I wouldn't trust Abine with anything after the way they sneakily bought out a trusted extension and shoe horned in their crap: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/17/firefox_taco_addon_beefs_up/

The DS *does* run Linux, although the overhead of the kernel on such a low specced device means that it's only really useful for cli stuff: www.dslinux.org

I'm not sure if it's possible with DOCSIS3 (or whether the ISP in question is using it, for that matter), but with DOCSIS2 it is possible for more than one cable modem to share a MAC address. This is quite common in people who want to get free internet, they simply clone the MAC address of a paying subscriber. This works fine as long as the two cable modems are on separate broadband router, so could it be possible it's just one guy selling 'cheap' internet access by method of cloned modems?

No, because Chelloveck doesn't own the rights to make the update, even if they still had the tools to do so.

I agree that Gary Sterns loves making pinball and that Stern doesn't make as much money as they used to. Trouble is, they are stuck in a catch-22 situation. It costs a lot of money to make a fun pinball, the cost of the designers, playfield manufacture and putting it all together all add up to be a lot. The more complicated a table is, the more it costs to produce. Also, traditionally new players don't really like playing the complicated games, as they don't have much of a clue as to what is going on. What Stern has been doing for the last couple of years now is just knocking out machines for as cheap as possible, with little in the way of features for the more discerning 'pinhead'. This is good (I suppose) for first time players and operators, but it sucks for anyone with half an interest in pinball. He's got rid of most of the good designers so now most Stern tables are just boring rehashes of ones from previous years. He really is treading water trying to keep the company afloat. It really is a shame to see machines from Williams/Bally during the mid-90's and what is being made today. A lot gets said on mailing lists as to what the future of pinball is, but I'm betting is going down the same route as Harley. The baby boomer demographic who has a bit of spare cash burning in their pocket is disappearing, and once they are gone, Pinball just isn't appealing to kids who have played Xbox/PS3 etc. I really hope another company pops up, but it's not likely.

I've been working with a guy called Brian Dominy (last time I checked he was 132rd on the wppr) who has designed and created an open source operating system that runs on the original WPC hardware found in pinball tables: http://www.oddchange.com/freewpc/ You can use it to change the rulesets and animations for WPC games, I have to admit it's been great fun working on the project and I'd encourage others to do so as well.

Your attitude towards this is what giving me conspiracy theories. How about listening to our concerns rather than calling us a bunch of tin-foil hatters? I really think this would be better handled by another Dev, who can actually understand why so many people are upset by this. I've been speaking to Eric Jung and he agrees that this was handled very, very badly. The only upside of this are that we have found that we cannot trust the Add-on devs to act for the good of the users.

Can we have an option in Mozilla to completely block any Add-on that is commerical? I use Firefox as I like supporting open source, not to put money in the pockets of shady companies.

They didn't do their job properly. They said they have a policy of 'No Suprises' and it's absolutely clear that this update surprised the hell out of a lot of people. How would you like it if your nice XP system suddenly turned into Vista, because of an 'upgrade'?

Well excuse me for picking a scab as it were, but why isn't it ALL open? What are they trying to hide, apart from their incestuous relationship between the Mozilla devs and Abine?

But it's not open source?

http://www.getabine.com/team.php Jules Polonetsky - Co chair of Future of Privacy Forum, which coincidently enough was funded by AT&T. No conflict of interest there. Chief Privacy Officer at DoubleClick, you know, the people who sell lots and lots of adverts on the internet? Seems strange that he would be interested in something that was designed to stop that? Jim Jorgensen - CEO of AllAdvantage, you probably won't remember the name but you probably remember them as the company that tried to pioneer 'Paid to Surf' by bombarding users with adverts. Again, why would he be interested in something designed to thwart that? Why are these people interested in a company that seems to have no others means of making money apart from charging $50 to take down a youtube video? http://www.getabine.com/deleteme/request.php?item=youtube This company stinks, I'll continue digging because I'm sure there's more

I would really like to see the ability for me to see if an Add-on changes it's EULA during an update. Thanks for taking the time to respond to my questions.

The problem was, this wasn't an update, it was a total rewrite. Therefore I feel you were wrong to let this be allowed to downloaded via updating TACO 2.0. This should have been treated as an entirely seperate Add-on and it was very deceptive for it to be included in the TACO 2.0 update. Maybe it's time to have rules that state if the Add-ons original function, codebase or license changes radically then it shouldn't be allowed to update via the Firefox update mechanism?

Then why does it say that on the Abine site. I'm sorry, but you should be ashamed to let this past you. It went from 8K to 3MB, that is not a simple update and I fear this is breeding a lot of mistrust in the Firefox update mechanism. How are you going to regain users trust after this?