Comment by geofft
9 years ago
I'm running Firefox via Debian, and I intend to continue running Firefox via Debian - I trust that the outcry in the Debian community would be so huge if the Firefox maintainer (or any other maintainer) allowed this sort of code from upstream through.
Well FF did just get caught with their pants down, installing a Mr.Robot (tv show tie-in) Add-on(extension) to FF users, without their consent. Since it was an Add-On that was pushed after a debian install, Debian devs wouldn't have been able catch it before it reached end-users.
That said, I still use FF, but I do make sure I keep all the opt-in telemetry and stuff off, since it was one of these settings that "let them" get away with installing the add-on without consent.
Granted the add-on by default didn't do anything unless you enabled it, but still.....
The Debian package of Firefox is not supposed to pull any code directly from Mozilla - whether security updates, marketing tie-ins, updated SSL libraries, whatever. Like all Debian packages, code is supposed to go through Debian. The only Debian programs that are supposed to fetch code on their own are ones where you explicitly tell it to do so (e.g., you're running `pip install` or something).
So the only way this code would end up on my machine is one of two ways:
1. The Debian Firefox package is pulling code from Mozilla without the maintainer's review (which is definitely possible, given how complex Firefox is and how there's approximately one person packaging updates including timely security updates), which would of itself be seen as a serious problem
2. The Debian maintainer specifically picked up this code as part of the tarball from Mozilla, and shipped it without noticing (also definitely possible!) or decided it was worth including
For what it's worth, I do not have this plugin in about:addons, and Debian unstable hasn't picked up a Firefox update since December 1, so as far as I can tell the system is working properly.