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Mozilla Firefox Blocks Add-Ons to Circumvent Russia Censorship
(theintercept.com)
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
Let them. If everyone refuses to comply the authoritarian control of the Russian government over its people will crumble a little.
If everyone
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.
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firefox can install extensions outside of mozilla add-ons
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
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Shadowsocks...
And guys! Please get your snowflake proxies running!
snowflake is actually blocked quite well
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
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
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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.
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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.
If only Firefox had publicly available source code that anyone could compile
Why is Mozilla even in Russia? They really should pull out completely and the certainly should not comply with this requests.
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What the frigging cow-dung is going on there, Mozilla?
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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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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