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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
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday December 17 2017, @10:47PM (2 children)
Mmm... given that, before Windows [wikipedia.org], the computers were either gaming mini-consoles ** or large mainframe irons, I wonder what do you mean by a throw-away computer.
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** The ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 kind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 17 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @12:42AM
No no no he wants to blame Bill Gates for what is going on. /sarc Missing the whole point. This shit goes on in open source too.
Most of our infrastructure is run by a small handful of people who can if they like do some pretty nasty things. One project I use (open source) just dropped ads into their project. He is doing it to pay the bills because he can not get a job. But guess what no one forked and no one really cared. I went out of my way to remove the ad system. It was the typical ad network dreck (your computer may be infected click here, install chrome today, etc etc etc). He did not mean to put a virus back door mechanism into his code but he did. I had very little control over it until I audited the code and removed it. Yet I up until that point basically trusted him. Now that trust is gone. Now I have to continuously audit his code. I have better things to do and my own projects to work on. I also have the luxury of doing so, as I have the skills to do it. Yet most people do not and would just have to deal with it. Open source or not.
Windows was what it was because we as an industry basically made them the defacto standard. MS most certainly had shenanigans going on at the time. Yet no one really could compete on their prices at their scale. The thing worked 'good enough' and most importantly didnt cost stupid amounts of money. I remember calling up IBM to find out what they wanted for a TCP/IP stack for OS/2. They wanted 20,000 dollars in 1993 for a single install. MS inside outed the whole business stack with its cheap prices and 'good enough' software with decent backward compatibility. I could in 1995 outfit a productive dev for less than 3k. That was hardware and full regiment of software on a MS box, plus 2-3k more if there was some specialized software needed. The same thing on pretty much any other platform of the time started around 20k. MS missed this lesson and this is why open source ate their lunch in the past few years.