Firefox disabled all add-ons :-(

@mike808 Already did that. Working so far, but I guess I’ll get to do it again tomorrow. Ugh.

@mike808 Not exactly confidence inspiring, is it?

@blaineg I know. Probably Millennial groupthink that developers dont have to think about OpSec or that there are process requirements that must be developed too, not just code. Process requirements aren’t optional user stories that can be deprioritized until theyre forgotten because they’re hard or the rockstar mentality wont let anyone admit they are charlatans selling snake oil and equine anal effluvia.

There is probably a huge lesson about TLS/SSL certs are not the same as signing certs, and that dynamic Identity and trust relationships cannot be statically embedded into code as data, necause they are not.

@blaineg @mike808

Process requirements aren’t optional user stories that can be deprioritized until theyre forgotten

And for their next trick, Mozilla will forget to renew the domain mozilla.org

@GLaDOS @mike808 Wait, I thought YOU were going to do that!

@lseeber Without any details as to what “mine” even means, the clear answer to your question is absolutely: “maybe”.

@mike808 My firefox and all add ons (as far as I can tell thus far) seem to be working fine. Not disabled.

@lseeber Lucky you. So, what can you tell us about why yours works and everyone else’s doesn’t, or help others whose Firefox isn’t working.

@mike808 I don’t know… hence the question mark.

@mike808 Now all of a sudden the add ons have disabled. In the past 15 mins.

@lseeber See next post. If we knew more specifics about your Firefox version & OS, the responses might be more specific.

@mike808 I’ve done what they said to do. I have no questions, thanks.

@mike808 And we’re back! Felt uber exposed.

@mike808 Thank you. More than you can imagine, thank you. I really miss the original Mozilla team, and want to stab the current morons. I use three browsers, and have the ad blocker add-on only on Firefox. Most sites are unusable without it.

Feh. I’m getting old. I was about to ramble.

Your detailed instructions above have improved my day considerably. Have a nice AliceInWonderland Mushroom (not kidding, that’s the name).

@Shrdlu I was an adblock fan too. Then I discovered Ghostery. It has more fine-grained control over what gets blocked, knows the difference between ads, trackers, and UX/statistics cookies.

Adblockers will be impossible to block in the future with everyone outsourcing every microservice feature of every website outsourced to yet another external cloud-based API broker. Even my local utility companies and all the banks run embedded outsourced ads on their website.

And then when I am shopping for something, I actually do want to see what’s available beyond my limited knowledge of brands and products.

Had you ever heard of Palm coolers before Meh/Morningsave offered them? I hadn’t. Would have spent way too much on a Yeti or RTIC if I was looking on the internet with my adblocker on all the time because I would only see the top 1/2 brands that pay to get Top Post/FP on Google or SD.

And then my wife has a business she runs customer service through a Facebook presence. So I am doomed trying to keep using straight up ABP (AdBlockPlus).

Ghostery seemed to hit that middle ground for now, even though it is a lost cause, IMHO. Even the ISPs and carriers are in on the game, selling access through APIs to your “anonymized” profile in bidding for ad placements that are part of widgets sites use to “monetize” even passive use of content. What do you think ATT, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Youtube and Twitch and Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and Roku and Tivo are doing with the content consumption statistics they collect on you? And that doesn’t even involve a browser, so ABP is useless there.

@mike808 @Shrdlu Dunno if someone mentioned these apps elsewhere, but I also stopped using adblock and switched to a cocktail of uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials. Seems to cover all of my needs, and I’ve only seen roughly 5 sites be ‘broken’ by this practice in the past few years. FWIW

@mike808 I don’t use Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Twitch, Netflix, Roku or Tivo. I only use ATT on my cell phone, and the cell phone gets used for text messages, and rare photographs. The photo app doesn’t have access to location services. My ISP is run by someone I can look in the eye, and there’s none of that crap that larger ISPs do on a daily basis. Upon rare occasion, I bring up youtube within Mozilla. Mostly I use Chrome for that, preferring not to sully Mozilla in that way.

I lead a boring life when it comes to the tech data gathering world (not by accident). AdBlocker works just great for me; it blocks the adds, and if there’s something vaguely interesting that is going to need differing access, I’ll bring the link up in IE8 or Chrome.

On the extremely rare occasions where I need to access something webby on my phone, I usually use Safari (it’s an iPhone, obviously). I doubt I do that even once a month.

@Shrdlu Just having your cellphone turned on generates revenue for your carrier…
Link

A Motherboard investigation showed AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile sold phone location data that ended up with bounty hunters, and The New York Times covered an instance of Verizon selling data.

…

The complaints against T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are largely identical, and all also mention how each carrier ultimately provided data to a company called Securus, which allowed low level law enforcement to locate phones without a warrant, as The New York Times first reported in 2018. The complaint against Verizon focuses just on the Securus case. However, Motherboard previously reported how Verizon sold data that ended up in the hands of another company, called Captira, which then sold it to the bail bondsman industry.

Typical “We sold your data to so-and-so. What they did with it after that us not our fault…” BS. Here, have a year of free credit reporting and identity theft “protection” (really not much more than “access” to identity theft after-the-fact cleanup self-help websites).

What else do you think Amazon and Google are doing with and selling the datasurveillance they get from those Alexa and Google Home always-on listening devices?

@mike808 @Shrdlu

I was pretty sure they were doing this, before I saw this recent article, based on the # of spam calls I get from phone numbers closely tied to recently visited locations.

with the first phone in Q being a reset pixel phone on a new phone line (phone never had apps installed).

experienced similar with an new iPhone with zero apps other than the apple pre-installed default apps.

The spam phone call phony caller ID info tracks recently visited locations quite nicely.

The spam call location incoming caller ID info tracking continued after the GPS capacities on both phones were turned off.

So the telcos (in this case tested with two diff telcos) were likely selling triangulated tower data along with everything else they were selling.

Unless Google and Apple were selling the data.

Hell, maybe everyone was selling the data.

This must be why Congress has been so protective of our privacy!

Oops.

I mostly use Chrome, but I still use Fire^H^H^H^HWaterfox for some stuff, since there are some extensions that either don’t exist, or don’t work as well on Chrome.

@blaineg Thanks, I’ve been giving Waterfox a lap around the pool after your post, so-to-speak. So far I think it’s OK.

@blaineg Thanks for the tip. It seems that tonight Mozilla decided to update Firefox without checking with me first and Quantum did indeed disable all of my beloved legacy add-ons. After opening an closing Waterfox a few times, the add-ons have magically been restored, so for now I am a happy camper. Yay. Waterfox also took-on the appearance of my older version of Firefox, which I like as well. For the few minutes I was forced to use Quantum, I thought it was rather fugly.