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posted by chromas on Tuesday October 23 2018, @04:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the funding-secured dept.

Mozilla is going to sell VPN subscriptions within Firefox

Beginning October 24th, the ad will show for select US-based Firefox users who are running the latest version — Firefox 62 — on desktop. If eligible and browsing on an unsecured network, you'll be shown an ad in the top right corner of your Firefox window that prompts you to click through to a sign up page.

Mozilla is offering ProtonVPN's services for $10 a month, which is actually $2 more than if you signed up for the same package directly through ProtonVPN. But, the majority of the revenue from ProtonVPN subscriptions that are processed through Mozilla will go directly to Mozilla. Both companies are banking that people will have good will about paying a little more in order to support their "shared goal of making the internet a safer place."

Also at ZDNet.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Chromium_One on Tuesday October 23 2018, @06:25AM (4 children)

    by Chromium_One (4574) on Tuesday October 23 2018, @06:25AM (#752368)

    What's recently pissed me off is that I set "allow studies" as disabled, and the fuckers went and installed shit on me anyway. User preferences aren't there just to look pretty, assholes.

    Mozilla has lost the path. Scope creep. Yak shaving parties. Iron Law of Bureaucracy is in full effect. Need to spend some time poking at alternatives again. The most important item on the features list is viable filtering. Something akin to uBlock Origin would be preferred, but if I wind up with an external solution, so be it. Pi-hole or similar might be okay.

    --
    When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 23 2018, @06:52AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday October 23 2018, @06:52AM (#752379) Homepage Journal

    Here I've got thirty years in the industry but only just now learned all about yak shaving.

    I've got quite a different take on yak shaving: I have quite a serious problem with focussing on my work. Sometimes something important needs to be done but I just can't bring myself to do it. But if I find some other, more pleasant task - such as yak shaving - to pursue, then I really am making forward progress.

    There is some limit to the effectiveness of this, I must admit.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 23 2018, @12:12PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 23 2018, @12:12PM (#752444)

    the fuckers went and installed shit on me anyway

    Wanna be a little bit more specific?

    • (Score: 1) by Chromium_One on Tuesday October 23 2018, @07:01PM (1 child)

      by Chromium_One (4574) on Tuesday October 23 2018, @07:01PM (#752565)

      Post title doesn't state it clearly enough? The new "shield studies" have their own settings for opt-out which are only found under "about:config" rather than the normal user preferences UI. While I had studies disabled, a new shield study was helpfully installed for me after a version upgrade. While researching what happened with that, I found posts suggesting this should only have been the case with dev versions. Stopped looking once I found the options to twiddle in about:config.

      --
      When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 26 2018, @09:46AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 26 2018, @09:46AM (#754045)

        The only related one pref I can find is app.shield.optoutstudies.enabled. Apparently set it to false to get rid of whatever guinea pig action it controls. That one can be changed via the menus too, preferences, security, Allow Firefox to install and run studies.

        Now is there some other pref I should toggle?