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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 17 2017, @04:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the random-plugin-included-for-free dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9228

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.

"I have no idea what it is or where it came from. I freaked out a bit and uninstalled it immediately," one user wrote on Reddit.

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.

Mr. Robot is a TV series about hackers airing on USA Network.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/mozilla-slipped-a-mr-robot-promo-plugin-into-firefox-1821332254


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by unauthorized on Sunday December 17 2017, @07:15PM (2 children)

    by unauthorized (3776) on Sunday December 17 2017, @07:15PM (#611047)

    Actually, multilevel security is not a new concept, through it's widespread adoption is a fairly recent development. selinux is nearly 20 years old by now.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Monday December 18 2017, @10:59AM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday December 18 2017, @10:59AM (#611332)

    and it is still unusable...

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday December 18 2017, @11:45AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday December 18 2017, @11:45AM (#611341) Journal
    Note that I specifically said single-user computers. MLS has been around in multi-user systems for longer than UNIX has existed, but it wasn't designed into single-user systems until the current generation of smartphone operating systems (well, Symbian had a permissions system, but it wasn't that great). SELinux and the FreeBSD MAC framework provide the tools for implementing something sensible, but they weren't widely used until Android started using SELinux for app permission policies and iOS started using the FreeBSD MAC framework for their sandboxing policies. It's not enough to have a solid mechanism, you also need to have policies that work well for common use cases and are automatically applied.
    --
    sudo mod me up