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TACO Extension for Firefox Forked After Proprietary Update
rtfa-troll writes "Beef Taco is a Firefox extension that allows a mass opt-out from tracking and targeted advertising by many ad networks. The Register reports that the original system, TACO, has become proprietary, and has added new 'features' best described as bloatware. I guess this should serve as a warning for users to always prefer software under a copyleft license where possible. If Google had chosen a license with better protection, such as the GPL, when it released its own opt-out tool, this problem would have been much less likely. This also shows why forks are so important when software development begins to get messy."
Just last week I got a notice to "upgrade" TACO to 3.0 and foolishly did so. A tiny little 8KB add-on became a 3MB disaster. Now it has new features which clash with other add ons or were redundant for me. Music streaming was broken for some sites and best of all, the old version, while available (and compatible), will no longer install on Firefox 3.6.
After uninstalling it, I downloaded the source for 2.0 and was planning attempt a fix, but now I don't have to. Obviously someone else was just as irritated, to that individual I say, "Thank you."
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
This way, they can sell the data on and still stick to their 'privacy policy': "Our Abine browser add-on uses hashes of unique identifiers that are not tied to you or your IP address, to help you track versions and updates for the add-on, and a different set of randomly generated identifiers to validate service requests such as creating or updating disposable email addresses. If you chose to provide more data in order to take advantage of additional services, such as webmail, add-on identifiers are never used in a way that ties it to your name or personal information to the best of our ability." Also, Eric Jung is on their 'Advisory board': http://abine.com/team.php If you don't know who he is, he is a board member of Mozilla Add-Ons governing board. This 'update' has made a mockery of the update mechanism in Firefox and severely undermines it in my view. Here's a link to the support board over at Abine, where I have been voicing my disapproval and I recommend you do the same: https://www.getabine.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7&start=10#p37