Mozilla’s new service tries to wipe your data off the web

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 612 points – Mozilla’s new service tries to wipe your data off the web
theverge.com
  • Mozilla has launched a paid subscription service called Mozilla Monitor Plus, which monitors and removes personal information from over 190 sites where brokers sell data.
  • The service is priced at $8.99 per month and is an extension of the free dark web monitoring service Mozilla Monitor (previously Firefox Monitor).
  • Basic Monitor members receive a free scan and one-time removal sweep, while Plus members get continual monthly data broker scans and removal attempts.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/YdY3R

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I got downvoted to hell for saying it before, but what Ubuntu and Firefox are up to together is kinda what Microsoft went to court over Internet Explorer for in the 90s.

Firefox is my go-to today, but I'm watching them closely.

Edit: typical fanboy downvotes. The writing is on the wall. Mark my words y'all. In 2035 you'll be saying "get off Firefox" like you're currently saying "get off chrome". I've seen this song and dance before.

Also, look at this super cool not disgusting abomination of a bug that's not a bug. Remap my fucking root directory?

Read on

what Ubuntu and Firefox are up to together is kinda what Microsoft went to court over Internet Explorer for in the 90s.

Can you elaborate on the statement? I'm not connecting the dots.

Maybe it's about firefox coming pre-installed in ubuntu, not sure either

No, they're talking about how Ubuntu doesn't let you uninstall Firefox, and constantly push ads for it down your throat, and how Ubuntu always opens web search results in Firefox regardless of your default browser, and how... Oh wait

So you don't know how to uninstall Firefox on Ubuntu?

Where do these "Ubuntu ads" display in the operating system? Are you talking about the software browser? An application used to get software suggestions is suggesting software? Or something more nefarious?

To me, your post just says, "I haven't used Linux much," because I've never encountered any of these problems.. but I'm always open to being wrong.

Edit : Just wanted to add that I now see that I missed a joke. I appreciate the helpful replies!

They're being satirical.

They're saying Ubuntu does those things then ending it with "oh wait... [they don't! That's what Microsoft does!]"

It was a joke, as the other guy said, i use linux as my main os anyways.

I also didn't get they were joking, a /s would have been helpful

I thought the fact that Ubuntu does none of those things, and the "oh, wait..." Made it clear enough, I'll add a /s next time though

The worst part is the bug thats not a bug that remaps "/" to the Firefox spell check directory... Gross.

See issue here

super cool not disgusting abomination of a bug that's not a bug. Remap my fucking root directory?

I am not convinced that's what's going on. It looks more like some weird thing snap does to make hunspell available to snap Firefox.

Have you seen this behavior on your own Ubuntu install? In other words, can you reproduce the described scenario?

Yes. I literally have a cron job to unmount and rename my root directory to / that runs every 12 hours.

And how does that work? How do you unmount the root directory of a live system and invoke a script?


sudo umount /var/snap/Firefox/common/host-hunspell 2>/dev/null

Sudo snap disconnect Firefox:host-hunspell 2>/dev/null

Like that?

It's not unmounting my root directory it's unmounting what Firefox mounted on my root directory.

You are misinterpreting the information here. Neither Firefox nor Ubuntu are doing anything to your root directory. The behavior described and what you are undoing is that your storage device is being made available at two locations: both at / and at the hunspell path.

lsblk outputs that my NVMe0n1p1 is mounted at /var/snap/Firefox/common/host-hunspell.

This drive and partition is where my root is.

lsblk is just lacking a lot of information and creating a false impression of what is happening. I did a bind mount to try it out.

sudo mount -o ro --bind /var/log /mnt

This mounts /var/log to /mnt without making any other changes. My root partition is still mounted at / and fully functional. However, all that lsblk shows under MOUNTPOINTS is /mnt. There is no indication that it's just /var/log that is mounted and not the entire root partition. There is also no mention at all of /. findmnt shows this correctly. Omitting all irrelevant info, I get:

TARGET                                                SOURCE                 [...]
/                                                     /dev/dm-0              [...]
[...]
└─/mnt                                                /dev/dm-0[/var/log]    [...]

Here you can see that the same device is used for both mountpoints and that it's just /var/log that is mounted at /mnt.

Snap is probably doing something similar. It is mounting a specific directory into the directory of the firefox snap. It is not using your entire root partition and it's not doing something that would break the / mountpoint. This by itself should cause no issues at all. You can see in the issue you linked as well that the fix to their boot issue was something completely irrelevant.

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That makes no sense. The bug listed shows the same device mounted to / and that spelling for in /var or whatever. And your system wouldn't operate if / didn't exist. I'm almost curious enough to go set up a VM to try to see what's happening.

My working solution is literally running a Cron .sh which is

sudo umount /var/snap/Firefox/common/host-hunspell 2>/dev/null

Sudo snap disconnect Firefox:host-hunspell 2>/dev/null

If Firefox updates via snap, it will change back to bullshit. Is the case in every 22.04 VM I have on my machine as well. This script effectively gives me "/" back, and unfucks the rest of my machine.

It is a reason for me looking to leave Ubuntu after 12 years dedicated. Just because it makes no sense doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Man that's well and truly fucked. I would be wanting to ditch Ubuntu also. What distros are you thinking about trying?

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