Mozilla Firefox Blocks Add-Ons to Circumvent Russia Censorship
https://theintercept.com/2024/06/12/mozilla-firefox-russia-censorship-blocked/Open linkView original on lazysoci.al159
Comments58https://theintercept.com/2024/06/12/mozilla-firefox-russia-censorship-blocked/Open linkView original on lazysoci.al
WTF on the part of Mozilla
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.
They should tell Russia to eat a dick. Remember when Google did that to China? I thought it was very cool of them
Unfortunately, the time when they seemed cool is long gone
@iopq @neuracnu Since when Google becomes your moral guidance? The company literally provided AI assistance to the genocide of tens of thousands of people, it spies on everyone on this planet, and willingly offer those info to the US government at request.
No, they were cool when their motto was don't be evil. It is no longer their motto. That was the canary
Let them. If everyone refuses to comply the authoritarian control of the Russian government over its people will crumble a little.
I think, that's the problem...
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
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.
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.
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.
Instagram is banned and blocked in Russia but it hasn't stopped the people from using it at all.
I disagree with that.
Surely there is someone, somewhere who is unable or deterred from using Instagram in Russia because of the ban.
release builds cannot and all extensions not signed by Mozilla will refuse to install
The addons on the store are signed and you can install them from an xpi file in regular Firefox.
Try it.
On mobile that may be the case, but on desktop you can definitely install extensions not signed by Mozilla
only until restart.
to load unsigned extensions persistently, you must use nightly or developer edition and enable a hidden config flag.
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
Only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that I installed it before this requirement was made and my install is grandfathered in
Shadowsocks...
And guys! Please get your snowflake proxies running!
snowflake is actually blocked quite well
Any alts for them out there that people could contribute too?
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
Its good to hear regular Tor is up and working for them.
I'm using Outline. Is that safe? I've never tested it against a hostile nation though.
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
Already done, has been for several months 😆
A quick web search for "page is not available in your region" indicates that it's not the first time they've done something like this.
And US government just forbade any IT services to work with Russia
not "any", but some very specific ones
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.
The problem with this is that Russia tries to block all popular VPNs as well.
I know, there are many VPNs and you can host your own VPNs, but most regular users won't bother.
Or even better, do not live in Russia
Me omw to move out from russia (it's sooo easy to do)
I would but that is very easy for me to say not being Russian
Just volunteer to go to Ukraine, then surrender. Try not to get raped by your own guys!
Me omw to risk catching a mindless bomb or a shot in the back to use the internet. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll have a chance to surrender without either happening.
gee why didn't the people who live there think of that. /s
Why is Mozilla even in Russia? They really should pull out completely and the certainly should not comply with this requests.
What the frigging cow-dung is going on there, Mozilla?
If only Firefox had publicly available source code that anyone could compile
Any similar extensions to bypass EU censorship?
Tor browser?
That's what I have been using. More often than not I get exit nodes that allow the propaganda through.
A proxy or VPN outside the EU?
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
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.
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.”
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Disgusting.
Hot take: Mozilla should stop with the political nonsense and spend their resources on improving Firefox.
For that matter maybe they should actually stand up for freedom and privacy
Hi tankies! waves
I think they would be happy that Russia is fighting down censorship
Liberals continue to confirm that the depth of their worldview is a flat, featureless line, with no prompting whatsoever. Thank you.
Great for Russians ! Nobody wants, or needs US/Capitalist propaganda/manipulation in the back door..
yeah the russia government that is currently full of oligarchs definitely doesn't like capitalist propaganda and manipulation.