Re: Agenda for January 15

Hi David,

I'm trying to think this through from a technical perspective, not a
legal- or license-oriented perspective.

On 01/15/2014 09:44 AM, David Singer wrote:
> I am saying, if you write a browser or other UA, that accepts plugins
> or other add-ons, whose DNT header can be affected by those plug-ins
> or add-ons, you need to engineer the way that they work so that the
> rules are followed.  There are many ways to do this.
> 
> We are entirely within the end-system ‘house’ here;  we have not
> stepped into a garden, walled or not.

Our add-ons can rewrite Firefox however they like.  We can do what we
want to make it hard, but the architecture of Firefox intentionally
makes it so an add-on can override pretty much any building block in the
browser.  Reasons aside, this means an add-on can change how DNT works
in Firefox regardless of UI.

We absolutely have many tools to reduce the chance addons will upset
users--from our vetting process to be listed on addons.mozilla.org to a
blocklist we can use for malicious addons--but these are both imperfect
and one can still write an addon that fundamentally changes Firefox
without Mozilla's endorsement.

Is that sufficiently addressing the concern for which we want to find
some text?  Mozilla looks for egregious violators of the spec and work
with them to correct it (or make it hard for them to get their software
plugged into Firefox).  It's still technically possible for violating
addons to exist -- we just attempt to correct them?

-Sid

Received on Friday, 17 January 2014 00:44:32 UTC