Advertisement in the official FF 1.0 de-DE! Officially? Why?

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Firefox
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Dunderklumpen
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Post by Dunderklumpen »

This sure is getting more and more interesting. They goofed - BIG TIME!
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Kel-nage
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Post by Kel-nage »

Well, I hadn't realised it was put in by him...my goodness, that does change things around.

I just hope they fix it and apologise.
utah
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Post by utah »

Well, diggin deeper into this German thread, it seems that Mozilla foundation's Mitchell Baker herself knew this was happening (and initiated it?):

This is from an official statement that Axel Hecht gave (same thread).
Mitchell Baker hat folgendes geschrieben::

1. We included the search plugin for ebay.de because we thought they would be useful to people. This was the only reason.
2. It's very helpful to know how many searches are initiated from the search box as opposed to the URL bar. To do this requires having the browser send a piece of information to the website so it's clear the search was started in the search box. This "identify as search box initiated search" is the ONLY new thing that happens with the ebay.de search plugin.
3. The providers of the search plugins give us the URL to which search queries should go. In most cases, this URL is to the main search engine system -- yahoo.de, google.de, etc. It appears that ebay.de has done something different, and given us a URL that doesn't point directly to ebay.de.
4. I understand there is concern, or at least a lack of clarity about this.


#2 + 3 are especially interesting - is this being done in other searchplugins?

I'd like to see an official statement of the foundation for sure.
And I think there needs to be a policy on searchplugins, extensions and the like.
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guest123
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Post by guest123 »

utah wrote:
Mitchell Baker hat folgendes geschrieben::

1. We included the search plugin for ebay.de because we thought they would be useful to people. This was the only reason.
2. It's very helpful to know how many searches are initiated from the search box as opposed to the URL bar. To do this requires having the browser send a piece of information to the website so it's clear the search was started in the search box. This "identify as search box initiated search" is the ONLY new thing that happens with the ebay.de search plugin.
3. The providers of the search plugins give us the URL to which search queries should go. In most cases, this URL is to the main search engine system -- yahoo.de, google.de, etc. It appears that ebay.de has done something different, and given us a URL that doesn't point directly to ebay.de.
4. I understand there is concern, or at least a lack of clarity about this.



The post dosen't address the commercial part of the agrement. Does that third party earn some quick bucks for the search being redirected through their website?
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utah
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Post by utah »

guest123 wrote:The post dosen't address the commercial part of the agrement. Does that third party earn some quick bucks for the search being redirected through their website?

As far as I understand it, the quick bucks go to Mozilla Europe. Or at least this was planned after a successful "test stage".
khyrontm
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Post by khyrontm »

Mediaplex, Inc. is a Advertising technology company that use cookies to track an individual's movements on any Web pages that carry their clients' ads. In October 2001, Mediaplex became a subsidiary of ValueClick, Inc.
fnkmaster
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Post by fnkmaster »

I would suggest that this should give the Mozilla Foundation some pause as to how much independence they give Mozilla Europe. It's not exactly clear how independent Mozilla Europe is currently, but they are acting as the trust bearers of the Mozilla, Firefox and other related trademarks and brand. Bad things they do, like this, reflect negatively on Mozilla as a whole.

Seriously - if this were slipped into the US release of Firefox, think of what the reaction would be by the community.
longcall911
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Post by longcall911 »

Cyberevil wrote:You officials should be very much aware that this puts one giant dent into the trust that people put into OSS.

I agree completely. This is an issue about trust and opensource. Most people I know who use Firefox do so because it is a statement against commercialism. These are also the same type of people who support DMOZ and its social contract.

And, slipping ads into .de destroys the trust that many of us have in Mozilla.
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zachariah
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Post by zachariah »

I hope the reporting team at MozillaZine.org gets to the bottom of this and posts a synopsis of the issue on the front page real soon

Help MozillaZine: Donate! or Buy Something!
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esavior
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Post by esavior »

:crazyeyes: Woah... I agree with with guest123 its not a mistake. Sure it was a mistake to do it but its not something that can accidently happen. Mediaplex is not lets hug each other and make OSS company they are in the business of data mining via cookies for better ad generation. Infact if I recall correctly they are in my adblock list. I am very interested in seeing a official responce from mozilla.org. If we dont get a public wiping of MozEurope for doing this I am going to throw a fit. Why will I throw a fit, because the mozilla foundation is cracking down on third party builders who throw in some extra code (see here), by waving the trademark policy; yet their buddies in europe are doing some interesting things and are still calling what they ship Mozilla Firefox. :) Afraid the third party builders will ruin firefox's name, they need to look closer to home

I just hope this gets resolved before we get slashdoted, I am sure my IE friends will be calling me to laugh if its not. :doubt:
Mindjunk
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CoolCatBad
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Post by CoolCatBad »

Everyone is getting in to the act. From Opera 7.54 search.ini;

[Search Engine 3]
Name=&Ebay.com
URL=http://adfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/711-1751-2978-58?loc=
http%3A//www.qksrv.net/interactive%3FMfcISAPICommand%3D
GetResult%26ht%3D1%26SortProperty%3DMetaEndSort%26
query%3D%s%26pid%3D1458483%26url%3Dhttp%3A//
search.ebay.com/search/search.dll%26aid%3D5319893
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esavior
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Post by esavior »

Someone said mitchell earlier as commenting on the issue. I went to her blog to see if she said anything about this current issue, she didnt say anything new but I was reading her firefox 1.0 release announcement and there is a line that caught my interest....
We provide access to search services from a range of sources including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and others you can see in Firefox. We expect to see some funds come to the Foundation as a result of our integrated search. We'll use any funds that result to help support the Mozilla Foundation's non-profit operations. When finances are involved questions often arise about their influence on an organization and we'll spend some time talking about this as we go forward.
(link)

I wonder if thats what they meant by integrated search making profits for the mozilla foundation... this doesnt make me feel good
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wong888
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Post by wong888 »

today is a sad day. :(
cant afford a sig.
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guest123
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Post by guest123 »

On second thought, IMHO, the Mozilla Europe might not have done such a bad thing maybe.

Think of the new firefox release, google has been set up as the default home page. Now, nobody asked why mozilla selected google when there are many other search engines in the market. It seems google would generate huge hits because of the default firefox home page; in turn google might even want to help mozilla foundation, financially or otherwise. Its all about business (come on, mozlla foundation needs some $$ too to run its operation). Opera has something similar for the free version, I assume.

Then why redirecting e-bay searches through some other website, to generate profit (to be used for mozilla foundation, which, I hope use it for sustenance and not profit) raised so many questions?

I guess in case of firefox home page, things are very transparent and google a very respected site; whereas for the e-bay search plugins, things were done in a hushed up way. Moreover, unfortunately, the third party, through which the info was redirected, is a dataminer and uses cookies to track user activity.

But maybe if Firefox redirects its search through some other clean third party and want to generae some resource and do it in a more transparent way, it might be a good source of revenue for the foundation. (Though I have no idea why someone would wanna pay for this kind of service).

I am not sure if I am correct, but I am sure the Mozilla Europe was thinking in this line and one can't say that they are 100% wrong.
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esavior
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Post by esavior »

Here is some more info as I try to piece it together.. WARNING BAD BABEL FISH TRANSLATIONS

The bug that caused the ebay change can be found here.
Pike2 is Axel
and Christoph Berndt is from Web tip media

Christoph Berndt wrote:This partner program is to contribute after a test phase to it,
to secure the financial support of the Mozilla Foundation.

AxelHecht wrote:Should however if parts of the programs, which are for contentwise reasons in it, to offer itself, to finance the further development or technical resources then we should be allowed to use this chance.

Christoph Berndt wrote:From our side no personal data are raised.
The IPs and retrieval queries are stored neither, nor evaluated in any form statistically.

AxelHecht wrote:Neither Mozilla Europe nor I are here opposite client webtip.ch or Christoph.

AxelHecht wrote:Mozilla will go surely rather to failure (or at least a complete change of the staff to go through), before we reequip however our products too adware or third sell data of our users on.


I can now verify the mediaplex site leaves a cookie.
If you direct your browser to: adfarm.mediaplex.com it reads in bold letters
Mediaplex Banner Server

Ebay and Mediaplex linked, I think I am getting somewhere
http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/423321
I think I figured out whats going on see my later post(page 4)
I will edit this post as I find more

What do I think this is all about? Well after digging through the forum and thinking I think this arrangement was something to help out ebay(de). It lets them know how much traffic they are recieving from from the search bar. To be honest I think this is issue with disclosure, which the mozilla foundation always has problems with.. ALWAYS. If they would have just come to the community and told them before 1.0 why they had to change ebay search location it would have been fine, but because they didnt it caused a big hub bub. Not everyone can follow every bug that opens on the bugzilla. Maybe one day they will figure out that we would like to know whats going on too :( even if it isnt a community driven project.

The only thing I do not get is Mediaplex roll in all of this, I know what webtips role is...
Last edited by esavior on November 16th, 2004, 10:15 pm, edited 8 times in total.
Mindjunk
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