Mozilla foundation shows its true face in a carveresque manner

Do you remember Elliot Carver from "Tomorrow Never Dies"? When he was making news, he also asked one of his subordinates whether they released the new version of their software. The response was that yes, and as requested, it was full of bugs and the users would be forced to upgrade for years.

Well, over the last weekend Mozilla foundation has pulled the same stunt: they allowed to expire their add-on signing certificate, which lead to everyone's add-ons stopping to work, and issued an update which fixed the issue. Never mind numerous concerned voices alerting Mozilla to the certificate expiration date which all but fell on a deaf ear.

Billions of users around the world became affected when their ad blockers, cookie managers, JavaScript blockers, download managers and many more add-ons stopped working. Strangely, this always works in favour of Big Ad.

Instead of fixing the certificate, they fixed the software and pushed an update. Those, whose installations were not hardened enough to disallow rogue updates, supposedly received the update automatically. Others had to install it manually. This is how you force everyone to install your latest version these days: sabotage user's environment.

If you are affected and have to be on the latest browser version, you can resort to the unbranded version. It would allow to continue using all installed add-ons after turning off signature verification. If you can afford going with an older version, you can switch to the nightly builds. But the mainstream version would not allow you to run w/o signature validation.

There should be someone who would post a bounty for the Mozilla foundation execs. They should be brought to a very swift justice.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 12:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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