Mozilla's creepy Mr Robot stunt in Firefox flops in touching tribute to TV show's 2nd season Mozilla automatically installed a weird add-on to Firefox on people's computers – an add-on that turned out to be a marketing promotion for the hit telly show Mr Robot. The open-source non-profit dev house secretly slipped the oddity, dubbed Through the Looking Glass, into browser installations as a shield study. These special …
"Our goal with the custom experience we created with Mr Robot was to engage our users in a fun and unique way,"
This quote sounds like it came straight from the Microsoft PR department. Like people want their browser to "engage" with them. It's supposed to be the other way around jagoffs.
they can be 'proud of themselves' all they WANT to if they can get the product right...
But with things like Australis, breakage of legacy plugins (many of which "FIX" the Australis b0rk-up), 2D FLATSO HTML 'settings' pages, etc. - this "users are by default our beta testers" nonsense is JUST the icing on the arrogance cake of FAIL.
/me points out that PRIDE isn't necessarily bad, but when you're proud of something, and it's NOT deserved, it becomes ARROGANCE.
It seems it most of Mozilla didn't know this was happening, the bug was marked as private so not even other Mozilla employees could see it. The asylum is being run by Marketing yet again.
"Our goal with the custom experience we created with Mr Robot was to engage our users in a fun and unique way,"
That is just such a fuckwitted, socially inept geek way of looking at the world. It's akin to "Why would anyone see any downside to this, it's all just harmless fun". You can engage me by writing a stable, performant, well supported browser and not filling my machine with shit.
"pushed to a big bunch of people – seemingly everyone who kept the default settings – and was intended as a game to promote the hacker-centric TV suspense-drama."
Isnt that exactly the wrong cross section of users for a "hacker-centric TV suspense-drama"? They need to "invert selection".
Exactly - and their little world only - as if everybody knew what Mr. Robot is.
But too many people at Mozilla look to be thinking more and more a browser is used just for fun, and not to produce actual work - it has to be managed professionally, and not by marketing.
So they're busy to optimize maybe your "streaming experience" - while killing support for managing your network devices...
It's like letters and packages from somebody you don't know, though in a language you do know. It made me angry. Turned out it was a gift--that was supposed to be an adventure--from the missuz. It must have hurt her worse than it hurt me. That's where the parallel breaks down. Mozilla never hurts, it blithely continues.
"They really are trying to follow Microsoft off of the cliff."
You may be right.. Look at how similar the last release of FF looks to the hated Edge browser.
I've been a loyal FF user for 10+ years on several platforms and this makes me sad. Mozilla's last Android FF release is also completely unusable.
"I knew there was a reason I stuck to the ESR".
I seriously can't believe they pulled a stunt like this while simultaneously pushing out the ctashfest that is Quantum.
Imagine the scene - you get the plugin, Quantum craps itself (yet again), and suddenly you've got this extra plugin saying hello.
Yeah, that's why we deployed ESR rather than latest-and-greatest.
ESR here, too.
Latest version on the boxen with slackware-current, though ... but I didn't get hit with it. After all these years, I automagically go through and turn off anything labeled "automatic" in any code I install. Handy reflex to have. Strangely enough, I don't even remember turning it off!
However, bad move Mozilla. ARG indeed.
If you ever read me arguing with Raymond on Usenet ::mumble:: years ago, you'd know we aren't the same person.
And it's "jake", not "Jake". There is an entity here on ElReg called "Jake" (there have been a couple of them, actually, over the years), and s/he ain't me either.
I don't know what crashfest you're referring to. The other OP mentioned Palemoon - well, this one would be more prone to crashes and memory leaks (at least in my somewhat extensive experience).
Back to the study - I did not get whacked with Mr Robot crap but I once suffered "serious trauma" when Mozilla tested merging urlbar and the search box. I wasted whole evening (I like the idea of googling only when I mean to) trying to customize my FF, all in vain before figuring out it I was a test rat. Forgiven but not forgotten. Still the best browser out there, especially now that NoScript is back in Quantum (I did ESR my other boxes during that painful transition as life was unbearable without NS and some sites just refused to render in Palemoon).
I've chosen to suffer the clunkiness of ESR 45 + ublock + noscript where i must use it at all (generally a PaleMoon user). Nothing against the new shiny, personally (i haven't used it enough to have an opinion), but I'll stick with the devil that is known for now. If they could've managed to get Developer Tools to parity with FireBug, I might not have seen it this way.
Interesting - Thank you for that. The Firefox Wiki indicates that "experiments" are just about Firefox telemetry, but it's a sobering reminder that a browser is a two-way window.
"And while we’re here, they are having their way with us.
They’ve packaged our fight into product, turned our dissent into intellectual property, televising our revolution with commercial breaks.
They’ve backdoored into our minds and robbed our truth, refurbished the facts, then marked up the price.
This is what they do. This is what they’re good at. This is their greatest trick.
Lobotomizing us into their virtual reality horror show."
:)
interesting quote, it forced me to google. Seems to be from 3rd season of the 'Mr. Robot' series.
After reading about it here I'm not sure I'd want to even SEE that show.
It's been my experience that hackers aren't anarchists, most aren't socialists (like Stallman), nor even anti-capitalists. The EFF is more like the ACLU than not, it seems, and doesn't really represent what [from what I've seen] MOST hackers think or do.
Most hackers seem to be (in general ) are libertarians, and somewhat conservative at that. In other words, it's less about legalizing everything (like drugs), and more about just being a "more free" society. After all, OTHER methods of governance take freedom (and/or money) AWAY. And most of them (us) are employed in fields where rapid thinking, problem solving, and creative solutions are key to making your customer/employer happy with you. You know, like I.T., engineering, software, ...
And I don't think you'll find too many hackers that are SJW's, either. Maybe, among the easily brainwashed n00b/s'kiddie types you'll find a few, but generally NO. Hackers tend to want their freedom, and freedom for everyone else, too [even if they don't agree with it]. You'll also find that hackers generally accept social change a bit faster than others, too, mostly on the 'live and let live' side, and not the "we have to change everybody who disagrees with us" side - as an example I had some interesting online discussions with a transgender hacker some time ago (about transgender-ness, lots of interesting resources referenced), and that particular hacker had no problem being accepted in the newsgroup, without the usual "suck-up" behavior that SJW's and the left typically give to people who are in 'SJW protected classes'.. yeah it's sad when "the new XXX employee" gets sucked-up to that way. EMBARASSINGLY sad, like they become instant 'celebreties'. I just treat people the same, regardless. I think that's what they want, too.
But, regardless of all of that, the 'alternative' perception of hackers makes for popular TV shows, I'd guess... so it's perpetuated. Thing is, hackers probably don't care nor don't watch the show. Hackers on shows like 'Bull' and 'Criminal Minds' and 'NCIS' are, however, pretty close to "the real thing" from my perspective. I mean, who doesn't like Garcia? Abbey? or McGee? Or that hacker girl on 'Bull' ?
Anyway, 'nuff from me now. I should get "work" done.
On that note, this "shield study" preference appears to have been snuck in as a sub-setting of an *older* setting. There has been a "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" setting for a while; it may have been opt-in at some point but for quite a whole it's been opt-out. I've usually left this checked as I generally figured I trust Mozilla *enough* to let them do some telemetry stuff. But among other things, this debacle caused me to notice that they've snuck in "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" as a *sub-preference* of "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla", which was set to "yes" (checked) by default without ever once explicitly notifying me about it.
This is bad. These "shield studies" are clearly a pretty different thing from telemetry even when they're actual studies and not TV marketing tie-ins, and I don't think it's cricket at all to just go ahead and assume anyone who's okay with telemetry is okay with being used as a feature test guinea pig.
Whilst the lyrical stylings of certain Irish tax dodgers may not be to everyone's taste, the payload was not executable code. I just don't get why they would do this. It isn't as if the browser experience couldn't otherwise be improved by fixing performance bottlenecks and fixing long-standing bugs. Seriously, sort out your priorities.
Up until this moment I always felt a bit paranoid when I disabled items such as "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" in my programs. But it turns out if you disable that, then the 'studies' are also disabled. Who can I say "told you so" to?
(Probably only a matter of time before that switch becomes "advisory" only...)
First came Pocket, then opt-out telemetry, now this.
It has become clear that Firefox is no longer a browser that can be trusted like it used to be. Now, it has to be treated the same as every other major browser: as an inherent security risk that must be carefully watched at all times.
It's so very sad to see.
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