Mozilla recently removed every version of uBlock Origin Lite from their add-on store except for the oldest version.
Mozilla says a manual review flagged these issues:
Consent, specifically Nonexistent: For add-ons that collect or transmit user data, the user must be informed…
Your add-on contains minified, concatenated or otherwise machine-generated code. You need to provide the original sources…
uBlock Origin’s developer gorhill refutes this with linked evidence.
Contrary to what these emails suggest, the source code files highlighted in the email:
- Have nothing to do with data collection, there is no such thing anywhere in uBOL
- There is no minified code in uBOL, and certainly none in the supposed faulty files
Even for people who did not prefer this add-on, the removal could have a chilling effect on uBlock Origin itself.
Incidentally, all the files reported as having issues are exactly the same files being used in uBO for years, and have been used in uBOL as well for over a year with no modification. Given this, it’s worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future.
And gorhill notes uBO Lite had a purpose on Firefox, especially on mobile devices:
[T]here were people who preferred the Lite approach of uBOL, which was designed from the ground up to be an efficient suspendable extension, thus a good match for Firefox for Android.
New releases of uBO Lite do not have a Firefox extension; the last version of this coincides with gorhill’s message. The Firefox addon page for uBO Lite is also gone.
I’m convinced that 80% of all these threads and the responses within them are astroturfing by Google to cause everyone to despair that Mozilla is no better than Google and that there will never be anything that could be developed to compete with Google if Mozilla went under.
There’s just too goddamn many of them and they’re all filled with the same negative comments. It’s just like the “no way bro, I love paying for YouTube why you gotta have everything for free bro?” bullshit from a few months ago.
I’ve noticed the same thing you have, but I suspect it has a different explanation. I think it’s more an echo chamber thing. People have said variations of this for a while now in HN comment threads, on reddit and here. And there’s a snowball effect from more people saying it.
But there’s been a throughline of bizarrely apathetic and insubstantial low effort comments. That’s the one thing that has tied them together, which is why I think they are echo-chambery. Just for one example: one guy just never read a 990 before (a standard nonprofit form), and read Mozilla’s and thought it was a conspiracy, and wrote an anti-Mozilla blog post. And then someone linked to that on Lemmy and said it was shady finances. Tons of upvotes.
But I’m convinced that no one reads through these links, including the people posting them. Because it takes two seconds to realize they are nonsense. But it doesn’t stop them from getting upvoted.
So my theory is echo chamber.
I think it’s probably a combination of both. There’s an astroturfing campaign going on somewhere, just not on Lemmy, which is overall too small and insignificant to target. But astroturfing works - it creates the echo chambers you’re talking about, it creates apathy. Most people just read headlines, not even the comments. You read a bad story about Mozilla once a week and you’ll start to internalize it - eventually your opinion of Mozilla will drop, justified or not, to the point where you’re willing to believe even the more heinous theories about it.
So you end up with a lot of people who’ve been fed a lot of misleading half-truths and even some outright lies, who are now getting angry enough about the situation they think is going on to start actively posting anti-Mozilla posts and comments on their own.
Right - I think either way there’s a snowballing effect. Astroturfing, at least as far as I can tell, can be notable for at least trying to make coherent arguments. Echo chambers I would say are characterized by fuzzy thinking, and I’ve seen more of the latter here (especially in this thread).
That said, sometimes the goal of astroturfing isn’t to make a point but to degrade conversations with noise and nonsense, extrapolations and digressions. In light of that, I suppose that too could explain some of what we’re seeing.
You just described why astroturfing and social engineering is so effective. Most people don’t check. So someone can post straight up nonsense and still influence millions of people’s opinions.
I also noticed the same trend here and elsewhere as well.
Dude SAME. I find it extremely hard to believe that Google would astroturf Lemmy but it really does feel like all of a sudden in the past ~month a bunch of vague or minor complaints being repeated over and over in every thread.
I use to follow a subreddit called /r/degoogle, which was nominally for conversation about how to remove and avoid using google products. … But I ended up leaving because in pretty much every thread there was a whole lot of posts shitting on any and every suggested alternative, mostly for not being hardcore enough. It was as if the only acceptable approach was to never use any electronic device ever again. Firefox of course was constantly under fire for taking money from Google; which apparently made them worse than Google themselves. … Anyway, I strongly suspected that people were deliberately trying to destabilize the group so that it couldn’t grow or become functional. I had no other explanation for how counter-productive the bulk of the conversations were, and it would certainly be an easy and potentially useful group for pro-google people to target.
I’m less convinced that it is happening here though, but I’m certainly more suspicious of it after that experience with /r/degoogle. I reckon probably why we see a lot of any Mozilla stuff here is just that the audience on Lemmy is very interested in what Mozilla is doing - and negative news always gets more traction than positive news.
as a non google astro turfing shill (you’ll have to take my word on this one lmao.)
I kinda get it, 80% of mozillas revenue comes from google? If that monopoly case doesn’t kill mozilla, this might.
I could see google trying to pull some shit like this.
Mozilla doesn’t need 80% of its revenue to do a good job of maintaining a browser codebase. So it’s a good thing that that funding could disappear, Mozilla could fold like a lawn chair and the next open-source fork that everyone got behind would pick right up and probably do a better job at the core task than Mozilla is.
This idea that open-source software requires more than a dedicated contributing community is (one of many) memes created by the likes of Google and Microsoft in order to snuff out FOSS competition.
i could see that being the case, i would expect it to be the case, but judging by how much the CEO of mozilla gets paid, idk how long that will last…
Although the open source nature of it would be highly beneficial, it might give grounds for google to be a literal monopoly, so maybe that would be productive even. Who knows.
Pretty sure they have AI that does it now.
They’re getting slammed in court cases. I’d say they have motivation.
no way bro, I love paying for YouTube why you gotta have everything for free bro?
Yeah bro, by are you not paying for freeing everything YouTube? Do you get the picture?
Yep. It’s infuriating. These Firefox communities are trash.
We should verify users somehow. No idea how, but I don’t see a future for the internet without it.
How do we prevent that from being abused to ostracize users who people just disagree with? Like how downvotes are used to suppress distenting opinions.
Good faith mods? AI trained on detecting bias terms and concepts? Community notes? No idea, maybe we should try all the above. The internet frequently rewards bad actors, so targeting those rewards should help.
(Uhhh, AI in charge of censorship? So no one knows how decisions are made? No one can know with AI. That’s just a large mistake. The other ideas have some merit though.)