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The censorship circumvention extension has disappeared from the Russian version of Mozilla Addons (discourse.mozilla.org)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/firefox

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According to zombbo, the developer of Censor Tracker: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/censor-tracker/

I am one of the developers of the Censor Tracker add-on, which is listed on Mozilla’s add-on repository. We recently noticed that our add-on is now unavailable in Russia, despite being developed specifically to circumvent censorship in Russia.

We have not changed any visibility settings, nor have we received any emails regarding this action.

Our Russian users now see this message when they visit the page of Censor Tracker:

*That page is not available in your region.

The page you tried to access is not available in your region.

You may be able to find what you’re looking for in one of the available extensions or themes, or by asking for help on our community forums.*

Can anyone suggest or explain what this is related to? Was there some request from the Russian authorities to make the extension unavailable in Russia or is there some other reason for this decision on Mozilla’s part?

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[–] gmtom 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I know some people will be thinking some variation of

"Well it's better they get rid of this one extension than get all of Firefox banned in Russia"

But you need to see the broader implication. They are openly stating that when given that choice they will bend to authoritarian governments. So if, let's say, the US government demanded their user data or to put in a back door that let's them get it themselves, do you think they would bend to them as well?

[–] XenoStare 5 points 5 months ago

...Yes, I don't believe that Mozilla will kill itself over that or potentially have someone commit felonies to leak info abt government surveillance and subpoenas. But FF is open source so anyone would see a backdoor or notice versions not matching. For user data FF Sync is, afaik, encrypted in a way that Mozilla can't access.

The devs can just put their extension on GitHub or host it on their own website. Issue is just visibility.