471803 - Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) 3.57 modifies Help -> About Mozilla Firefox Window to contain political statements

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Policy, defect)

Description

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) verion 3.57, which is the version currently posted on AMO, alters the "Help -> About Mozilla Firefox" window to be a political statement:

"Help Thaksin. Help Thais fight with bureaucratic polity system. Free Thais from the hidden shadow".

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

I'm not sure we should be blocklisting on this basis, however removing from AMO seems like a reasonable step if the author doesn't make changes.

Comment 2

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

That is actually what I was thinking also, but I was not sure under what component to file a bug requesting removal of a theme from AMO that would get the appropriate attention.

Comment 3

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Email the editors list for things like that, [e-mail]

Comment 4

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Perhaps forcing an update back to the 3.56 version should be considered?

Comment 5

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Perhaps forcing an update back to the 3.56 version should be considered?

That isn't possible. Applications will only update to newer (higher) versions

Comment 6

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Well yes, but i was thinking taking the 3.56 version and re-versioning it as 3.57.1 or something.

Comment 7

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Attachment: Screenshot of About page

This is a screenshot of the Help -> About Mozilla Firefox page.

Comment 8

[Dave Garrett]

I agree that the author should probably be asked to remove this. (if just because it annoys users, regardless of their opinion on the statement) However, is this sort of thing actually stated to be against any official policy listed anywhere?

Comment 9

[Dave Garrett]

If the author doesn't want to remove the message, I suggest a compromise of just moving the message to the theme's about dialog instead of overriding Firefox's.

Comment 10

[Nick Nguyen [:osunick]]

I'm going to email the author and disable 3.57.  The 'About Mozilla Firefox' dialog should not be altered for any reason, political or otherwise.

Comment 11

[Nick Nguyen [:osunick]]

PS- this is Nick Nguyen, Add-ons Lead at Mozilla :)

Comment 12

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> I agree that the author should probably be asked to remove this. (if just
> because it annoys users, regardless of their opinion on the statement) However,
> is this sort of thing actually stated to be against any official policy listed
> anywhere?

Well actually there are 2 other issues.

1.  Having this statement in the About dialog, makes it appear that the political statement is somehow endorsed by the Mozilla Foundation.

2.  It makes it appear to users that their copy of Firefox has somehow been hacked.  See this thread:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1018445

Comment 13

[Dave Garrett]

I don't disagree with your reasoning at all. I'm just saying that if this is to be not allowed then I'd like to be able to point at a posted policy statement somewhere saying as much. If this isn't actually against official policy, then that should be corrected first.

Comment 14

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Yes, I agree with your point completely.

If there is nothing specific in the policy regarding political opinions and advertisements from extensions and themes, this needs to be added.

It is my opinion that no extension or theme hosted on addons.mozilla.org should be permitted to present the user with any advertising or political messages under any circumstances.

If such things are permitted, then at a bare minimum, the message needs to state that you are seeing this message because you have the XYZ add-on installed and the message is endorsed by neither the Mozilla Foundation nor the Mozilla Corporation.  I would also suggest requiring the add-on author to display their real name and a valid e-mail address that ends up delivering any feedback about the advertisement to the add-on author.

Comment 15

[Dave Garrett]

In my opinion a non-invasive statement (i.e. in their own about dialog) should be fine, but making it look like it's a statement by Mozilla via Firefox's about dialog should not be allowed.

(In reply to comment #10)
> I'm going to email the author and disable 3.57.  The 'About Mozilla Firefox'
> dialog should not be altered for any reason, political or otherwise.

I'd recommend clarifying the word "altered" here. I would say that it shouldn't be altered by changing the actual content of what is stated. As stated in the thread from comment 12, some other add-ons theme the about dialog without real content changes. There's also fun stuff like this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3867 (though, the pics are old)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/images/p/10489/943948800

Comment 16

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Additionally, since at least version 3.50 of this theme, the author has been encouraging users to set signed.applets.codebase_principal_support to true without explaining the security ramifications of making this change.

Perhaps this should also be addressed in the policy.

Add-ons posted on AMO should not require disabling security features in order to work.

The author should be encouraged and/or helped to get a valid code signing certificate for this extension.

Comment 17

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

(In reply to comment #15)
> In my opinion a non-invasive statement (i.e. in their own about dialog) should
> be fine, but making it look like it's a statement by Mozilla via Firefox's
> about dialog should not be allowed.
> 
> (In reply to comment #10)
> > I'm going to email the author and disable 3.57.  The 'About Mozilla Firefox'
> > dialog should not be altered for any reason, political or otherwise.
> 
> I'd recommend clarifying the word "altered" here. I would say that it shouldn't
> be altered by changing the actual content of what is stated. As stated in the
> thread from comment 12, some other add-ons theme the about dialog without real
> content changes. There's also fun stuff like this:
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3867 (though, the pics are old)
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/images/p/10489/943948800

And, the author could easily argue that the about dialog was not altered in any manner in this instance.  All that was changed was the image.  I believe the additional text is all part of the image.

Comment 18

[Dave Garrett]

(In reply to comment #17)
> And, the author could easily argue that the about dialog was not altered in any
> manner in this instance.  All that was changed was the image.  I believe the
> additional text is all part of the image.

Thus now we're debating the word "content". :p Nonetheless, I think you understand my point here. I don't think we should care about themeing. It's when it says something different that there's a problem. (be it text in the XUL or text in the image)

(In reply to comment #16)
> Additionally, since at least version 3.50 of this theme, the author has been
> encouraging users to set signed.applets.codebase_principal_support to true
> without explaining the security ramifications of making this change.

Yes, this worries me too, but is another matter entirely. I sympathize with the reasoning here. Themes don't normally get options dialogs and he's hacked one into being via the about dialog. He's trying to add greater flexibility for his users, which is a good idea, but he really can't do it normally. Seeing as this option isn't applied only to this one theme, I would think this would be better served as a separate extension.

Comment 19

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

(In reply to comment #15)
> In my opinion a non-invasive statement (i.e. in their own about dialog) should
> be fine, but making it look like it's a statement by Mozilla via Firefox's
> about dialog should not be allowed.

Well it might not be a bad idea to run this past the Mozilla Foundation lawyers.

There could be legal issues in hosting add-ons that contain advertisements, political or otherwise.

Comment 20

[Dave Garrett]

I prefixed that with "in my opinion" for a reason. It's just my opinion.

Comment 21

[Nick Nguyen [:osunick]]

It really isn't about the content of the message, it's more about the gap between what users expect based on the description of the theme and what they actually get.

There are plenty of political themes in AMO, so the message isn't the problem: it's the manner in which it's delivered.  In this case, the developer changed a dialog unrelated to the function of his add-on for a reason unrelated to the theme or its description.  It's actually similar to Malware in that it makes these changes without making it obvious which add-on implemented the change.

The policy that developers agree to when uploading includes a bit about 

"    * your add-on may be removed from the site, re-categorized, have its
description or other information changed, or otherwise have its listing changed
or removed, at the sole discretion of Mozilla and its authorized agents; "

which is broad because in most case common sense prevails and our relationship with developers allows us to communicate openly and resolve issues in a civil and humane manner.

Comment 22

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to comment #10)
> I'm going to email the author and disable 3.57.  The 'About Mozilla Firefox'
> dialog should not be altered for any reason, political or otherwise.

Eh, well, I'm fairly sure that there are themes which display a (slightly?) modified version of the logo instead of the original there, though perhaps they only do that on the theme preview image (in the Theme part of the add-ons dialog) and I'm getting confused. Either way, I am not sure if banning the modification of that logo outright is the way to go. I think that we're arguing mostly based on the impressions the image gives, as discussed in some of the earlier comments.

Comment 24

[Dave Garrett]

A comment about bug 472278: It looks as though the fact that add-ons are updated along with Firefox updates is making a few users think this is caused by Firefox's update itself. Though, this user must have updated a while ago and just reported now because it doesn't want to let me update past 3.56 right now.

On a side note, 3.56 already altered the about dialog to add their logo of some kind, however it does say "Theme by Kongkeat Kuatrakull" right below it.