Package: firefox Version: 118.0-1 Severity: normal Firefox has a new offline translation capability in version 118. Step one of that is determining the language used in a web page. It uses https://fasttext.cc/ to acomplish that.
I have experimentally verified that firefox is able to detect the language of a Spanish language web page when used offline. So it is not downloading the LLM from a server and using it, instead the LLM must be baked into firefox. (The LLMs used for the actual translation are downloaded on demand.) See attached screenshot. This is the first run of firefox in a user account, while offline. The localhost webserver does not send any headers indicating the page's language. This is arguably a DFSG violation. I have no firm opinion on that matter, but I *do* have the opinion that the free software community needs to come to a consensus about the question. Inclusion of LLMs in packages like this risks a decision by default. Note that the fasttext LLM uses wikipedia or the common crawl as its corpus. The pre-trained vectors, which I think some would prefer to consider as "source" rather than the training corpus, are 500+ mb so it seems that are not included in the source package either. I think what is included is a quantized model, as described here https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/faqs.html -- Package-specific info: -- Addons package information -- System Information: Debian Release: trixie/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 6.5.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages firefox depends on: ii debianutils 5.13 ii fontconfig 2.14.2-6 ii libasound2 1.2.10-1 ii libatk1.0-0 2.50.0-1 ii libc6 2.37-11 ii libcairo-gobject2 1.18.0-1 ii libcairo2 1.18.0-1 ii libdbus-1-3 1.14.10-1 ii libdbus-glib-1-2 0.112-3 ii libevent-2.1-7 2.1.12-stable-8 ii libffi8 3.4.4-1 ii libfontconfig1 2.14.2-6 ii libfreetype6 2.13.2+dfsg-1 ii libgcc-s1 13.2.0-4 ii libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 2.42.10+dfsg-1+b1 ii libglib2.0-0 2.78.0-2 ii libgtk-3-0 3.24.38-5 ii libnspr4 2:4.35-1.1 ii libnss3 2:3.93-1 ii libpango-1.0-0 1.51.0+ds-2 ii libstdc++6 13.2.0-4 ii libvpx7 1.12.0-1 ii libx11-6 2:1.8.6-1 ii libx11-xcb1 2:1.8.6-1 ii libxcb-shm0 1.15-1 ii libxcb1 1.15-1 ii libxcomposite1 1:0.4.5-1 ii libxdamage1 1:1.1.6-1 ii libxext6 2:1.3.4-1+b1 ii libxfixes3 1:6.0.0-2 ii libxrandr2 2:1.5.2-2+b1 ii libxtst6 2:1.2.3-1.1 ii procps 2:4.0.3-1 ii zlib1g 1:1.2.13.dfsg-3 Versions of packages firefox recommends: ii libavcodec59 7:5.1.3-2 ii libavcodec60 7:6.0-7 Versions of packages firefox suggests: ii fonts-lmodern 2.005-1 pn fonts-stix | otf-stix <none> ii libcanberra0 0.30-10 ii libgssapi-krb5-2 1.20.1-4 ii pulseaudio 16.1+dfsg1-2+b1 -- no debconf information -- see shy jo
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
