If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Firefox users in Russia are no longer able to install several anti-censorship and pro-privacy extensions, some of their developers and users are reporting, suspecting at the same time it is the developer of Firefox, Mozilla, that is behind this. The extensions in question are Censor Tracker, Runet Censorship Bypass, Planet VPN, and FastProxy, and it is at this time unclear if Mozilla made the decision to block the extensions in the Russian market on its own, or was acting on an order from the authorities. In either case, users in Russia trying to install the add-ons are met with the message, “unavailable in your region.” These extensions remain online elsewhere, including in the US. At least one developer – from a team behind Censor Tracker, confirmed that the add-on has recently become unavailable in Russia, but also that they are in the dark as to why. Some of the comments left in response to the developer’s post suggest that it might be Mozilla’s decision, considering that censorship bypassing tools, per se, are not illegal in Russia. As seen in Russia As seen in the United States. And while the ever-shrinking community of Firefox users awaits some clarification from Mozilla about what is happening regarding this particular incident, some observers are directly accusing the Mozilla Foundation (a non-profit that owns the Mozilla Corporation) of being behind the blocking of the said handful of extensions. “After recent regulatory changes in Russia, we began to receive persistent requests from Roskomnadzor demanding that we remove five extensions from the Mozilla extension store. After careful consideration, we have temporarily limited their availability in Russia. Realizing the consequences of these actions, we are carefully considering further steps, taking our local community into account,” Mozilla said in a statement to Kommersant, a Russian news outlet. Regardless of the fact Firefox has lost “the browser war” badly to Google’s Chrome, what originally propelled it to for a while be the world’s top browser, ending the era of the dominance of Microsoft’s IE, were the principles of free and open source movement, and commitment to an open internet. And that is how Firefox is still perceived by those using the browser – in fact, that is most often the very reason they continue using it at all. However, given the developing controversy over the blocking of pro-privacy and anti-censorship tools, the nature of what Mozilla has become, and the fact this is not the first instance of censorship, are leaving some in the community wondering if the stated guiding principles are still to be trusted. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Mozilla’s Mixed Signals: Blocking Privacy Tools in Russia Sparks Criticism appeared first on Reclaim The Net.