Mozilla, the maker of the popular web browser Firefox, said it received government demands to block add-ons that circumvent censorship.
The Mozilla Foundation, the entity behind the web browser Firefox, is blocking various censorship circumvention add-ons for its browser, including ones specifically to help those in Russia bypass state censorship. The add-ons were blocked at the request of Russia’s federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor — the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media — according to a statement by Mozilla to The Intercept.
“Following recent regulatory changes in Russia, we received persistent requests from Roskomnadzor demanding that five add-ons be removed from the Mozilla add-on store,” a Mozilla spokesperson told The Intercept in response to a request for comment. “After careful consideration, we’ve temporarily restricted their availability within Russia. Recognizing the implications of these actions, we are closely evaluating our next steps while keeping in mind our local community.”
“It’s a kind of unpleasant surprise because we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information.”
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. “And due to these values, it should not be so simple to comply with state censors and fulfill the requirements of laws that have little to do with common sense.”
Developers of digital tools designed to get around censorship began noticing recently that their Firefox add-ons were no longer available in Russia.
On June 8, the developer of Censor Tracker, an add-on for bypassing internet censorship restrictions in Russia and other former Soviet countries, made a post on the Mozilla Foundation’s discussion forums saying that their extension was unavailable to users in Russia.
The developer of another add-on, Runet Censorship Bypass, which is specifically designed to bypass Roskomnadzor censorship, posted in the thread that their extension was also blocked. The developer said they did not receive any notification from Mozilla regarding the block.
Two VPN add-ons, Planet VPN and FastProxy — the latter explicitly designed for Russian users to bypass Russian censorship — are also blocked. VPNs, or virtual private networks, are designed to obscure internet users’ locations by routing users’ traffic through servers in other countries.
The Intercept verified that all four add-ons are blocked in Russia. If the webpage for the add-on is accessed from a Russian IP address, the Mozilla add-on page displays a message: “The page you tried to access is not available in your region.” If the add-on is accessed with an IP address outside of Russia, the add-on page loads successfully.
Supervision of Communications
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. In 2018, there were multiple user reports that Roskomnadzor had blocked access to the entire Firefox Add-on Store.
According to Mozilla’s Pledge for a Healthy Internet, the Mozilla Foundation is “committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience.” Mozilla’s second principle in their manifesto says, “The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.”
The Mozilla Foundation, which in tandem with its for-profit arm Mozilla Corporation releases Firefox, also operates its own VPN service, Mozilla VPN. However, it is only available in 33 countries, a list that doesn’t include Russia.
The same four censorship circumvention add-ons also appear to be available for other web browsers without being blocked by the browsers’ web stores. Censor Tracker, for instance, remains available for the Google Chrome web browser, and the Chrome Web Store page for the add-on works from Russian IP addresses. The same holds for Runet Censorship Bypass, VPN Planet, and FastProxy.
“In general, it’s hard to recall anyone else who has done something similar lately,” said Shakirov, the Russian open internet advocate. “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.”
Wow, wtf Firefox? Not even Chrome is blocking some of the add-ons…
Guess enshittification is starting to creep into Firefox now too
Think about it, pretend you are the Mozilla CEO. You get a
requestdemand from Putin that you block these addons, and you have two options. A) Make a stink and stick to your principles, of which Putin has none, and so you get Firefox banned in Russia altogether. Now, Russians who want to use it cannot, and are forced to use other browsers that Putin can control. or B) Comply with the request, knowing users can still load extensions from the side.Only one of these two options leads to the possibility of Russians being able to use Firefox with these addons, and it’s B.
Oh and fuck Putin, just because.
people who were using these addons probably had them installed already, so it’ll only affect new users
They chose to comply with the request and become one of the browsers Putin can control. Not sure how Mozilla gets credit for anything good here.
I guess there isn’t a good path here. There never is when Russia is involved. I guess just less bad maybe, I dunno
Firefox was pretty great in 2003 ;-)
When should an organisation stop complying with totalitarian governments? First they stop the extensions.
What if they request for Firefox to add site filters, or else?
What if China demands similar bans for extensions related to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet etc?
It can go on and on. Some baselines should not be negotiable.
They’ve added a temporary block while they decide what to do.
Same thought Yandex programmers before they turned it into biggest Putin’s propaganda machine on the internet.
It has been since proton imo. only one person in my group is still on the base version of the fox, the rest of us have preferred forks.
is that something you know for sure? or has Google quietly complied with similar requests, without making a statement like Mozilla has here?
It’s in the article
Did you read the article? No? Cmon. You should start doing that before drawing conclusions.
This is noted as a temporary block on the specific extensions ONLY within the country with regulatory power to ban Firefox. Russia.
Mozilla has stated this is temporary so they can have the breathing room to figure out how to navigate this. Since this goes against their principles.
It’s either Firefox is banned in Russia, or they do this. Which causes more harm? That’s a rough choice for them to need to make.
This is proactive ban before court desicion.
Your biggest mistake is trusting the word of a corporation.
If it was a good faith action why would they do it in secret, why not make a post about it and informing everyone before hand about the situation?
For me, all evidence points to them hoping no one would notice and “temporary” would roll over into permanently.
Your biggest mistake was automatically assuming anything in corporation says is a lie, and projecting that into me.
All that matters is the track record.
Mozilla is a for-profit company, “temporary” = “quiet permanent” especially coupled with the secrecy and attempts to keep things quiet.
Yea, no, this isn’t going to be “temporary”
This comment aged like milk given they had already lifted the ban.
Yes, and I’ve already made a comment admitting as such in the relevant thread…and in the week since I made that comment Mozilla is in another scandal
Does the add-on work the same way in Chrome? Or does Google break it in a way similar to uBlock Origin with the WebExtensions v3 update?
God I’m getting sick of that word.
I’m sick of the concept it represents.
Besides, this instance isn’t even enshittification anyway.
Enshittification is when a company makes the user experience worse to squeeze more money out of them. This is just government regulation.
Darlin’, English, like any language, evolves.
Still Mozzila Corporation seem to be trying to earn more money by staying in the Russian market.
That’s a stretch.
How else would you explain Mozilla’s decision?
Not really, they’re a for profit company with very little market share and as a result very little wiggle room to, say, be banned from an entire market region
They’re protecting profits over people like so many other companies do. Mozilla Firefox is no savior, they’ll protect their profits just like any other.
Protecting profits isn’t the same as trying to squeeze more profits. If companies were enacting bad policy out of legitimate concern for their business (as is the case here), it wouldn’t necessarily be an issue.
If they get kicked out of the Russian market then those extensions wouldn’t be available there anyway.
Yeah me too, but can we not discuss it in a more nuanced and useful way than just shoving this word into every single post on Lemmy?
If things would stop getting shittier, then yes. I’m not entirely sure that it applies here so I understand your annoyance, but you’re seeing “enshittification” everywhere because we’re seeing the practice of enshittification everywhere. I applaud it being called out. We shouldn’t be seeing higher prices for worse experiences, but that’s the current trend. If you’re tired of seeing the word, then it’d probably be a good idea to take a break from c/technology because I don’t think it’s stopping any time soon.
We’re not, though. The word “enshittification” was coined to describe a very specific kind of shittiness, not just a general “I don’t like this development.”
Now that the word is being used in the more general sense, though, we’ve lost a useful way of referring to just that very specific kind of shittiness. We already had plenty of ways to say “I don’t like this development” so this is a net loss for the descriptiveness of language.
I think we see it so much because kids on the internet think it’s fun to say. It’s dismissive and stifles meaningful conversation.
I think it describes a phenomenon we’ve seen repeated over and over almost without variation. Every single internet service slowly gets shittier as they switch from investment to returning investment. Everything going back to MySpace and Yahoo Spaces went from awesome to abandoned as soon as they started trying to monetize the platform they built. It’s fair to have a word for that and observing the inevitability.
Does it do any good if it is inevitable? I don’t know. The Fediverse seems to be a direct reaction to it, and I’d like to see more.
I don’t disagree that the word should exist, I’m saying it’s become overused to the point of becoming meaningless. Take this entire thread, for instance. This is not enshittification - yet, here we are.
Alright. It’s fair to point out that it’s not applicable. People do that shit, though. But if it wasn’t so damn applicable all the time, you probably wouldn’t notice and be sick of it.
I’m already two martinis into my evening, so I’m done worrying about it. Cheers, mate.