Gregory's Server@kevinrothrock summary above incomplete. Russians were blocking Mozilla add-on store. These add-ons are blocked only inside Russia by Mozilla, presumably to avoid having their whole site blocked. Still not good, but not as bad as the summary makes it sound.
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@kevinrothrock Sure but if the KGB was saying "either you remove these tools or we ban your entire site" they chose to remove the tools for Russian IP addresses. People with VPNs can still get them. The summary sounded like Mozilla was collaborating with the Russians or something.  @kevinrothrock @mike805 ok thanks @mike805 for the precision. Indeed it changes what the title suggested. This being said, it's still a cooperation with Russia. I guess there was other alternatives: accepting to loose the market, providing a way to run alternative stores, recommend alternatives when ppl run Firefox in Russia etc...  @emergence_trailblazer @kevinrothrock @mike805 Well, it's not like, with the direction Firefox was taking this last decade, they would care to make extension repositories a thing that browser natively supports. At least, we can distribute extensions through other sites...  @emergence_trailblazer @kevinrothrock @mike805 We'll see what happens, https://www.osnews.com/story/139928/under-pressure-from-russian-censors-mozilla-removes-anti-censorship-extensions/ also implies they likely have to face fines or arrests of Mozilla employees otherwise, so let's see. But it also seems to imply this is not a final decicion… (maybe they get their employees out of there 😉) @rugk @emergence_trailblazer @kevinrothrock Well yeah if they have employees inside Russia who are Russian citizens, then they have to do what the orcs say, at least publicly. The right thing to do in that case is malicious compliance, i.e. you officially do as you're told, and have some people outside of Russia who are not publicly affiliated make it easy to work around the ban. People inside Russia should not be involved in that. @mike805 @emergence_trailblazer @kevinrothrock and how would you make it "easy to work around" the ban? @rugk @emergence_trailblazer @kevinrothrock Add a Tor hidden service for downloading Mozilla software and plug-ins, for starters. And there would be a stand-alone installer for the relevant plug-ins, so if I used a Tails live environment or similar, I could download that, copy it out, and load it into my main working environment. Tails provides very good anonymity, but does not naturally mesh with the rest of your online life. And the Tor exit nodes often get blocked or captcha'd. |
@mike805 “we’ve temporarily restricted their availability within Russia” is pretty cut and dry