Spammers target Mozilla add-ons page

[chimak111]

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/12/13/mo...m-infestation/

If you visit the official Mozilla AMO -- Addons Mozilla Org -- site right now you may notice an increase in extensions that are pure spam.

The site is abused by spammers currently who flood it with extension listings designed to get users to click on links in the description.

And somehow my own about:addons page is showing an extension I never installed: Looking Glass.

Just a few minutes ago, I deleted another extension I didn't install myself.

[chimak111]

Looks like Looking Glass is an "experiment": https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/com...looking_glass/

I don't quite know what language is proscribed here so I'll just swear silently.

[Bings]

I toggle the "extensions.ui.experiments.hidden" from true to false. Refresh my add ons page and the field is toggled back to true automatically. So if I have it, it's not letting me see it.

[chimak111]

I toggle the "extensions.ui.experiments.hidden" from true to false. Refresh my add ons page and the field is toggled back to true automatically. So if I have it, it's not letting me see it.

There's a suggestion in https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/com...glass/dr7q00k/ to use

lockPref("extensions.ui.experiment.hidden", false);

in mozilla.cfg.

lockPref
is used to lock preferences so they cannot be changed through the GUI or about:config. In many cases the GUI will change to reflect this, graying out or removing options. Appears in about:config as "locked". Some config items require lockPref to be set, such as app.update.enabled. It will not work if it set with just pref.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I use [Mozilla] SeaMonkey and haven't installed any add-ons in ages. I wonder if I have anything weird...with the browser I mean, not ME!

[whatthefunk]

Looks like there is more to this than originally thought:

https://sircmpwn.github.io/2017/12/1...ery-slope.html

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 “****”, 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!

[chimak111]

An overly long video: Mozilla is Not Trustworthy unless one love's Lunduke's voice

[dequire]

Yea stunts like this, as well as the underlying foundation's donations to some possibly shady causes (which Grey Geek and others have mentioned in the past here on the forums, as well as the Bryan Lunduke post listed above), means it's time for this old hack to move to Vivaldi whilst I await the new official KDE browser.

[Bings]

Gonna try waterfox. Getting it from here https://bintray.com/hawkeye116477/wa.../waterfox#read the repository has a kde version. It just imported everything seamlessly from my firefox. Good start

[SpecialEd]

An overly long video: Mozilla is Not Trustworthy unless one love's Lunduke's voice

[soapbox]I find Lunduke to be smug, annoying and struck with his own perceived cuteness. He also doesn't think Net Neutrality is a big deal.[/soapbox]

[dequire]

I'm on the fence about NN myself, to be honest. I mean, it didn't exist before 2015, and it wasn't the end of the world. And the problems we did have did not really get fixed in that time. If the current antitrust laws on the books aren't enough to protect consumers, then what's the point? As for Lunduke, I get he may not be everyone's cup of tea, but he does have informative guests and he also talks about topics no one else as readily appears to address - i.e. his problems with facebook and documenting the privacy issues and subsequent problems with deleting his account.

[chimak111]

... move to Vivaldi whilst I await the new official KDE browser.

Qupzilla 2.2.2 is in the Bionic repos. Take a look at it? It sort of reminds me of Midori.

Re. Lunduke, each time he went Motzilla, it grated

[chimak111]

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/upd...ing-glass-add/

To our community

We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on.

[dequire]

Well I went ahead and installed Falcon on Neon via a Snap, which was made available by the awesome Neon devs. Installable on any debian-based system that supports Snaps. This post was made using it. You can also install as an appimage, if that's more your cup of tea. Has built-in encrypted password storage support, which is a definate plus. The only thing I still need to do is install a dictionary - I'm a horribly-notorious mis-speller, so that's on top of the list to do. One thing I can say off the bat is...fast. Blazing fast.

[GreyGeek]

I’m going to try Falkon. FF57 isn’t behaving to well for me


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