Sarah Jamie Lewis (@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social)

It is reminiscent of the recent issue with the Tesseract dev - in fact this Firefox issue may be where Patrick got the idea from. That kind of stuff is not merely happening in a barely-used Lemmy alternative front-end UI, but even Firefox itself!! Lack of transparency, having to spend quite a large amount of effort to decode the strangeness, people questioning why it was done, and in particular in this manner. I found it an interesting story as they went through the process of investigating this strange behavior by Firefox (even though it's not done by bots on the Threadiverse, so a bit of a stretch regarding fit for this community).

https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/117005284142621849:

Do I love the existence of an barely documented binary blob in an open source browser project attached to "filtering" functionality?

No, I can't say I do.

According to contemporary reports and discussion, this filtering functionality was first added so that such sites were not displayed next to "commercial partners".

So that's fun.

https://indiepocalypse.social/@gourd/117005806514136692:

@sarahjamielewis looked up why this list exists, so for other people reading this thread, going by this

Problem: commercial partners do not want their content to be negatively associated with adult content. In the context of Suggested Tiles, this means no sponsored or affiliate tiles should appear within same browser viewport. As an example, MGM would not want a 007 DVD release to be appearing within the same page (in particular, directly next to) where PirateBay tile appears.

Ah. Advertising.

People question why the list chosen to be used for this is a private one rather than a shared resource, able to be edited by the community, and why it was encrypted.

https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/117005414636478349:

@sarahjamielewis Hey, cool! Note that we couldn't reverse anything here - had to use classic cracking, trying lots of host/domain combos until we got exact hits. Kudos to @s3inlc for getting some really hard ones at the end!

I'm going to stop copying links now bc it's so annoying, just the text itself:

@sarahjamielewis It used to be a plaintext list but overzealous content filters on corporate and home networks kept accusing people of downloading pornography when Firefox updated itself.

A solution to that could be to have the source code contain the list in clear text and have the build process do the hashing such that downloading the binary version would not trigger such filters.

@kasperd @mhoye @sarahjamielewis Or they could simply not bend over backwards to make life easier for their advertising partners at the expense of users?

@kasperd This. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a list of questionable sites.

Because you may want to be able to have your browsers not recommend a notorious revenge porn site on a public terminal in a library. Or a gore site in a school.

But, you want to have this transparent. In a way that doesn’t get your binary flagged, or a source code file blocked from viewing due to a parental filter between a contributor and Codeberg, or unintentionally becoming a directory of horrible sites.