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Mozilla is ethically compromised at the highest levels. They’ve made a shift over the last few years from a scrappy, low-rent, nonprofit dedicated to helping th

Mozilla is ethically compromised at the highest levels. They’ve made a shift over the last few years from a scrappy, low-rent, nonprofit dedicated to helping the web to just another data mining tech company. Just try setting your Firefox browser to a blank page with no requests on startup and watching the Wireshark log if you think otherwise.

Lowkeyloki 8y ago
What browser would you suggest instead? I feel a bit cornered, especially now that literally every alternative is based on chromium.
- woah 8y ago
  Brave seems ok, has a pretty good built in adblocker
  - vpzom 8y ago
    still chromium
  - asfgoinionio 8y ago
    They're remarkably scummy. They swapped out advertisements for a cryptocurrency scam. Maybe the browser itself is OK. I've never used it.
    - who_what_why 8y ago
      How's the browser a scam? I use it and enjoy it. I think their business model is the most egalitarian business model amongst all browsers.
      - jasonlotito 8y ago
        The collect money on someone's behalf, without that person knowing. It's a scam. It would be like me taking money on behalf of you. Only I wouldn't tell you. And now someone thinks they are paying you by going through me. Seems like a scam.
        atomical 8y ago
        Blocking ads and depriving publishers of income is a scam. You are stealing from content creators. BAT gives more revenue to content creators than Google ever would.
        yoasif_ 8y ago
        > Blocking ads and depriving publishers of income is a scam. But this is literally what Brave does by default.
      - thekyle 8y ago
        I'm not trying to take sides in this but here is a relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
    - sanxiyn 8y ago
      You can use Brave without caring about cryptocurrency at all.
- aphextron 8y ago
  Good question. Other than Firefox, Webkit/Blink based browsers are pretty much the only thing usable on the modern web without crashing. That leaves ungoogled Chromium, which unless you're compiling it yourself (good luck) means just blindly trusting some random internet person for binaries. There's really no good answer at this point.
  - hollerith 8y ago
    Worse: even if the person (or organization) providing the binary is well-meaning, they would need some serious resources (mostly programmers) to provide security updates quickly enough. The least resource-intensive way to provide attack-resistance near the level provided by Google's Chrome team would probably be to notify the user when a vulnerability is disclosed so that the user can either switch to Chrome or restrict their browsing to safe sites till the binary provider can get a security update out. I know of no one doing that or providing timely security updates however except Google, possibly Opera, possibly Brave and probably some day soon Microsoft.
- narag 8y ago
  What's wrong with Chromium? It's a honest question. I understand you'd say that about Chrome, but I thought that Chromium being open source it isn't exactly in the same bag.
  - gruez 8y ago
    No resistfingerprinting, or any meaningful about:config entries.
  - zobzu 8y ago
    honestly, its slow. icecat is quite nice.
- gowld 8y ago
  What's wrong with chromium?
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    Chromium phones home, hard.
- geowwy 8y ago
  This site suggests IceCat, Ungoogled Chromium, Iridium or Pale Moon: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html The also have a guide for enhancing privacy in Firefox
  - atomical 8y ago
    There's also Brave browser.
    - jasonlotito 8y ago
      No. Brave is collecting money on people's behalf without their consent.
      - atomical 8y ago
        Most of the BAT being donated is coming directly from the User Growth Pool. Do you block ads without the publisher's consent? If so, you are in a much more morally precarious situation.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    After this discussion, I would think very hard before using Pale Moon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410928
  - Lowkeyloki 8y ago
    I would consider IceCat, but it looks like development has fallen behind Firefox considerably. I mean no offense by this but I consider myself a privacy wonk and that website is a bit too tin foil hat even for me. I think we're in a bad way as far as choices go for browsers these days, but Firefox seems like the best of a bad situation to me. If people are still concerned, they should take a look at the changes made to Firefox for the Tor browser.
- who_what_why 8y ago
  Brave. And what's wrong with Chromium?
  - ripdog 8y ago
    It reinforces Google's control of the internet, and helps convince webmasters that the only browser they need to test for is Chrome.
    - who_what_why 8y ago
      Chromium is open source much like Android and Linux are open source.
- kylek 8y ago
  I don't think anyone has mentioned Opera yet. Why? It's quite a bit snappier than FF imo, and has extensions like uBlock Origin/HTTPS Everywhere/Privacy Badger available (and the ability to install Chrome extensions). Edit: I know it's chromium-based, but still wondering!
  - detaro 8y ago
    Going to a closed-source browser owned by a big chinese company because you're worried about Mozilla's open source browser seems like a hard sell.
- random878 8y ago
  I like Icecat (annoyingly not in the Debian repos). I've also started to make use of text browsers. Links and Links2 are two that I use. Links2 is a nice halfway option as it will support images too. I find them great for websites where I want to read info, but the interface is ironically designed to make that harder than it should be. News sites are a perfect example. Text browsers turn them from bloated billboards back into a readable format.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
0xcde4c3db 8y ago
I think Mozilla's leadership honestly tries to be ethical, but their frame of reference is marketing. They seemingly think tactics that are only moderately scummy instead of flagrantly scummy represent a pro-user revolution. The hell of it is that with the way ad tech has eaten the web, I'm not sure they're wrong.
cced 8y ago
Mind posting sources for your claims of ethical compromise?
- terryd 8y ago
  Renee DiResta: Mozilla Fellow, Director of Research at New Knowledge https://www.mozillapulse.org/profile/410 https://www.mozillapulse.org/profile/410 New Knowledge is the organization that setup a fake Russian botnet, and then tried to push a narrative about how the Republican candidate in an Alabama Senate race was being assisted by this "Russian election interference"... anybody involved with that organization is a scumbag - it has zero redeeming qualities. Renee has been making the rounds lately on Youtube, informing everyone about how much of a threat these operations are (not her organizations fabricated ops, the totally real ones). I haven't yet found the prime mover in this, but her activities are well aligned with those of the DoD ratcheting up the scaremongering about the (according to them) active Chinese operations against the US population. So there is a pretty strong push for further internet lockdown measures being made right now by these people - and Mozilla is associated. At this point I would not be at all surprised to hear Mozilla announce RealID browser integration.
  - eridius 8y ago
    I hadn't heard of this before, so I just dug up the original NYT story. At least one person from New Knowledge was involved in a small experiment designed to explore how the sorts of tactics used by the Russians worked, which attempted to convince Republicans that Mr. Moore was receiving Russian help, but it was designed to be too small to actually affect the outcome of the election (as the goal was to explore how the tactics worked, not to produce any effect). This is a little shady, but as long as it didn't actually affect the outcome I see no harm in a group of people trying to better understand how the Russian social media tactics work.
    - terryd 8y ago
      First of all, the story has actually changed a couple of times. So if you really want to understand the timeline - you are going to need to refer to archives of those articles. Second, the "small experiment" had a budget of at least $100k that they are willing to admit to - traceable money that flowed through people related to the USDS and DoJ. You know that Obama repealed the ban on domestic propaganda before he left office, right? I couldn't tell you the number of times a counter-intel op leaked into domestic media (PopSci was really bad about it) - and months of work would instantly go up in smoke as the operation got scuttled, it makes me sick thinking that is no longer the case. New Knowledge's objective was to deceive voters. That is damage that can't be undone, they even tricked the media (a disappointingly easy task) into spreading the lie. If you can't see something very wrong with this, well you'll be just fine in cold-war 2.0 - we can pick up where we left off in government experimentation on an unwitting public. MKULTRA 2 electricboogaloo. I'm sure its been a while since we updated our nuclear/biological/chemical weapons models... so long as it doesn't affect the public by a statistically significant amount - we should be fine to resume the 1970s practice of releasing airborne pathogens over major American population centers, doubling the number of deaths in the elderly.
43920 8y ago
> Just try setting your Firefox browser to a blank page with no requests on startup and watching the Wireshark log if you think otherwise OK, so I just did this, and I don't really see what the issue is. Looking at Wireshark, I see requests for: * detectportal.firefox.com, which is used to detect whether you're connected to a captive portal network and need to sign in before you can connect to the internet. As far as I'm aware, no personal information is transmitted as part of this request, and there's apparently a pref to disable it [0] * A couple of requests for OCSP certificate validation [1], which seems like a useful feature, and is also pretty easy to disable if you really don't want it. * A request to download.mozilla.org and another one to download.cdn.mozilla.net, which looks like it's checking whether an update is available. I don't really see a problem with any of these? [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1307867 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1307867 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Prot...
- aphextron 8y ago
  >I don't really see a problem with any of these? You seriously don't have an issue with being fingerprinted and tracked every single time you open an application on your computer? The point is that there should be zero. I should not have a single outgoing network request triggered by opening a web browser to a blank page until interacting in some way. The fact that we've lost this as a standard is terrifying to me.
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    You can configure Firefox such that there is zero outgoing connection. That's better than everything else.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - vesche 8y ago
    The whole point of Firefox _is_ to make network requests. All of the features above aren't leaking your user data or fingerprinting you, they're assisting you in what the applications purpose is... to make network requests. Not to mention firefox is an open-source project, so you could go look at all the network communication it makes when it starts up. All of these options are configurable anyways. I think you're looking in the wrong direction. Try the closed-source (or partial closed source) operating systems you interact with on a daily basis: Windows, Android, macOS, iOS- that's where you'll find the "fingerprinted and tracked every single time you open" sort of thing you speak of. :)
paavoova 8y ago
Requests like what, updating extensions? Telemetry? There's quite a bit that ships on by default but that can be disabled in about:config. What proof do you have they're data mining besides FUD?
tw20190405jxkro 8y ago
> Mozilla is [...] made a shift over the last few years from a scrappy, low-rent, nonprofit dedicated to helping the web to just another data mining tech company. This is a delightfully concise summary of Mozilla today. I was a Mozilla contributor in the "scrappy" years and became one of those listed on /about/owners.html. But Mozilla today is basically unrecognizable. A few years ago, even after I'd stopped contributing, it made me sick to my stomach to think about where things have gone, but I can process it better nowadays. Mozilla's done worse than what's written in OP, but the absolute worst they can do is continue getting people to believe they're the same scrappy organization fighting for good. If you believe in the Mozilla mission, then use Firefox, I guess, because there's not really a better option. (Although I suppose a WebKit-based browser should be an acceptable equivalent.) But please don't give Mozilla any money or tell people that Mozilla is their friend. It sort of tarnishes how things were around the time when you could say that and it was actually true all the way through.

Lowkeyloki 8y ago

What browser would you suggest instead? I feel a bit cornered, especially now that literally every alternative is based on chromium.

woah 8y ago
Brave seems ok, has a pretty good built in adblocker
- vpzom 8y ago
  still chromium
- asfgoinionio 8y ago
  They're remarkably scummy. They swapped out advertisements for a cryptocurrency scam. Maybe the browser itself is OK. I've never used it.
  - who_what_why 8y ago
    How's the browser a scam? I use it and enjoy it. I think their business model is the most egalitarian business model amongst all browsers.
    - jasonlotito 8y ago
      The collect money on someone's behalf, without that person knowing. It's a scam. It would be like me taking money on behalf of you. Only I wouldn't tell you. And now someone thinks they are paying you by going through me. Seems like a scam.
      - atomical 8y ago
        Blocking ads and depriving publishers of income is a scam. You are stealing from content creators. BAT gives more revenue to content creators than Google ever would.
        yoasif_ 8y ago
        > Blocking ads and depriving publishers of income is a scam. But this is literally what Brave does by default.
    - thekyle 8y ago
      I'm not trying to take sides in this but here is a relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    You can use Brave without caring about cryptocurrency at all.
aphextron 8y ago
Good question. Other than Firefox, Webkit/Blink based browsers are pretty much the only thing usable on the modern web without crashing. That leaves ungoogled Chromium, which unless you're compiling it yourself (good luck) means just blindly trusting some random internet person for binaries. There's really no good answer at this point.
- hollerith 8y ago
  Worse: even if the person (or organization) providing the binary is well-meaning, they would need some serious resources (mostly programmers) to provide security updates quickly enough. The least resource-intensive way to provide attack-resistance near the level provided by Google's Chrome team would probably be to notify the user when a vulnerability is disclosed so that the user can either switch to Chrome or restrict their browsing to safe sites till the binary provider can get a security update out. I know of no one doing that or providing timely security updates however except Google, possibly Opera, possibly Brave and probably some day soon Microsoft.
narag 8y ago
What's wrong with Chromium? It's a honest question. I understand you'd say that about Chrome, but I thought that Chromium being open source it isn't exactly in the same bag.
- gruez 8y ago
  No resistfingerprinting, or any meaningful about:config entries.
- zobzu 8y ago
  honestly, its slow. icecat is quite nice.
gowld 8y ago
What's wrong with chromium?
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  Chromium phones home, hard.
geowwy 8y ago
This site suggests IceCat, Ungoogled Chromium, Iridium or Pale Moon: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html The also have a guide for enhancing privacy in Firefox
- atomical 8y ago
  There's also Brave browser.
  - jasonlotito 8y ago
    No. Brave is collecting money on people's behalf without their consent.
    - atomical 8y ago
      Most of the BAT being donated is coming directly from the User Growth Pool. Do you block ads without the publisher's consent? If so, you are in a much more morally precarious situation.
- protomyth 8y ago
  After this discussion, I would think very hard before using Pale Moon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410928
- Lowkeyloki 8y ago
  I would consider IceCat, but it looks like development has fallen behind Firefox considerably. I mean no offense by this but I consider myself a privacy wonk and that website is a bit too tin foil hat even for me. I think we're in a bad way as far as choices go for browsers these days, but Firefox seems like the best of a bad situation to me. If people are still concerned, they should take a look at the changes made to Firefox for the Tor browser.
who_what_why 8y ago
Brave. And what's wrong with Chromium?
- ripdog 8y ago
  It reinforces Google's control of the internet, and helps convince webmasters that the only browser they need to test for is Chrome.
  - who_what_why 8y ago
    Chromium is open source much like Android and Linux are open source.
kylek 8y ago
I don't think anyone has mentioned Opera yet. Why? It's quite a bit snappier than FF imo, and has extensions like uBlock Origin/HTTPS Everywhere/Privacy Badger available (and the ability to install Chrome extensions). Edit: I know it's chromium-based, but still wondering!
- detaro 8y ago
  Going to a closed-source browser owned by a big chinese company because you're worried about Mozilla's open source browser seems like a hard sell.
random878 8y ago
I like Icecat (annoyingly not in the Debian repos). I've also started to make use of text browsers. Links and Links2 are two that I use. Links2 is a nice halfway option as it will support images too. I find them great for websites where I want to read info, but the interface is ironically designed to make that harder than it should be. News sites are a perfect example. Text browsers turn them from bloated billboards back into a readable format.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

0xcde4c3db 8y ago

I think Mozilla's leadership honestly tries to be ethical, but their frame of reference is marketing. They seemingly think tactics that are only moderately scummy instead of flagrantly scummy represent a pro-user revolution. The hell of it is that with the way ad tech has eaten the web, I'm not sure they're wrong.

cced 8y ago

Mind posting sources for your claims of ethical compromise?

terryd 8y ago
Renee DiResta: Mozilla Fellow, Director of Research at New Knowledge https://www.mozillapulse.org/profile/410 https://www.mozillapulse.org/profile/410 New Knowledge is the organization that setup a fake Russian botnet, and then tried to push a narrative about how the Republican candidate in an Alabama Senate race was being assisted by this "Russian election interference"... anybody involved with that organization is a scumbag - it has zero redeeming qualities. Renee has been making the rounds lately on Youtube, informing everyone about how much of a threat these operations are (not her organizations fabricated ops, the totally real ones). I haven't yet found the prime mover in this, but her activities are well aligned with those of the DoD ratcheting up the scaremongering about the (according to them) active Chinese operations against the US population. So there is a pretty strong push for further internet lockdown measures being made right now by these people - and Mozilla is associated. At this point I would not be at all surprised to hear Mozilla announce RealID browser integration.
- eridius 8y ago
  I hadn't heard of this before, so I just dug up the original NYT story. At least one person from New Knowledge was involved in a small experiment designed to explore how the sorts of tactics used by the Russians worked, which attempted to convince Republicans that Mr. Moore was receiving Russian help, but it was designed to be too small to actually affect the outcome of the election (as the goal was to explore how the tactics worked, not to produce any effect). This is a little shady, but as long as it didn't actually affect the outcome I see no harm in a group of people trying to better understand how the Russian social media tactics work.
  - terryd 8y ago
    First of all, the story has actually changed a couple of times. So if you really want to understand the timeline - you are going to need to refer to archives of those articles. Second, the "small experiment" had a budget of at least $100k that they are willing to admit to - traceable money that flowed through people related to the USDS and DoJ. You know that Obama repealed the ban on domestic propaganda before he left office, right? I couldn't tell you the number of times a counter-intel op leaked into domestic media (PopSci was really bad about it) - and months of work would instantly go up in smoke as the operation got scuttled, it makes me sick thinking that is no longer the case. New Knowledge's objective was to deceive voters. That is damage that can't be undone, they even tricked the media (a disappointingly easy task) into spreading the lie. If you can't see something very wrong with this, well you'll be just fine in cold-war 2.0 - we can pick up where we left off in government experimentation on an unwitting public. MKULTRA 2 electricboogaloo. I'm sure its been a while since we updated our nuclear/biological/chemical weapons models... so long as it doesn't affect the public by a statistically significant amount - we should be fine to resume the 1970s practice of releasing airborne pathogens over major American population centers, doubling the number of deaths in the elderly.

43920 8y ago

> Just try setting your Firefox browser to a blank page with no requests on startup and watching the Wireshark log if you think otherwise OK, so I just did this, and I don't really see what the issue is. Looking at Wireshark, I see requests for: * detectportal.firefox.com, which is used to detect whether you're connected to a captive portal network and need to sign in before you can connect to the internet. As far as I'm aware, no personal information is transmitted as part of this request, and there's apparently a pref to disable it [0] * A couple of requests for OCSP certificate validation [1], which seems like a useful feature, and is also pretty easy to disable if you really don't want it. * A request to download.mozilla.org and another one to download.cdn.mozilla.net, which looks like it's checking whether an update is available. I don't really see a problem with any of these? [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1307867 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1307867 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Prot...

aphextron 8y ago
>I don't really see a problem with any of these? You seriously don't have an issue with being fingerprinted and tracked every single time you open an application on your computer? The point is that there should be zero. I should not have a single outgoing network request triggered by opening a web browser to a blank page until interacting in some way. The fact that we've lost this as a standard is terrifying to me.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  You can configure Firefox such that there is zero outgoing connection. That's better than everything else.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- vesche 8y ago
  The whole point of Firefox _is_ to make network requests. All of the features above aren't leaking your user data or fingerprinting you, they're assisting you in what the applications purpose is... to make network requests. Not to mention firefox is an open-source project, so you could go look at all the network communication it makes when it starts up. All of these options are configurable anyways. I think you're looking in the wrong direction. Try the closed-source (or partial closed source) operating systems you interact with on a daily basis: Windows, Android, macOS, iOS- that's where you'll find the "fingerprinted and tracked every single time you open" sort of thing you speak of. :)

paavoova 8y ago

Requests like what, updating extensions? Telemetry? There's quite a bit that ships on by default but that can be disabled in about:config. What proof do you have they're data mining besides FUD?

tw20190405jxkro 8y ago

> Mozilla is [...] made a shift over the last few years from a scrappy, low-rent, nonprofit dedicated to helping the web to just another data mining tech company. This is a delightfully concise summary of Mozilla today. I was a Mozilla contributor in the "scrappy" years and became one of those listed on /about/owners.html. But Mozilla today is basically unrecognizable. A few years ago, even after I'd stopped contributing, it made me sick to my stomach to think about where things have gone, but I can process it better nowadays. Mozilla's done worse than what's written in OP, but the absolute worst they can do is continue getting people to believe they're the same scrappy organization fighting for good. If you believe in the Mozilla mission, then use Firefox, I guess, because there's not really a better option. (Although I suppose a WebKit-based browser should be an acceptable equivalent.) But please don't give Mozilla any money or tell people that Mozilla is their friend. It sort of tarnishes how things were around the time when you could say that and it was actually true all the way through.