This is genuinely disturbing.
A developer was planning on sneaking data collection into a product through a sketchy terms of service. That on its own should keep the app out of any marketplace.
The subsequent claim that the developer simply forgot to include this in the TOS doesn’t get any extra sympathy from me. Funny the apology only appeared after the developer got caught with their pants down, isn’t it?
That GitHub discussion seems to confirm it. The developers shutting down their extension immediately afterwards too just reeks of suspicious activity.
The version number for the extension in my browser (1.8.8) doesn’t match the latest release that’s visible on this otherwise public repository (1.8.0)
So presumably at some point “someone” “somewhere” modified or added some files to the source code of this extension out of public view… and then “somehow” got a hold of this dev account password or whatever which was subsequently used to surreptitiously push it to the chrome webstore…
There are web clipping tools - even open source ones - to help you with stuff like this.
Based on your other comments here, you should probably start organizing your tabs before your browser simply crashes.
I wondered why this was downvoted before I saw the original message in my notifications
yeah, thanks Mr/Ms obvious, you described exactly the reason of why it does not look vanilla at all, that big giant bottom ad banner
Anyway, my point is that I would assume Firefox would look different if there was evidence the user caused this banner by accidentally injecting malware into the browser within Linux.
What are the chances Mozilla will actually open source the deepfake text detector, which is literally the only part of the entire Fakespot portfolio that might be worth preserving?
ETA: here’s FakeSpot failing spectacularly to identify an AI-generated book with phony, AI-generated reviews.
This narrows the possibilities down to three four interesting options.
Some other comments have been annoyingly dismissive, but I hope you push onward to figure out what the hell this is. Because if it’s one of the first two, it’s a big deal.
What part of it doesn’t? Besides the massive banner added the bottom of the screen, everything looks like it’s the default. That icon in the top-left corner comes preinstalled. The search engine is still the default. The only customization I see here is an extra theme and a couple of add-ons.
This is something new. What’s under the 3-dot menu? And to cover our bases, can you look through your browsing history to determine where this copy of Firefox came from?
“thought-provoking stories” has been part of Mozilla’s Firefox for a while, originally tied to their Pocket branding. I guess Pocket is dead but sadly not this part of it.
To be fair, the article itself recommends it.