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Mozilla Slipped a 'Mr. Robot'-Promo Plugin Into Firefox and Users Are Pissed (gizmodo.com)
MarcAuslander shares a report from Gizmodo: Mozilla sneaked a browser plugin that promotes Mr. Robot into Firefox -- and managed to piss off a bunch of its privacy-conscious users in the process. The extension, called Looking Glass, is intended to promote an augmented reality game to "further your immersion into the Mr. Robot universe," according to Mozilla. It was automatically added to Firefox users' browsers this week with no explanation except the cryptic message, "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS," prompting users to worry on Reddit that they'd been hit with spyware. Without an explanation included with the extension, users were left digging around in the code for Looking Glass to find answers. Looking Glass was updated for some users today with a description that explains the connection to Mr. Robot and lets users know that the extension won't activate without explicit opt-in.
Mozilla justified its decision to include the extension because Mr. Robot promotes user privacy. "The Mr. Robot series centers around the theme of online privacy and security," the company said in an explanation of the mysterious extension. "One of the 10 guiding principles of Mozilla's mission is that individuals' security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. The more people know about what information they are sharing online, the more they can protect their privacy."
Mozilla justified its decision to include the extension because Mr. Robot promotes user privacy. "The Mr. Robot series centers around the theme of online privacy and security," the company said in an explanation of the mysterious extension. "One of the 10 guiding principles of Mozilla's mission is that individuals' security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. The more people know about what information they are sharing online, the more they can protect their privacy."
Don't forget disabling all existing privacy extensions. Oh, and mails you get from Mozilla are pure gold: "Keep trackers off your trail" blah blah "evade tracking technology" blah blah "https://click.e.mozilla.org/?qs=e7bb0dcf14b1013fca3820..."
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Presumably only Mozilla has access to this sort of system. But then again, that's just an assumption of mine.
You can turn this off in the Privacy section: "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla", and under that "Allow Firefox to install and run studies".
It's the latter one that allows those experimental add-ons to be added and run. I had those both enabled, because I thought that Mozilla would be responsible in how it used them. Obviously, I was mistaken. So, at the very least disable the latter if you don't want more mysterious add-ons showing up. As soon as you uncheck that box, the add-on disappears.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If you hadn't enabled telemetry and studies, you wouldn't see it. Also, given that it's some sort of marketing tie-in to Mr. Robot, it might very well be US only.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The extension was able to be installed if you had the "Firefox Studies" checkbox selected. To prevent Firefox Studies from installing extensions on your behalf:
A little Googling leads me to think the Looking Glass add-on was installed via the Firefox built-in Shield Recipe Client Feature, also described here: Firefox/Shield/Shield Studies, which is documented as:
Shield is a Firefox user testing platform for proposed, new and existing features and ideas.
Shield Studies is a function of the Shield project that prompts a random population of users to help us try out new products, features, and ideas.
I have this disabled via the following pref.js settings:
// Disable Shield Recipe Client
user_pref("app.shield.optoutstudies.enabled", false);
user_pref("extensions.shield-recipe-client.enabled", false);
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
According to https://github.com/mozilla/add..., it does:
* sends header "X-1057" to sites
* if the page contains certain strings, it flips those strings upside down for 2-6 seconds and then reverts to normal (ex. "privacy" and "control"). It'll also put an on hover box on them with a link.
Dunno if that's really the right plugin, test plan, or full list of what it does, but it was linked from the parents link, which was waaaay more to read than the above two bullet points. If someone sees the above and knows them to be wrong, please reply and correct me.
It seems to be a trend. I installed Chrome on a Linux partition and almost immediately, Yahoo tried to install their plugin into that browser.
Not forgetting Canonical's spyware which sent your local search queries for command options to their servers. It's anonymized they claim - well it isn't if your ISP decides to do a man-in-the-middle attack and deep packet inspection with your data.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/201...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
To move tabs, I created the directory c:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\(yourprofile).default\chrome and then put a file named userChrome.css in it with this content. Note the 1,2,3 order you can modify to change where tabs, etc. are at the top of Firefox 57. The order below is for navigation bar, bookmarks, then tabs:
/* Tab bar below navigation & bookmarks toolbars */
#nav-bar{
-moz-box-ordinal-group: 1;
border-top-width: 0;
}
#PersonalToolbar {
-moz-box-ordinal-group: 2;
}
#TabsToolbar {
-moz-box-ordinal-group: 3;
}
#main-windows[windowtype="navigator:browser"] {
background-color: transparent;
}
You are an idiot. Just because they use a Open Source business model doesn't mean they shouldn't be chastised for pushing advertisements in our face. This extension isn't even Open Source. Yes, they are pushing CLOSED SOURCE software to your machine without you knowing about it.