Katsokaapa onko selaimeen hiljaisesti ja käyttäjältä lupaa kysymättä asentunut "Looking Glass" nimien lisäosa, joka on oikeasti promootio NBC/Mr Robot -kanssa. Onko todella niin kireässä lahjoitukset, että tämmöistä perseilyä näiden eri mainosjuttujen kanssa jatketaan.
Here’s a breakdown of what happened a few days ago. Mozilla and NBC Universal did a “collaboration” (read: promotion) for the TV show Mr. Robot. It involved sideloading a sketchy browser extension which will invert text that matches a list of Mr. Robot-related keywords like “fsociety”, “robot”, “undo”, and “fuck”, and does a number of other things like adding an HTTP header to certain sites you visit.
This extension was sideloaded into browsers via the “experiments” feature. Not only are these experiments enabled by default, but updates
have been known to re-enable it if you turn it off. The advertisement addon shows up
like this on your addon page, and was added to Firefox stable. If I saw this before I knew what was going on, I would think my browser was compromised! Apparently it was a mistake that this showed up on the addon page, though - it was supposed to be
silently sideloaded into your browser!
There’s
a ticket on Bugzilla (Firefox’s bug tracker) for discussing this experiment, but it’s locked down and no one outside of Mozilla can see it. There’s
another ticket, filed by concerned users, which has since been disabled and had many comments removed, particularly the angry (but respectful) ones.
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Update
It has been clarified that an about:config flag must be set for this addon’s behavior to be visible. This improves the situation considerably, but I do not think it exenorates Mozilla and I stand firm behind most of my points. The study has also been rolled back by Mozilla, and Mozilla has issued
statements to the
media justifying the study (no apology has been issued).