6 ms·

I don't get it. Is someone going (and I don't really care if is from mozilla or microsoft) to RECONFIGURE my browser without my consent? This is unacceptably ba

by hexo 7y ago

I don't get it. Is someone going (and I don't really care if is from mozilla or microsoft) to RECONFIGURE my browser without my consent? This is unacceptably bad idea.

user17843 7y ago
modern software (especially browsers) with auto-update = SAAS. What you experience is a synced remote interface, you don't own your software anymore. Granted, the secret lies in providing such an excellent and subtle service that the majority of users actually either endorse or not even notice the dependency. Which means changes should be subtle and consistent.
- deno 7y ago
  Firefox is fully open source. Runs locally and even works offline. How is it SaaS exactly? The auto-update mechanism exists almost exclusively for the benefit of Windows users. None of the Linux distros use it.
  - Althorion 7y ago
    I guess the application changing it’s behaviour remotely, as is the case with Normandy, can be somewhat reasonably considered SaaS.
    - deno 7y ago
      Changing a default setting is SaaS?
      - Althorion 7y ago
        Changing a default setting _remotely_. That is a huge field of possibilities, from not SaaS-y at all to very SaaS-y. Like for example you could make it so the script to be run when a browser encounters a pdf file is put directly in the settings. Thus changing that setting changes what the browser does—you can add, remove or change an in-browser pdf viewer that way. It’s not what Normandy currently does, but it is something it’s at least theoretically capable of. And hitting that extreme would, in my opinion, made it reasonable to start calling it SaaS.
        deno 7y ago
        You could do all that with a regular update as well.
        Althorion 7y ago
        No, not with the _regular_ update. Only with the _remote_ update, which is a part of what makes SaaS SaaS.
        deno 7y ago
        What is a “remote update”? All updates are remote until you download them.
        Althorion 7y ago
        The one that is remotely done for you, without any action on your part. Typically, a user has to click the installer or use package manager or something to get the update, it’s their decision they make locally. If a setting is in place where this decision can be made somewhere else, it’s now a remote thing, a remote update. Quite useful thing in some cases and one of the things that make SaaS possible in the first place.
        mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        The distinction is between auto-update and user-chosen update. Some users strongly prefer all software running on their owned hardware is incapable of auto-updating in a way that bypasses explicitly requiring the user to choose to update each time. It may come across as a nasty dark pattern if a user must opt out of auto-updates (which is loosely what Normandy is, if you extend “auto-update” to also mean tacit enrollment in an experiment). Instead it should be off by default, with a clear and unambiguous description of the functionality on a menu page if a user wants to opt in. For example, I am a very privacy-focused browser user, relying on many special settings & extensions. Despite frequently reading about browser updates, I had no idea Normandy functioned like this, nor that it was enabled by default, until reading into this current Firefox certificate bug. Upon learning what Normandy is and that it is opt-out by default with unclear connections to the traditional privacy dropdown menus to disable experiments or usage stat sharing, I feel that Mozilla violated my trust in a profound and deeply upsetting way.
- hexo 7y ago
  Firefox is not SAAS. Is it? If it is, show me where it is disclosed. So we can finally migrate away from it. There should be exactly zero change to it UNLESS I said so, because I am admin of my machines - not someone from Mozilla, nor Microsoft, nor Apple. Is it that hard to understand? And stop talking about "owning" anything, you clearly do not understand ownership rights - your idea of it does not apply to whole world AND this is not USA. I'm too old for this "word plays". It seems like there is a need to pay someone, to not listen to mozilla and finally strip firefox from it's newly introduced "features".
  - Sphax 7y ago
    Good thing is you can do just that. Pay someone to fork Firefox and task them to build the browser you want.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Vendor controlled auto-update is worse than SaaS. It's effectively a control over your machine. Your entire security depends on a random employee of a random organization you entrusted with this control to not get compromised, not compelled by the government, not made shady deals with other parties to ship a backdoor to you. But if speaking about the issue. Why Mozilla even need so much control over extensions? Seems like they built an infrastructure to be able to disable any installed extension remotely. That's just evil.
  - orbital-decay 7y ago
    > Your entire security depends on a random employee of a random organization you entrusted with this control to not get compromised, not compelled by the government, not made shady deals with other parties to ship a backdoor to you. As opposed to what? How do you test for all that with manual updates, as an individual or a small organization? Even for a huge organization which reviews most of the updates it installs, critical updates should be applied immediately, to avoid the lag.
kevingadd 7y ago
Nah, it's an experiment/testing system that's configurable in settings. I don't remember whether it's opt-in or opt-out. It's usually used for things like user studies but I guess it is also used for hotfixes. If it's opt-out I guess it's not "consent"? I recall opting into it, but I can't be sure they didn't change it.
- Althorion 7y ago
  `app.normandy.enabled` has a default setting of `true`, at least on my machine, so yeah, it’s now opt-out.
  - bassman9000 7y ago
    And you have to go via about:config, which is a no-go for the majority of the users.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      You need about:config for that flag, but that flag isn't the only way to turn off Normandy.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    That pref doesn't matter. If you turn off the visible checkbox in settings, normandy turns off. This is true for many feature flags. You can try it yourself, I tested it - unchecking the box in settings disabled the hotfix in my user studies tab (all of them were marked as complete).
Althorion 7y ago
Yes, sort of. The change is made to _default_ configs, so if you changed something, it won’t touch it. And while I get that changes to that can be annoying, I also find them necessary to keep the application easy to use and productive and cannot think of any piece of software that never have changed their defaults. The reason for Normandy to exist is to allow the developers to check if some change to that defaults is production ready yet. For example, you can start enabling by default hardware video acceleration for some people and compare the number of browser crashes they experience compared to the general public and use that knowledge to know when this feature is stable enough to be enabled for all.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  It should be mentioned that Mozilla had once wrecked their reputation by allowing a corporate-supported study [1] (yeah, Mr. Robot one). It was a really bad PR disaster for Mozilla, and I think Mozilla has at least learned their lesson by not abusing the studies system in such way (as far as I know). [1] https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-slope.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-...
  - philipwhiuk 7y ago
    So they'll put it directly in Normandy instead of wrecking Studies?
    - lifthrasiir 7y ago
      Not sure, but Mozilla had taken another PR risk by sponsored contents to the Packet integration [1]. So we need to keep our eyes to Mozilla. On wrecking Normandy, you can actually see all enabled recipes [2] and nothing seems smoky. It even seems that the hotfix (id=721) was used to unbreak Office 365, supporting the positive uses of this system. But I strongly agree that there should be more approachable list of them. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/01/24/update-on-pocket-and-firefox-integration/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/01/24/update-on... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16229927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16229927) [2] https://normandy.cdn.mozilla.net/api/v1/recipe/ https://normandy.cdn.mozilla.net/api/v1/recipe/
nebopolis 7y ago
Is it an unacceptably bad idea to allow auto updates as well? Anything potentially problematic here could also be done with a code change, but at least this contains a flag to opt-out.
lifthrasiir 7y ago
You are using a web application named the Hacker News (among others) that always reconfigures and changes without your consent. You probably want to avoid the entire web. EDIT: In addition, think hard about the update strategy of applications that need to support that moving web.
- hexo 7y ago
  You need to understand difference between something installed on my computer (run by ME, i pay my HW, electricity bills and connectivity) and a website (run by someone ELSE, doesnt pay my HW or electric energy AND forces me to watch ADS for which I PAY for bandwidth).
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    I have already edited, but to elaborate: > In addition, think hard about the update strategy of applications that need to support that moving web. If you want the web and accept that the web is moving and you can't do anything about that, then it should be recognized that the web browser is hard time catching up. I actually hate most auto update things, but it had been too hard to use any web browser without such facilities. I use Firefox because at least I can see---and have a non-zero probably to alter---what happens to this moving platform.
  - geofft 7y ago
    I take it you don't run any JavaScript or CSS that you haven't audited, either, and you have a download cap on each web request?
    - hexo 7y ago
      Heard of no-script? Heard of application sandboxing? Do you actually understand WHY we run web via HTML, JS and CSS and not as actual compiled applications randomly downloaded from internet? Seems like you do not. Do not ask manipulative c* until you make sure you REALLY know what you are talking about.
ajross 7y ago
That "someone" is the author of the browser you installed in the first place, and which you know is going to push whole software updates on a regular basis. That's right, "someone" isn't going to just RECONFIGURE your browser, they're going to REPLACE it! Quarterly! That concern just doesn't parse. If you don't trust Mozilla to give you working software, why are you running their software in the first place? There are circumstances and concerns where you might want to limit things like software and preference updates. And both of those are and remain under your control. But the default is to allow updates, for obvious reasons.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  On my system authors of software can't push updates to me at all. Instead the software is packaged, there is at least some oversight over what is packaged and plenty of user control over packages.
  - ajross 7y ago
    Yeah, so like the other poster your point reduces to "I trust Fedora to build Mozilla code more than I trust Mozilla to build Mozilla code". Which is nonsensical. At some point you're still trusting "someone" (the scary "someone" from upthread, even!) to give you software, so what's the complaint exactly?
    - ptx 7y ago
      It's not nonsensical. I trust the distribution maintainers to maintain and update a cohesive system composed of thousands of third-party packages. This is entirely different from trusting those thousands of third-party authors to directly update whatever they want on my system whenever they feel like it. Edit: I'm not implying anything about the capabilities of this preference-updating system; the subject was software updates and who is trusted to deploy them.
      - ChrisSD 7y ago
        That's hyperbolic. Mozilla can't directly update whatever they want via this system. According to the article they can only "change the default value of a preference" within Firefox.

by hexo 7y ago

I don't get it. Is someone going (and I don't really care if is from mozilla or microsoft) to RECONFIGURE my browser without my consent? This is unacceptably bad idea.

user17843 7y ago

modern software (especially browsers) with auto-update = SAAS. What you experience is a synced remote interface, you don't own your software anymore. Granted, the secret lies in providing such an excellent and subtle service that the majority of users actually either endorse or not even notice the dependency. Which means changes should be subtle and consistent.

deno 7y ago
Firefox is fully open source. Runs locally and even works offline. How is it SaaS exactly? The auto-update mechanism exists almost exclusively for the benefit of Windows users. None of the Linux distros use it.
- Althorion 7y ago
  I guess the application changing it’s behaviour remotely, as is the case with Normandy, can be somewhat reasonably considered SaaS.
  - deno 7y ago
    Changing a default setting is SaaS?
    - Althorion 7y ago
      Changing a default setting _remotely_. That is a huge field of possibilities, from not SaaS-y at all to very SaaS-y. Like for example you could make it so the script to be run when a browser encounters a pdf file is put directly in the settings. Thus changing that setting changes what the browser does—you can add, remove or change an in-browser pdf viewer that way. It’s not what Normandy currently does, but it is something it’s at least theoretically capable of. And hitting that extreme would, in my opinion, made it reasonable to start calling it SaaS.
      - deno 7y ago
        You could do all that with a regular update as well.
        Althorion 7y ago
        No, not with the _regular_ update. Only with the _remote_ update, which is a part of what makes SaaS SaaS.
        deno 7y ago
        What is a “remote update”? All updates are remote until you download them.
        Althorion 7y ago
        The one that is remotely done for you, without any action on your part. Typically, a user has to click the installer or use package manager or something to get the update, it’s their decision they make locally. If a setting is in place where this decision can be made somewhere else, it’s now a remote thing, a remote update. Quite useful thing in some cases and one of the things that make SaaS possible in the first place.
        mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        The distinction is between auto-update and user-chosen update. Some users strongly prefer all software running on their owned hardware is incapable of auto-updating in a way that bypasses explicitly requiring the user to choose to update each time. It may come across as a nasty dark pattern if a user must opt out of auto-updates (which is loosely what Normandy is, if you extend “auto-update” to also mean tacit enrollment in an experiment). Instead it should be off by default, with a clear and unambiguous description of the functionality on a menu page if a user wants to opt in. For example, I am a very privacy-focused browser user, relying on many special settings & extensions. Despite frequently reading about browser updates, I had no idea Normandy functioned like this, nor that it was enabled by default, until reading into this current Firefox certificate bug. Upon learning what Normandy is and that it is opt-out by default with unclear connections to the traditional privacy dropdown menus to disable experiments or usage stat sharing, I feel that Mozilla violated my trust in a profound and deeply upsetting way.
hexo 7y ago
Firefox is not SAAS. Is it? If it is, show me where it is disclosed. So we can finally migrate away from it. There should be exactly zero change to it UNLESS I said so, because I am admin of my machines - not someone from Mozilla, nor Microsoft, nor Apple. Is it that hard to understand? And stop talking about "owning" anything, you clearly do not understand ownership rights - your idea of it does not apply to whole world AND this is not USA. I'm too old for this "word plays". It seems like there is a need to pay someone, to not listen to mozilla and finally strip firefox from it's newly introduced "features".
- Sphax 7y ago
  Good thing is you can do just that. Pay someone to fork Firefox and task them to build the browser you want.
zzzcpan 7y ago
Vendor controlled auto-update is worse than SaaS. It's effectively a control over your machine. Your entire security depends on a random employee of a random organization you entrusted with this control to not get compromised, not compelled by the government, not made shady deals with other parties to ship a backdoor to you. But if speaking about the issue. Why Mozilla even need so much control over extensions? Seems like they built an infrastructure to be able to disable any installed extension remotely. That's just evil.
- orbital-decay 7y ago
  > Your entire security depends on a random employee of a random organization you entrusted with this control to not get compromised, not compelled by the government, not made shady deals with other parties to ship a backdoor to you. As opposed to what? How do you test for all that with manual updates, as an individual or a small organization? Even for a huge organization which reviews most of the updates it installs, critical updates should be applied immediately, to avoid the lag.

kevingadd 7y ago

Nah, it's an experiment/testing system that's configurable in settings. I don't remember whether it's opt-in or opt-out. It's usually used for things like user studies but I guess it is also used for hotfixes. If it's opt-out I guess it's not "consent"? I recall opting into it, but I can't be sure they didn't change it.

Althorion 7y ago
`app.normandy.enabled` has a default setting of `true`, at least on my machine, so yeah, it’s now opt-out.
- bassman9000 7y ago
  And you have to go via about:config, which is a no-go for the majority of the users.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    You need about:config for that flag, but that flag isn't the only way to turn off Normandy.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  That pref doesn't matter. If you turn off the visible checkbox in settings, normandy turns off. This is true for many feature flags. You can try it yourself, I tested it - unchecking the box in settings disabled the hotfix in my user studies tab (all of them were marked as complete).

Althorion 7y ago

Yes, sort of. The change is made to _default_ configs, so if you changed something, it won’t touch it. And while I get that changes to that can be annoying, I also find them necessary to keep the application easy to use and productive and cannot think of any piece of software that never have changed their defaults. The reason for Normandy to exist is to allow the developers to check if some change to that defaults is production ready yet. For example, you can start enabling by default hardware video acceleration for some people and compare the number of browser crashes they experience compared to the general public and use that knowledge to know when this feature is stable enough to be enabled for all.

lifthrasiir 7y ago
It should be mentioned that Mozilla had once wrecked their reputation by allowing a corporate-supported study [1] (yeah, Mr. Robot one). It was a really bad PR disaster for Mozilla, and I think Mozilla has at least learned their lesson by not abusing the studies system in such way (as far as I know). [1] https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-slope.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-...
- philipwhiuk 7y ago
  So they'll put it directly in Normandy instead of wrecking Studies?
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    Not sure, but Mozilla had taken another PR risk by sponsored contents to the Packet integration [1]. So we need to keep our eyes to Mozilla. On wrecking Normandy, you can actually see all enabled recipes [2] and nothing seems smoky. It even seems that the hotfix (id=721) was used to unbreak Office 365, supporting the positive uses of this system. But I strongly agree that there should be more approachable list of them. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/01/24/update-on-pocket-and-firefox-integration/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/01/24/update-on... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16229927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16229927) [2] https://normandy.cdn.mozilla.net/api/v1/recipe/ https://normandy.cdn.mozilla.net/api/v1/recipe/

nebopolis 7y ago

Is it an unacceptably bad idea to allow auto updates as well? Anything potentially problematic here could also be done with a code change, but at least this contains a flag to opt-out.

lifthrasiir 7y ago

You are using a web application named the Hacker News (among others) that always reconfigures and changes without your consent. You probably want to avoid the entire web. EDIT: In addition, think hard about the update strategy of applications that need to support that moving web.

hexo 7y ago
You need to understand difference between something installed on my computer (run by ME, i pay my HW, electricity bills and connectivity) and a website (run by someone ELSE, doesnt pay my HW or electric energy AND forces me to watch ADS for which I PAY for bandwidth).
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  I have already edited, but to elaborate: > In addition, think hard about the update strategy of applications that need to support that moving web. If you want the web and accept that the web is moving and you can't do anything about that, then it should be recognized that the web browser is hard time catching up. I actually hate most auto update things, but it had been too hard to use any web browser without such facilities. I use Firefox because at least I can see---and have a non-zero probably to alter---what happens to this moving platform.
- geofft 7y ago
  I take it you don't run any JavaScript or CSS that you haven't audited, either, and you have a download cap on each web request?
  - hexo 7y ago
    Heard of no-script? Heard of application sandboxing? Do you actually understand WHY we run web via HTML, JS and CSS and not as actual compiled applications randomly downloaded from internet? Seems like you do not. Do not ask manipulative c* until you make sure you REALLY know what you are talking about.

ajross 7y ago

That "someone" is the author of the browser you installed in the first place, and which you know is going to push whole software updates on a regular basis. That's right, "someone" isn't going to just RECONFIGURE your browser, they're going to REPLACE it! Quarterly! That concern just doesn't parse. If you don't trust Mozilla to give you working software, why are you running their software in the first place? There are circumstances and concerns where you might want to limit things like software and preference updates. And both of those are and remain under your control. But the default is to allow updates, for obvious reasons.

zzzcpan 7y ago
On my system authors of software can't push updates to me at all. Instead the software is packaged, there is at least some oversight over what is packaged and plenty of user control over packages.
- ajross 7y ago
  Yeah, so like the other poster your point reduces to "I trust Fedora to build Mozilla code more than I trust Mozilla to build Mozilla code". Which is nonsensical. At some point you're still trusting "someone" (the scary "someone" from upthread, even!) to give you software, so what's the complaint exactly?
  - ptx 7y ago
    It's not nonsensical. I trust the distribution maintainers to maintain and update a cohesive system composed of thousands of third-party packages. This is entirely different from trusting those thousands of third-party authors to directly update whatever they want on my system whenever they feel like it. Edit: I'm not implying anything about the capabilities of this preference-updating system; the subject was software updates and who is trusted to deploy them.
    - ChrisSD 7y ago
      That's hyperbolic. Mozilla can't directly update whatever they want via this system. According to the article they can only "change the default value of a preference" within Firefox.