Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

This happened to me yesterday, so I looked for it.

The Extension actually does nothing, but invert (make them upside down) a few words on specific sites.

It's an experiment called "PUG ARG" to check whether page contents sniffing works. Its page doesn't reference any Bugzilla issue or Wiki page, while https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies/Queue doesn't list it.

The source code references https://support.mozilla.org/kb/lookingglass, which (as of now) only says "test - 12817".

The add-on tests whether specific words can be detected on sites; the current list has nice picks like "revolution" and "privacy". Of course, this is only a test, but in the future Firefox might look for specific terms in the pages you load and do specific things based on them.

The other thing it's doing is to send an extra header to three specific sites: https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/blob/da464ac8f1c3b0894.... I suppose the words and the domain are a reference to the Mr. Robot series.

The add-on describes itself as an "Augmented Reality Game Experience" and was made by a certain "PUG Experience Group": https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/blob/da464ac8f1c3b0894....

Of course, Shield Studies are supposed to be a way of making "more informed product decisions based on actual user needs".

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7jh9rv/what_is_loo...

Wow, FF is sniffing the content and changing words.

Could not think of anything worse a web browser could do.

Do they change political arguments on pages in the future to see how I react in a user study?

Signed Mr. Guinea Pig

>Do they change political arguments on pages in the future to see how I react in a user study?

It's possible: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information...

That's ridiculous, since FF is literally fetching and rendering that content, being its raison d'être.

You can't "sniff" what is already yours to begin with.

Is this something that was a test that just got merged into production? It sounds like an honest mistake that shouldn't have gone out?

I was fine with the Shield Studies program when I understood it to be a tool for improving the browser.

This is clearly an abuse of a development/testing/telemetry tool to deliver an advertisement.

Trust is hard to win and easily lost.

Take a look at the existing studies: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/sumo/shield.php

Sniff implies sending. It's the scanned content transportation and destination that's the issue.

This would be a major blunder and showing that the merge into production process is lacking a lot.

Luckily this is intended and seems to be a paid for marketing/advertising scheme

> This would be a major blunder and showing that the merge into production process is lacking a lot.

It's one flag, an entirely non-critical one at that, to either install this add-on hidden or not. It's not a major blunder to forget this once out of a few hundred times and it most definitely does not in any fucking way show that "the merge into production process is lacking a lot".

Absolutely no one would have minded, and there's no reason to either, if this would have been installed hidden.

You need to get the fuck down from those clouds and think about reality. Your comments are getting more ridiculous by the minute.

There's no sending involved with this add-on.