• neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      I suspect this was a “do it or we’ll categorize Mozilla products as malicious software” situations. But some transparency from Mozilla would be nice.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        They should tell Russia to eat a dick. Remember when Google did that to China? I thought it was very cool of them

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        Let them. If everyone refuses to comply the authoritarian control of the Russian government over its people will crumble a little.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            5 months ago

            Well at the very least they could of just said no. I don’t think they have a Russian office and if they did they probably should get out of Russia

            • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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              5 months ago

              I would expect Russia to just ban downloads of Firefox, if they said no. Like, why would Russia not do that? Chrome, Edge, Safari etc. will presumably bend over backwards quite readily. As in, it would be a disservice to the Russian people to get Firefox banned over this.

              • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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                5 months ago

                The Russian government is a disservice to the Russian people. However, I do not think Mozilla should go along with the collapse of any form of democracy.

                Russia is either exactly like China at this point or it will be like China soon. US companies shouldn’t deal with authoritarian governments. I also dislike that Cisco is a big Chinese government contractor.

    • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      because it’s either do that or block all of firefox from existing in russia.

      besides it’s not really a big deal since firefox can install extensions outside of mozilla add-ons. the intercept is just sensational trash.

        • john89@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          I disagree with that.

          Surely there is someone, somewhere who is unable or deterred from using Instagram in Russia because of the ban.

      • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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        5 months ago

        firefox can install extensions outside of mozilla add-ons

        release builds cannot and all extensions not signed by Mozilla will refuse to install

        • azuth@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          The addons on the store are signed and you can install them from an xpi file in regular Firefox.

          Try it.

        • RandomGen1@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          On mobile that may be the case, but on desktop you can definitely install extensions not signed by Mozilla

          • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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            5 months ago

            only until restart.
            to load unsigned extensions persistently, you must use nightly or developer edition and enable a hidden config flag.

            • RandomGen1@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              Without a nightly or dev version I’m running bypass paywalls clean from github, persistently on the latest Firefox desktop release. I do not believe it’s signed by Mozilla, but I could be wrong

        • chayleaf@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          Well, Tor (with bridges) still works just fine, I don’t really know any other “crowdsourced” proxy networks. Telegram isn’t blocked (it used to be, but everyone used it anyway, including people in the government, so they unblocked it), so any info there is freely available. Wireguard and OpenVPN are blocked (even within Russia for some reason), shadowsocks is throttled on certain connections but works fine, and I haven’t extensively tested anything else.

          Also, mobile networks are used for testing stricter blocking measures before rolling them out to landline connections

        • chayleaf@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          it might work with obfuscation, in general my preferred solution is VPN+proxy, the proxy is used for bypassing the DPI and doesn’t have to adhere to particularly high standards and can be easily swapped, and the VPN is used via the proxy for actually routing L3 traffic

  • Karna@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Either Connect to VPN > Download the Add-on.

    Or, on the GitHub or Gitlab page, provide a copy of extension and the instruction to install it locally.

      • ಠ_ಠ@infosec.pub
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        5 months ago

        That’s what I have been using. More often than not I get exit nodes that allow the propaganda through.

      • ಠ_ಠ@infosec.pub
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        5 months ago

        An extension would allow me to use FF as I usually do for all sites except for list-of-blocked-sites-in-EU that the extension would work its magic on to allow data through. Also, I wouldn’t have to look for a secure proxy myself and it would work (hopefully) on FF for mobile devices.

        (Right now I’m using Tor which was already suggested in a different comment. The effort of having to open Tor is small but I was wondering whther an extension like Censor Tracker existed.)

        I suppose a proxy could work. Ideally I would have multiple proxies working within the same profile like

        • Proxy 1 for websites A, B, C (uni proxy so I can access papers)
        • Proxy 2 for websites E, F, G (Russia proxy so I can read EU-blocked stuff)
        • Rest goes unproxied.
        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          I remember, “back in the days” there was an extension that scraped a list of open proxies by country and then used one of those proxies based on the URL. So what you described was/is possible. Nowadays I’m lazy and have nothing like this set up anymore.

          There also is a problem with open proxies: They could be extremely slow or not working at all but being listed as fast and online so any type of automatism would select them.

          You also never know who’s running them. If you host a proxy or VPN overseas and use this one you at least have some control over what it does. The speed might also be better.

          I guess it just boils down to how much money you’re willing to pay.

          The problem with Tor is, that it is very slow because how it works. You also have zero control over the exit node. It could be run by a malicious actor scraping all your data and sending back false information. Tor is good for poking though government firewalls but not for security, so careful when entering confidential or personal data.

  • NotSpez@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    If only Firefox had publicly available source code that anyone could compile

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    Why is Mozilla even in Russia? They really should pull out completely and the certainly should not comply with this requests.

    • mihor@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      You do realize that the world doesn’t revolve around western whims and ideas?

        • mihor@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          Dictator?? He was democratically elected. Censorship?? We have worse one in the EU!

          • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            Sure he was, just a democractically elected leader since the 90s who political opponents just can’t help eating known poisons.

            Are Pussy Riot in or out of prison right now for dangerously be pro lgbt 8n Russia?

            • mihor@lemmy.ml
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              5 months ago

              Who even cares about Pussy Riot in Russia? Nobody. You westerners simply cannot fathom that one person can remain in power for longer than max. 8 years. That’s why you can’t have nice things.

              • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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                5 months ago

                Are politician assassinations and decades to rig elections “nice things”? Because, yes, term limits are in fact part of the reason we can’t have " nice things" then.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Stanislav Shakirov, the chief technical officer of Roskomsvoboda, a Russian open internet group, said he hoped it was a rash decision by Mozilla that will be more carefully examined.

    “It’s a kind of unpleasant surprise because we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information, and its policy was somewhat different,” Shakirov said.

    Developers of digital tools designed to get around censorship began noticing recently that their Firefox add-ons were no longer available in Russia.

    Roskomnadzor is responsible for “control and supervision in telecommunications, information technology, and mass communications,” according to the Russia’s federal censorship agency’s English-language page.

    In March, the New York Times reported that Roskomnadzor was increasing its operations to restrict access to censorship circumvention technologies such as VPNs.

    “For the last few months, Roskomnadzor (after the adoption of the law in Russia that prohibits the promotion of tools for bypassing blockings) has been sending such complaints about content to everyone.”


    The original article contains 703 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • InstallGentoo@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    Hot take: Mozilla should stop with the political nonsense and spend their resources on improving Firefox.

  • Sims@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Great for Russians ! Nobody wants, or needs US/Capitalist propaganda/manipulation in the back door…

    • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      yeah the russia government that is currently full of oligarchs definitely doesn’t like capitalist propaganda and manipulation.