Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

The rather troubling part of this announcement in a GitHub issue is that this nugget comes out in a seemingly innocuous comment[1]:

>> Firefox still uses MLS for `browser.region.network.url`; will that also move to Google Location Services?

> This endpoint will be migrated to another service (classify-client) that will return the expected response. We'll adjust DNS entries when it's time to make that move so firefox won't see any difference.

What exactly is this "classify-client" service?

Note also this led me to discover for the first time that this is a thing[2]:

> Geolocation for default search engine

> In order to set the right default search engine for your location, Firefox will perform a geolocation lookup once by contacting Mozilla's servers and store the country-level result locally. This connection happens on the first start of Firefox – in case you want to prohibit that, you will have to preconfigure the browser and set the browser.search.geoip.url preference to a blank string.

Also related is [3].

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065#issuecomment-...

[2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...

[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/iq27wa/disabling_l...

classify-client is probably this project: https://github.com/mozilla/classify-client

Looks like it depends on a GeoIP database.

Searching for the file name the default database seems to be MaxMind's free database:

https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geolite2-free-geolocation-data

They are the comany that infamously set the default US location to a farm in Kansas, causing all sorts of trouble for the people who live there. From the file name it sounds like classify-client is by default only trying to identify the country you are in.

I'm not seeing a browser.search.geoip.url setting, however I have geo.enabled set to false and various other setting that might cause that to not be present.

Default, or center?

I can't remember the details but there was at least one larger HN thread on it so it should be easy to find. Enough people (including various police agencies) were confused that it caused major issues for the people who lived there.

I don't think they purposefully picked their farm though as the default, but rather their farm landed on the center of the polygon they were using to represent the area being searched. Maybe we need to figure out a different UI way of doing this, but isn't this unavoidable? Search any country on any maps app and zoom in to the max - you will be on someone's property.

I don't think it is worth going over this again here, as I said there was a HN thread with more info including your question discussed at some length. It sounds like they moved it to a lake to limit the chance of it happening again.

I know exactly the thread you are talking about.

So they did choose a location - the lake, in response to the center being a bad location.

>> Firefox still uses MLS for `browser.region.network.url`; will that also move to Google Location Services?

Is that the latest rename of `geo.provider.network.url`? And if so, have they changed the json format again too? I set that manually on my desktop because Mozilla's regularly put me far away (and in a different legal jurisdiction).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com