Something with a public wiki page describing what it does exactly is hardly a backdoor.

Also here's the code for the server: https://github.com/mozilla/normandy

The wiki entry evidently doesn't describe what it does because according to the wiki entry it allows for the enabling and disabling of preferences. The updating of a certificate is beyond what is described in the wiki.

Mozilla should follow up with a post describing exactly how Normandy works and the full capabilities it gives them.

From what I understand, Normandy is an infrastructure for delivery of some changes to some of Firefox users (or all of them). There are two major use cases: preferences rollout and studies. In the first case default values of preferences get changed (if your pref has non-default value, it won't affect you). In case of studies some piece of code gets delivered and executed, which cat do anything. In this hotfix the study installs add-on, which in turn installs certificate.

Users shouldn't have to search and then be able to understand the code found for such a feature. When a remote capability such as this exists it is Mozilla's responsibility to document how the feature works and the exact capabilities it gives them. Instead of doing so they have produced a wiki entry which appears to falsely describe the capabilities of this remote feature by stating it is used to change default preference values.

Hacker News

I think people here can be expected to read some code if they are interested in how something works.

Please read and follow the site guidelines when commenting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

All code is available – as a tar.xzipped archive of Firefox source code containing over 150k files and measuring over 1GB in size when unpacked.

grep -iR normandy

I expect code related to normandy to be ~1k LOC in size and probably written in JS. I haven't checked though, because I don't really care today.

And you shouldn't have to care. No one should. The very fact that this exists and that we are expected to trust it is very disappointing.

Open source software can't have a backdoor because the code is available to review.

Got it.

Type about:config in the address bar and search for 'app.normandy.enabled' flag.

Well that's interesting. I see Normandy enabled, but if I go to the "Privacy and Security" section of the preferences page I see all the data collection and use stuff disabled. There's no obvious way to disable the Normandy back door.

Oh well, at least we don't have another season of Mr Robot spam to look forward to.

Presumably the logic is something like:

    if (studies.enabled) {
      if (normandy.enabled) {
        ...
      }
    }

> There's no obvious way to disable the Normandy back door.

???

It's a publicly documented feature with a publicly documented way to disable it.

With an obscure name and no correlation to all the other spying and backdoor ING Mozilla are doing. Is this really the best option tog etaprivacy focused browser? I think this is all very worrying.

Can you elaborate on what 'other spying' Mozilla does? Do you mean their telemetry?

Spying was the wrong word. But yes, the telemetry. The google analytics that are hidden on the extensions page, that only listen to the Do not track, but not the turn off telemetry checkbox. Sadly it just doesn't seem to stop.

It's named after a world famous beachhead of an invasion. The name isn't that obscure for a feature that invades the userbase with a takeover.

I am not sure what 'spying' Mozilla is doing, but I agree this should be better named and better highlighted.

here the flag is true but the extensions are still unsupported

It may take a little time for the partial fix to be distributed.

Not so in Firefox for Android. No normandy to find.