Firefox Add-on warns you if you visit Prism-linked company websites

[anuseems]

A new Firefox add-on, called Dark side of the Prism, has been designed to warn Internet users who have installed it automatically when they visit websites of companies linked to the government surveillance system Prism.

All users have to do is install the add-on in Firefox, it will work passively from that moment on. Once you visit a website of a company associated with Prism, it starts to play the song Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. It also displays a logo at the top right for a second or two before it vanishes.

The add-on covers not only the main websites of companies involved, e.g. microsoft.com or google.com, but also company owned domains such as YouTube, Blogger or Bing.

The music begins to play right away and while it has been mainly designed to raise awareness, it may also render some websites unusable which may be intentional as well. If you visit YouTube for instance, you cannot really play any video on the site while the add-on is running in the background as you'd have to listen to two audio sources at the same time.

The conclusion here is that the add-on is mainly designed to provide Internet users with options to find out which of their favorite websites and new websites they visit are linked to Prism. There is no list of sites it supports though which makes it difficult to judge if it is covering all web properties of linked companies or only major ones.

An option to disable the sound would be really helpful in this regard, as it may be getting on your nerves pretty soon even if it plays for only a couple of seconds before you leave the website again.

If you need to work with the site however, it is definitely problematic since there is no stop button either.

Tip: NoScript users can block the server request so that only the Prism logo is displayed by the extension.

Anyway, if you are interested in the add-on check it out. It is available over at the Mozilla Add-ons repository.

@ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-side-of-the-prism/

[Mr Orus]

THX FOR SHARING :king:

[demoneye]

sound interesting !

Thanks for let us know :)

[Batu69]

Useful information, thank a lot :rockon:

[avmad]

I'll give it a miss. A new addon maker, this is his first with only 1 review. Who knows what it could be doing. :ph34r:

[avmad]

I just like recommendations before jumping in. It's probably fine, and I love Pink Floyd :stereo:

[calguyhunk]

I'll give it a miss. A new addon maker, this is his first with only 1 review. Who knows what it could be doing. :ph34r:

Mozilla reviews all it's extensions to check as to whether the developer's doing anything more than what they claim to before putting it on their website. :) So the chances that this is doing anything nefarious right under Mozilla's nose is slim although not impossible ;)

But the music is prolly gonna get annoying after a while without a 'disable music' button on the options list and also render vids unwatchable on Youtube etc for reasons of overlapping audio :( This is the hurriedly released basic 1.0 version. If you're truly interested, wait for 2.0 if that ever comes along :D

[Vjcobra]

Thanks for shareing :)

[avmad]

prism-break.org

Opt out of Prism.