on you, your privacy is important") and then stuff like this happens (and it's not the first time, not even this year), it shakes one's belief in their trustworthiness.

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

#452
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There almost certainly is not a way to invisibly install add-ons, unless you are part of Mozilla, and, you know, making Firefox. If paranoia is your thing, it might be worth considering that Mozilla can do anything it wants inside Firefox core, all of it is "invisible" to you.

And this is the point where even the most Mozilla-supporting users move away. For me, this is it, I’m going to Chromium. Fuck this shit, in the past months we had CliqZ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708 , we had Mozilla adding new telemetry, we had Mozilla force-enable toolkit.telemetry.enabled, we had Mozilla say that, if you download Nightly, that is considered opt-in to tracking, we had Mozilla put Goo…

Alternatively you can give waterfox[1] a try.

Features

    Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
    Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015)
    Removed Pocket
    Removed Telemetry
    Removed data collection
    Removed startup profiling
    Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins
    Allow running of unsigned extensions
    Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
    Addition of Duplicate Tab option
    Locale selector in about:preferences > General
[1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

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

#453
post #26
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable these studies under Options | Privacy and Security

I hate the fact that Firefox increasingly makes me jump through all sorts of hoops to find all the hidden options to turn off their various spyware attempts. Its the Win10 of browsers...

There's an extension for that called privacy settings[1] it exposes all the settings in one easy place.

I also recommend waterfox instead of firefox.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-setti... [2]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

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

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean having a little fun ? Firefox is bleeding market share and has been for a while. Despite this, revenue and profit is at an all time high for mozilla which is weird as the revenue comes from sending theirs users to google for being profiled and exposed to ads. Meanwhile long time users lose faith and trust in mozilla and firefox. Not exactly the best time to be caught having "a little fun" move showin…

> Firefox is bleeding market share and has been for a while. http://gs.statcounter.com/ Chrome 54.98% Safari 14.79% UC Browser 7.98% Firefox 6.09% Internet Explorer 3.88% Opera 3.79% In all fairness, Firefox has overtaken IE.

Not really.. Microsoft is killing off internet explorer

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

#455
post #96
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, its so intuitive for the average person to type: about:config in address bar and scroll through hundreds of oddly named parameters to turn off spyware. Comments like yours are illustrative of a certain mindset. When you encounter the complexity of domains you are not intimately familiar with (court system, law, finance, etc), and those complexities are designed specifically to make it hard for you to protect yo…

You're being hyperbolic, you don't need to go into about:config. It's right in the main browser settings, under the Privacy and Security section where one would expect settings like this to be

If what you say is true, please point me to where I can find the following privacy settings in the main preferences:

  network.websocket.enabled
  network.IDN_show_punycode
  dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
  dom.storage.enabled
  dom.indexedDB.enabled
  dom.battery.enabled
  dom.enable_user_timing
  dom.enable_resource_timing
  dom.netinfo.enabled
  layout.css.visited_links_enabled
  browser.safebrowsing.phishing.enabled
  browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.enabled
  browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled
  browser.send_pings
  beacon.enabled
  privacy.donottrackheader.enabled
  privacy.trackingprotection.enabled
  dom.enable_performance
  datareporting.healthreport.service.enabled
  datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled
  toolkit.telemetry.enabled
  toolkit.telemetry.unified
  media.peerconnection.enabled
  media.peerconnection.ice.default_address_only
  media.peerconnection.ice.no_host
  media.eme.enabled
  media.gmp-eme-adobe.enabled
  webgl.disabled
  geo.enabled
  camera.control.face_detection.enabled
  device.sensors.enabled
  security.tls.unrestricted_rc4_fallback
  security.tls.insecure_fallback_hosts.use_static_list
  security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation
  security.ssl.treat_unsafe_negotiation_as_broken

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

#456
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deeply hate this update methodology. Some hippster fresh from university decides that the gui, approach, functionality i use daily is no longer needed and pushes his rewrite into a release. One click later im stuck with this, because all the bundled crap is hijacking the "security" for a ride. If any software developer would truely respect users, he would offer updates as seperate packages, where users can opt out…

Imagine the complexity of maintaining the software when every patch must anticipate a fragmented mess of different pieces of patches being installed on target systems. Imagine the explosion of testcases required. At that point, it’s probably better to just stop feature development and do nothing but security patches, which of course will lead to stagnation and which will also lead to fragmentation as many more incomp…

Ever heard of debian ? Then maybe you've heard of debian backports ?

I'm asking because debian and backports are doig exactly that: separating security patches from the rest, not for a browser but for a whole OS and every applications including firefox.

also this xkcd is not relevant. the point here is that mozilla has quite a history of breaking userspace earning them the reputation of "making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum."[1]

[1]: http://forums-test.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=14736466#...

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

#457
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is the first response from Mozilla in the Gizmodo article: “Firefox worked with the Mr. Robot team to create a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users. It’s especially important to call out that this collaboration does not compromise our principles or values regarding privacy. The experience does not collect or share any data,” Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing offi…

> Don't talk the ethics talk if you're not prepared to do the ethics walk. Exactly. > "The experience does not collect or share any data," Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, said Looking in the sources of the extension, it adds additional HTML header to every HTML request to https://www.red-wheelbarrow.com/forkids/ pages. The activity of the users there could of course be tracked and the data de…

The add-on only initializes itself (and thus sends the header) if the user has manually gone into about:config and flipped the `extensions.pug.lookingglass` preference: https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/blob/59659431fd2a75c33...

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

#458
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't talk the ethics talk if you're not prepared to do the ethics walk. Exactly. > "The experience does not collect or share any data," Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, said Looking in the sources of the extension, it adds additional HTML header to every HTML request to https://www.red-wheelbarrow.com/forkids/ pages. The activity of the users there could of course be tracked and the data de…

The add-on only initializes itself (and thus sends the header) if the user has manually gone into about:config and flipped the `extensions.pug.lookingglass` preference: https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/blob/59659431fd2a75c33...

It was obviously not complete in the form it was delivered, the "turning on" was supposed to be added somewhere at some later moment.

The whole thing is still suspicious: it was delivered to everybody whereas if it was supposed to be used only by the users who are aware of it, as now Mozilla tries to spin it, i.e. only to those who decided to "play the game", then the hidden install, especially to every user, was unnecessary as the normal extensions to Firefox are easily installed by the user, a click or two are enough:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-cat-fri...

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean having a little fun ? Firefox is bleeding market share and has been for a while. Despite this, revenue and profit is at an all time high for mozilla which is weird as the revenue comes from sending theirs users to google for being profiled and exposed to ads. Meanwhile long time users lose faith and trust in mozilla and firefox. Not exactly the best time to be caught having "a little fun" move showin…

> Firefox is bleeding market share and has been for a while. http://gs.statcounter.com/ Chrome 54.98% Safari 14.79% UC Browser 7.98% Firefox 6.09% Internet Explorer 3.88% Opera 3.79% In all fairness, Firefox has overtaken IE.

Actually chrome and microsoft are responsible for IE hitting the bottom. Look at the following chart from stat counter:

https://andreasgal.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/alldevices-e1...

That all versions of firefox combined barely do better than obsolete unsupported browser that the manufacturer actively try to remove from the market is not a good sign.

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

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean having a little fun ? Firefox is bleeding market share and has been for a while. Despite this, revenue and profit is at an all time high for mozilla which is weird as the revenue comes from sending theirs users to google for being profiled and exposed to ads. Meanwhile long time users lose faith and trust in mozilla and firefox. Not exactly the best time to be caught having "a little fun" move showin…

non sequitur. either it’s right or it’s wrong, whether or not you like the org as a whole doesn’t change that. even so to briefly chase your point, do you believe they are doing net good, and some things are looking more positive, like the servo work? my only point is that criticism works on a relative scale. i agree there are things they could do better, but i still prefer they exist.

right/wrong or good/bad are concept derived from organized religions to control populations' beliefs and they are inappropriate in most cases if not all because they are relative to your own beliefs.

If you are the good guy then your enemy is the bad guy but from the bad guy point of view he is the good guy and you are the bad guy.

No one is ever the bad guy in the movie of her own life.

servo, or whatever else they could come up with will never reach a net good for me as I need ALSA support and the extensions mozilla has dropped to make firefox useful to me.

I would rather have them disappear so there is room for something better to exist in its place. Right now there are occupying space and prevents an alternative to emerge.

The sad part of this is that by accumulating blunders, near sighted and far reaching decisions, with their attitude of not caring about user feedback or user freedom of choice they managed to turned me, a long time supporter (since netscape times) that has based part of my business on their browser, against them and wishing they would go away. This is quite a feat in itself. I'm not sure there is another entity that managed to alienate me that much, not even canonical or gnome.

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