Disturbing popup on Whonix desktop

There is a small popup box appearing on my Whonix desktop. “(1) You have (1) message” is what’s in the popup box. It seems to have the Whonix color scheme. Black text on a yellow background.

Does it seem familiar? Could I be infected with something? It pops up infrequently and last just a moment. Nothing happens when I click it.

I can’t find the source but I have ideas. I installed normal Firefox (not Tor Browser) so that I could install a Firefox VPN add-on from the Mozilla site to access sites that block Tor. I don’t know if the popup is caused by the add-on or the sites that I visit. The only other software I installed was ProxyBroker to get open proxies also to unblock sites blocking Tor.

It disturbs me that something seemingly from the browser is able to display itself outside the browser window. Are Firefox add-ons capable of accessing parts of the Whonix OS outside of Firefox itself?

I would use Tor Browser exclusively if sites would work on it. The Tor blocks and Captchas on Tor are impossible to work around. Is there a solution to this problem? I think a full VPN on Whonix after Tor. Some people say that’s a bad idea, but why is that? It’s impossible to use services like Google on Tor so I must do something.

No, certainly not. Whonix does not do that by default. Must be coming from user installed software.

A screenshot might help to tell more.

Screenshot. I could not post a link. Replace DOT with a period.

cdn-142.anonfilesDOTcom/9dLeJ5D1xd/27e9a32f-1643199949/Untitled.png

Appears on the desktop. I had notifications for a website turned on. Is that what caused it?

I’d still like to know if add-ons can break out of Firefox into the Whonix OS. It appearing on the desktop instead of inside Firefox confuses me.

I have no idea what that is. And since it’s cropped I cannot see the context and cannot even guess which application is generating it.

Possibly. I am never using these.

Can Firefox add-ons show notifications outside Firefox on Debian (or any Linux or even Windows)


Tor Browser Add-Ons

Testing with Tor Browser and a local HTML page can reproduce the same “Disturbing popup” using the notification API.

If you had HTML5 notifications enabled it is probably nothing to worry about. It is something I would strongly advise against however.

anonfiles.com/7bz5iaE3x3/whonix_firefox_notification.cleaned_png

Regards

1 Like

To Patrick: Can you fix the upload or hotlinking of the forum?

Regards

https://www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Forum_Best_Practices#Posting_Links_for_New_Users