Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

On Android I get this:

>We rolled out a hotfix that re-enables affected add-ons. The fix will be automatically applied in the background within the next few hours. For more details, please check out the update at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-failing-install...

Which is like "we did something we shouldn't have causing unauthorised changes to your computer, so we're going to make unauthorised changes to fix it".

Quite telling is that this is supposed to protect us from other developers. On the add-on screen "Enable" is greyed out, there's no "Enable even though Mozilla doesn't like it".

The UX is just like the "fuck you this computer isn't yours it belongs to Microsoft and we'll do what we like with it" that I thought I'd left in the past decades ago.

It's not your computer Mozilla, you fucked it up, you don't get to mess around with it without asking the owner.

My understanding is that this is literally illegal in the UK.

Mozilla barely had any trust left to burn IMO but they sure went all out.

It's worth reading the comments on the original HN article about Firefox extension signing becoming mandatory. Some of them are eerily prescient:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10038999

If Mozilla had barely any trust left than the industry as a whole is truly fucked.

I could say that for reliable software like SQLite or curl.

But for Firefox? My expectations for browsers in general aren't anywhere high enough to warrant raised eyebrows even in the face of monumental fuckups like the one were seeing today. Specially because users tried to warn that this could happen and Mozilla stubbornly said NO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10038999

As I understand it, you agree to the terms of Studies as part of the ToS agreed to on installation. You can disable it later. And--while it was a ridiculous mistake--they didn't make any "unauthorized changes" to your computer. They just let a certificate expire and your computer, running the same code it always had, stopped trusting it.

Hiding behind ToS is ridiculous. Nobody reads them and a moral company should never assume that because its in the ToS they actually have informed consent.

At what point is it your responsibility to verify that something you're using is keeping it's end of the bargain? Ceding all responsibility doesn't seem like the answer either. While forced arbitration and other crappy things in contracts suck, a company protecting itself against explicitly stupid or bad behavior seems reasonable. While it's reasonable to expect a consumer to understand hot coffee is hot, its unreasonable to say that a customer who has purchased coffee that gives them second degree burns had reasonable understanding of the risks. I think the only real solution would be putting customers through plain English video presentations of what rights are present or excluded for every piece of software. This would be terribly inconvenient, however it would make sure people only installed software they trusted and actually needed.

> Ceding all responsibility doesn't seem like the answer either.

Whether I cede my responsibility or not does not excuse a company from acting morally or not. You can't act immorally and say its okay because your users have given informed consent, when you know for a fact that they don't. Studies show that it would take over a year for an average user to read all the EULAs that they agree to in a year. It is literally impossible for an average user to read all the agreements they "agree" to in the average case of a computer user.

> I think the only real solution...

I'm not sure that this problem needs a solution exactly. The status quo is fairly reasonable, companies are expected to act morally and when they don't they get called out in social media and people move on to other companies. The primary threat to this model working is when overly pedantic people on HN and other sites excuse companies actions by saying things like "Well actually you _did_ agree to it by the EULA, so you shouldn't be suprised that they took your first born child, next time pay more attention to what you agree to!"

> My understanding is that this is literally illegal in the UK.

What about this is against UK law?

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