Mozilla's sanctions against VK (Russia)?

IAM
#1

It looks like Mozilla is starting sanctions against VK. Now you can’t log in. That’s what you see if you try to:

Циклическое перенаправление на странице
При соединении произошла ошибка. Эта проблема может возникать при отключении или запрещении принятия кук.

(Okay, I have a different browser.) The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist and some other media outlets have canceled paid access to a number of publications about the war in Ukraine for Russian and Ukrainian readers - thanks to them. On their websites, a person living in Russia, where almost all publications opposed to the putin regime are banned, can read the truthful information. And you decided to complicate the life of a Russian who, quite possibly, is against the war and hates putin? Well, such a person can throw your mozilla in the trash.

#2

That is a network error and not any kind of intentional blocking: the site redirected too many times and Firefox gave up to prevent infinite loops. Typically this happens during login flows where one site redirects to another for login and then tries to send a token back. If there’s an error the site might keep retrying and retrying. Often this is because cookies aren’t getting saved correctly, which might be because you are blocking cookies, and sometimes is because there’s a script error on the website that interrupts their processing before they get around to saving the cookie.

This could be

  • a website bug, sending incorrect code to Firefox (using Chrome-only features, not testing in Firefox)
  • Your own cookie settings being too strict for that site (Extended Tracking Protection set to “strict”, or disabling 3rd-party cookies)
  • a Web Extension (like an ad blocker) that is blocking parts of the site and ended up blocking too much
  • A firefox bug we need to fix.

Please try, in this order:

  1. disable any Web Extensions that could interfere with that site. You can launch “Troubleshooting Mode” to turn them all off at once, or if you have things like Ad Blockers you can usually turn them off for just that site. => If this fixes the site please report it to the Web Extension author. I’m sure they will want to fix it.
  2. disable Tracking Protection for that site (Click the “Shield” icon in the address bar). If that fixes it please us know so we can adjust Tracking Protection so it will work for that site. We will need to know if you’re using Standard, Strict, or Custom settings for Enhanced Tracking Protection and what site is having the problem
  3. if neither of those fix it please report a “Web Compatibility” problem to https://webcompat.com/ . They will figure out if the problem is with the site or with Firefox and get the ball rolling. Or you could report it to https://support.mozilla.org and they will get the word over to webcompat.com and into the Firefox bug system.

Mozilla does not block websites. Principle 2 of our Mozilla Manifesto is “The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.” We do sometimes put up a warning for phishing or malware sites because user safety is also important (Principle 4). Users can always ignore that warning page and continue on to the site, or turn off that protection feature entirely in our preferences. We do not control the list of sites that get those warnings: we rely on Google’s SafeBrowsing service for that.

-dveditz

#3

Thank you for the explanations. I tried to open vk.com half an hour ago and it was alright. I wrote my post because I had never encountered such an obstacle before. Until today, I used my Chrome to access the site (although two browsers working at the same time take too much RAM). So it seems to be a network error indeed and, hopefully, will not happen again.

#4

Just access to over 150 00 websites is forbidden from Russia by Russian stuctures. Also Russian websites forbid access for user from other countries. If you want to know more, look for information about censorship in Russia.

Use vk is privacy risky.