Hacker News Reader

Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

Can we take a moment and consider the side effects?

This is a once in a lifetime chance for Google & Co. to get a glimpse of all those sly fuckers hiding behind adblockers.

This effectively uncloaked a very specific subset of Internet users and exposed them to the very companies that they've been actively trying to avoid. Not just those who avoid Chrome, but those who take extra steps to explicitly evade the tracking.

Surely Mozilla, the privacy advocate, must understand the impact of this fuck up, and yet the offered "fix" doesn't even mention a one-click .xpi install, but rather asks to enable a mechanism that, if left enabled, will grant unnecessary control to Mozilla over people installs.

This ain't right.

View on HN

For me at least, it was pleasantly surprising that Google either has no inventory or just no clue who I am, as when ublock got disabled by this bug, YouTube started presenting me with ads for cars in mostly Japanese, with prices in Yen and "Singapore stock also available".

I guess because I watched anime videos?

It would be interesting to see what they show for me, but I'm avoiding surfing websites other than HN until it gets fixed (FF for Android).

You can disable the signature verification on Firefox for Android, using about:config and searching for the flag named 'xpinstall.signatures.required'.

Perhaps leave yourself a note to change it back once an update ships : )

FWIW I think it's pretty easy to test if someone is using an adblocker anyway. (I see sites do the "It looks like you're using an adblocker" thing all the time). I don't know if there's any realistic way to entirely hide that.

That's a bit different though- generally speaking those messages show up when the javascript tracker can't talk to the server it's communicating with. Even though it's "detecting" the adblock it isn't able to send information back from the client about it.

> Even though it's "detecting" the adblock it isn't able to send information back from the client about it.

Sure they can, they can just send back a resource request. It could even be for like an image with a query string attached with it, it doesn't have to be an ajax request necessarily.

The ad blockers are smart enough to detect and block that though.

When disaster kicked in, my Firefox prominently displayed a yellow bar informing me that addons had been disabled due to [whatever].

So I wasn't exactly left unaware that Bad Stuff had happened. I could - and did - shut the thing down, apply a fix, and be back up running normally within a few minutes.

My particular brand of fix: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Firefox_disable...

I can't help but consider the tinfoil hat aspects of this matter. I would like to learn more about the sequence of events that lead to this snafu. Would an actor know that by making "an error" at a given point in time, there would be a deterministic window of time in the future where Firefox users worldwide would be affected by the consequences.

As much as I love my tinfoil hat, I can't see any upside for mozilla in this? If it's to get people to opt in to "studies", they already have most people sending them telemetry, apparently, so this would just be to get stragglers? Seems like a really expensive way to do it.

You need to adjust the angle of your tinfoil hat. Oriented properly, you can find other candidates for "actor" besides "Mozilla".

If you have the right hat, with the right amount of tin, you can even start playing with words that rhyme with fuselage. A good exercise, especially if you like practicing corporate fiction.

I still don't understand why Mozilla is taking so long to simply post instructions for the .xpi install as you mention, hosted on their own domain?

it does really feel like "the great upscertificate expiration foul play"

FTA:

> There are a number of work-arounds being discussed in the community. These are not recommended as they may conflict with fixes we are deploying...

Let's give them a little time to get this fixed..

Although may not be as effective as uBlock and other tools, Firefox's incognito mode has some protection against trackers (Content Blocking set to Strict).

>Surely Mozilla, the privacy advocate

The post is still great despite that weakness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com