Browse activity - should about:mozilla be masked?

[greenfeld]

Supposedly we have modified A.L.I.C.E. to ensure that students do not trigger off phrases in response to topics which could be considered controversial, or which might be considered more appropriate for adults.

The Browse Activity uses Chrome, so the "about:mozilla" handler works. While this is largely meant to be a cute easter egg, its contents may not be considered appropriate for K-12 students.

We may wish to consider hiding this handler, either by editing it out of Chrome (if permissible), or masking all URIs beginning with this in the URI handler so Chrome cannot process it (otherwise about:mozilla?foo=bar will work). I'm not certain if this change should be OLPC-specific, or pushed to Sugar upstream.

[cjb]

I don't find this to be a problem. The reason ALICE was problematic (to me) is that it claimed one particular religious worldview as being truth. Mere information about different religions (as can be found in the wikipedia snapshot we ship), or in this case simply nonsense that sounds like it might be apocalyptic, is not concerning.

[Quozl]

I'm certain this is not a problem. The text is creative writing, and in context relates to the early browser user adoption wars, and is a valid part of internet history. It is well explained elsewhere. We should leave decisions of content appropriateness to deployments, especially where there is doubt at our level, and direct them to remove the activity if they think it is so important.

If we want to overservice, and if we can gain permission to modify Firefox and keep the name (unlikely and difficult), or are willing to use a derived name (ugly), then we might provide a modified en-US.jar file. Or we might provide a script to delete the locale/en-US/global/mozilla.dtd file from the en-US.jar file. Estimated four hours work with full testing.

But still, I don't think this should be done. Raise it upstream with Mozilla.

[greenfeld]

Mozila's main targeted user group is not necessarily K-12 (except maybe on the higher end).

The question really is how concerned OLPC is about avoiding a "Hot Coffee" (Rockstar games) sort-of-scenario. I agree though that building and maintaining our own Mozilla/Firefox tree just for this likely is excessive.

If we believe that there is no harm if a student of any grade level discovers about:mozilla in a country where English is not well spoken (risking misinterpretation of poetic English), then there likely is no need to fix it. But if a third grader starts asking their teacher what "sacrifice" means in the wrong country and the teacher notices the comment about fires, we might hear a request to hide the page in the future at the bare minimum.

I was more wondering if it was possible to intercept the request in Browse at the Sugar level before it hit Firefox (presuming Mozilla found that acceptable, and not modifying their product). But if we do not see this as a significant risk from a PR standpoint, we likely can let it sit as-is.

[godiard]

Does not exist anymore. Deprecated