XLE @ XLE @piefed.social

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3 wk. ago

I think this comment said it best:

This is an obvious, thinly-veiled advertisement for a company's services. It's widely known that ad companies track you everywhere by many mechanisms. This is why we use ad blockers of all sorts. This has nothing to do with DuckDuckGo, it's merely used as a vehicle to get clicks.

And a supplemental note from the DDG team themselves :

This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true... please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

(copied from my response to the same post in a different community)

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...

Leveraged for anything from buying a plane ticket to large scale business decisions, Agentic AI holds the promise of adapting to a wide variety of applications to improve users’ productivity and effectiveness.

These AI agents are so successful that their value is still completely abstract and speculative, with no specific use cases in sight. Just imagine the possibilities yourself, because we sure can't.

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.

1. Mozilla did this, and you're the first person to talk about it online
2. Your OS did this, and you're the first person to talk about it online
3. A protected browser page got hijacked by malware on Linux
4. You did this and forgot, somehow

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.

All I can tell you is what I read on the linked page because I haven't analyzed the bill itself.

Impact on ALL Canadians:

Companies must keep records of your personal data under secret government orders, with blanket immunity for privacy violations for handing over more than they should.

Is there no such thing on Android already?

Usually, Apple devices are limited on features, but I've never seen an Android app pull this off.

Watch out for Bill C2. It requires companies to collect data on you (Canadian citizens) and shields them from "accidentally" oversharing it.

https://piefed.social/post/974112