161–170 of 183 posts
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> for most people it’s fear-mongering about nothing To be fair, a core argument in favor of Firefox is essentially fear-mongering about google and your personal data. It always struck me as odd that actions many people would call "shady" if google does it are condoned in FF because Mozilla.
Mozilla is not the largest advertising company on Earth whose core business is profiling people to package and sell them.
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If Google is paying what Yahoo was, it's $300 million a year for the default search option on Firefox. Google pays Apple billions to stay the default on the iPhone as well.
Ok, so that makes Mozilla beholden to them how exactly? Is Google calling up Mozilla asking them to do them favors in the product? Are Mozilla engineers being asked to write in special features that Google asks for? Yes, Google provides 90% of the revenue or somewhere around there. But I still haven't heard how exactly Mozilla is doing special favors to Google or is in some way beholden to it. Mozilla has a contract…
All ad supported products have bad incentives. It’s the same reason HBO and Nerflix produces great TV shows and ad based broadcast and cable networks mainly produce garbage.
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I added an exception and read the page I received. A single author describes changes he made to his Firefox options from 29 onward. There is no plural "they", and, to my understanding, the information is not current. Should this information become inaccessible because certs weren't paid for?
I think he's just pointing out the irony of someone purporting to aid the security-conscious having an expired cert on his own site. Unless this is really some meta-level social commentary on how people will trust a complete stranger's website despite an invalid cert because he seems like a nice guy.
This is exactly the point I was going after. It would be one thing if the cert had just expired but cmon, October 31, 2017 really?
In all seriousness it's not a bad list as a handy reference.
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Mozilla is not the largest advertising company on Earth whose core business is profiling people to package and sell them.
>whose core business is profiling people to package and sell them Do you have any proof of this statement? Google is an advertising company. It doesn't make any sense that they would sell your information to other advertising companies. Not only does that violate their privacy policy, but it makes no business sense, either.
Google's in the business of knowing EVERYTHING they can about you, so they can better sell "you" to their customers (advertisers). You are not a customer of Google, you are their product. Nestle, Exon, Ford, etc are the customers of Google.
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It sounds like the problem is you're spending your time on adversarial websites. Give JS to a skillful developer who shares your goals, and they'll use it to make the website better.
Actually I don't. I never had any account on FB for example, but once in a blue moon I get to visit a public FB page (like a recent blog post posted on HN recently), and having JS disabled let me browse it without worries. How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions? My personal tastes tend to go not too far off this kind of design: http://bette…
I don't know if I qualify as a skillful JS developer, but I run a website displaying pictures that works correctly without Javascript.
However, Javascript makes this website way faster, smoother and easier on the connection by downloading only the moving parts when clicking on a link, carefully preserving history so back/next works as if this script did nothing. When Javascript is disabled, an ugly white flash appears when navigating between some pages and rendering is just slower, even though it remains decent (my code is minimalist anyway…)
When leaving the page of a picture to come back to the album it is in, scroll position is restored. This is impossible without Javascript. History Back button is not sufficient: you might have looked at 10 pictures before coming back to the album. Sure, you can still ask your browser to come back 10 pages ago, but this is less convenient than just clicking on a cross.
It also help dimension images correctly, which I could not manage to do using pure CSS, unfortunately.
No Javascript tracker is present. You want Javascript enabled on this website because it helps using less resources and makes things easier to use. This is a 9 KB Javascript file that gets compressed to 3 KB and served using HTTP2 only once, so this is basically a null cost when considering how much a picture weighs (~ 100KB). And this is free software, for the sake of it.
But you cannot know this on random websites. Problem is, Javascript is not used like this in general. Unfortunately for websites like this one, disabling Javascript by default is still a reasonable thing to do.
Worse, visitors of this website that disable Javascript won't be aware of that, because things pretty much work as expected and I don't display a warning message.
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I was under the impression the search deals are merely which engine are the default. How does having the default search be Google make the Mozilla corp beholden to Google?
search engines pay for 80% of mozilla's cheques, so search engines have 80% control over mozilla's income, which is a bit iffy, especially for something meant to be community controlled and directed (non profit open source right?)
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>whose core business is profiling people to package and sell them Do you have any proof of this statement? Google is an advertising company. It doesn't make any sense that they would sell your information to other advertising companies. Not only does that violate their privacy policy, but it makes no business sense, either.
I think maybe you misunderstood the point here. I agree Google is probably not directly selling your information it gathers to other people but instead is selling access to that information in the form of directed advertising. Google's in the business of knowing EVERYTHING they can about you, so they can better sell "you" to their customers (advertisers). You are not a customer of Google, you are their product. Nestl…
Their products are AdWords and AdSense. These services network customers together who want to 1. make money from ads, and 2. advertise themselves.
Google mediates this exchange between both parties, and uses data from users to target their ads more accurately.
Calling the user a product is rather hyperbolic. The only interaction with a user is in choosing which ad to serve, and recording if they view or click the ad.
It's not slavery after all.
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A crash log doesn't violate your privacy, nor does usage statistics when properly anonymized. Sometimes telemetry is just telemetry.
> A crash log doesn't violate your privacy Says who? If that's the case then ask the user to email you the log. Instead, we get covert eavesdropping.
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I think maybe you misunderstood the point here. I agree Google is probably not directly selling your information it gathers to other people but instead is selling access to that information in the form of directed advertising. Google's in the business of knowing EVERYTHING they can about you, so they can better sell "you" to their customers (advertisers). You are not a customer of Google, you are their product. Nestl…
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Google's data is a part of their offering, but that doesn't somehow make me as a person a "product". Their products are AdWords and AdSense. These services network customers together who want to 1. make money from ads, and 2. advertise themselves. Google mediates this exchange between both parties, and uses data from users to target their ads more accurately. Calling the…
It's scary, being in the Too Much Information age. It feels so easy to be misled when it's hard to devote the time to properly understand complex topics like this.
I don't know if I feel any more confident in my browser choice (or anything else related to cybersecurity), but... thanks, still? Acknowledging how little I can know about any one thing feels so destabilizing... hoorah for existential crises?