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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, Interesting) by FatPhil on Sunday December 17 2017, @11:27PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday December 17 2017, @11:27PM (#611150) Homepage
    ?!??!? You're unhappy that Pale Moon applied an entirely consistent default policy, that was trivially overrideable, to a single plugin?

    If that's the worst thing you can think of about the browser, you should probably like it more than any other software ever.
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  • (Score: 1) by dwilson on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:21AM

    by dwilson (2599) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:21AM (#611654) Journal

    I'm unhappy that the creator enforced what was essentially a political decision on his userbase. Overridable or no, that's not cool.

    It also didn't stop me from using the software, as I had never heard of that specific addon, never used it, and probably never will. But as the length of the linked forum thread shows, there were a significant number of people that took issue with the decision.

    Related: Why do you assume I think badly of the browser? I love Pale Moon. It's the best Mozilla-derived browser out there, hands down.

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