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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Evergreen article: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

I don't agree with Cory Doctorow on everything, but he was absolutely right back in 2012 that platform owners would converge on the idea that the general public is not to have access to general purpose computers. These pushes for locked-down phones, key escrow, neutered browser extensions, mandatory code signing, remote attestation, and so on are all steps toward this convergence.

Yes, yes, there's an argument to be made about protecting devices against owner tampering keeps users safe. But throughout history, haven't most measures against the public been justified by safety concerns? And haven't we been better off, overall, discarding these measures in favor of personal freedom and responsibility?

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The most surprising development on this front has been Firefox's limiting user's ability to install addons that have not been blessed by them. I understand that if you run an app store, you get to review code and refuse to distribute apps/addons that don't meet your standards.

The surprising thing is that Firefox does not let you install a non-blessed addon, even if you are downloading it from the developer's website (i.e., not from Mozilla). They don't give you a warning about installing software from un-vetted sources — they straight up don't let you install. I understand this is the case even if you're running the developer version of Firefox, which is obviously not meant for mainstream users.

AFAIK, the only way to install a Firefox addon that has not been blessed is to get your hands on the XPI and install it in debug mode, which means that it automatically uninstalls itself every time you restart your browser.

I would have expected MS Edge, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari to have done something like this before Mozilla Firefox. What happened to the open web?

> I understand that if you run an app store, you get to review code and refuse to distribute apps/addons that don't meet your standards.

I think that you lose the moral right to curate your app store when you make it impossible for users to switch to alternative app stores.

Curation or no-sideloading: there should be a law that says a company should get to choose only one.

You can sideload relatively easily even on stable, and I'm fine with the UX being slightly arcane because the average user shouldn't need to do it

Is there a way to permanently side-load? In my experience you can only do it via the debug functionality, which uninstalls with every restart. I believe you can side-load approved addons permanently, but I've not seen this for non-approved addons.

On Linux, many distributions build Firefox with a magic directory where extensions can be placed without needing a signature, if you have root access.

E.g. this is how Arch builds and installs Tridactyl https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/...

It is possible to load unvetted extensions, but it's inconvenient. If you go to this url in Firefox:

   about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox

You can install a "Temporary Add-On", which is any add-on/extension you have stored on your local disk[1]. So you can download an extension from a third party, rename the .xpi to a .zip (Firefox extensions are just zip files with a different extension), unzip it, and use the "Load Temporary Add-on" button to point to the manifest.json file in the unzipped extension.

Add-ons installed this way will work as though you installed it via normal means, with the caveat that it will not automatically reload when you restart Firefox, it must be added manually again.

I have developed a few extensions, and this is the standard process for testing extensions during development. There is a similar process in Chrome, etc.

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Chrome is much easier (Load Unpacked Extension), and persists across restarts, IIRC.

It's the reason I decided not to switch back to Firefox. I want to run my own extensions without anyone else's approval.

> I don't agree with Cory Doctorow on everything

Honest question, why this qualifier? Nobody expects a human to agree with everything another person says.

Is it unfashionable on hn to agree with this Cory guy, whoever he is?

EDIT: For anyone else wondering, he seems to be a writer.

>> I don't agree with Cory Doctorow on everything

> Honest question, why this qualifier? Nobody expects a human to agree with everything another person says.

These types of disclaimers are anti-intellectual and you should continue to point them out when you see them.

>These types of disclaimers are anti-intellectual

They are, but it's a habit gained from forums with a broader audience, like Reddit, where a single mistake or unacceptable association can have your voice removed from the discussion.

Learning how to communicate effectively is not anti-intellectual.

I could write a genius paper with bad grammar and poor spelling, and it wouldn't detract at all from my intellectual arguments. However, very few people look at basic editing, spellchecking, and word choices and say that they're anti-intellectual -- nobody claims that by caring about spelling I'm training my audience to be dismissive or shallow when evaluating papers.

Back when I was writing college essays, I would go even farther; I would tailor my grammar to specific people. I knew that certain forums disliked second-person voice or sentence fragments. Other forums leaned in the opposite direction, and I would take a more casual approach.

If you know that your audience has a certain expectation, bias, or ingrained belief, it is good to address that from the start. It's not encouraging laziness or reinforcing a bad habit, it's just making sure that the people you communicate with are on the same page as you. Worry less about what your responsibilities are as a communicator, and worry more about just getting your ideas across -- regardless of whether that entails couching your language or adding disclaimers.

There are very few disclaimers, language choices, or style alterations that I won't use if I'm trying to communicate an intellectual point with someone I know, because I care about them understanding me. Literally everything else is secondary.

> Learning how to communicate effectively is not anti-intellectual.

This is a strawman.

> I could write a genius paper with bad grammar and poor spelling, and it wouldn't detract at all from my intellectual arguments.

It would.

Your life advice here isn't bad, but it's unrelated to my original statement. What you're describing is basically code switching.

> This is a strawman.

Is it? My (perhaps incorrect) understanding of your argument is that your audience should already understand that agreeing in part is not agreeing in full, and that more to the point, if they don't already know that they might not be worth communicating with in the first place.

My argument is that it's a good idea to worry less about what people should know, and more about working around what they do know.

Sometimes good communication means accommodating people's biases and misconceptions about how the world works, and addressing those misconceptions up-front.

> What you're describing is basically code switching.

Sure. And what quotemstr is doing isn't code switching? What is the difference between dismissing an argument because of the source and dismissing it because it was spelled wrong? Why should I accommodate one behavior and not the other?

When people dislike a source they will often dismiss the entirety of the content. If you qualify it like this you can get these people to be more open to the information because they identify with you as a member of the tribe who dislike the source, and the people who are already partial to the source don't care. Imagine, for example, Breitbart gets exclusive information regarding something unrelated to their politics. It's very easy for a large number of people to reflexively dismiss the article because of the publisher, but if you qualify it by saying that you're left leaning, then people take a second look.

> When people dislike a source they will often dismiss the entirety of the content.

Pandering to these people on Hacker News is counterproductive.

Unfortunately, this kind of disclaimer is something you eventually acquire as a general habit.

People think it boosts the signal of their post to make their agreement seem exceptional. Simple as. It's such an internet comment meme that it probably even works. Just tack it on to any rhetoric for free points.

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