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Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

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Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#81

Post by seabird »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #58

So they emailed you about a new service; shrug . Of all the "spam" you could possibly receive this is by far the most useful. What is it with all Firefox/Mozilla hating as of late? They don't seem to be able to do anything right in the eyes of some people, and seem to be held to a ridiculously high standard (far higher than anyone else).

I'm going to wager that it's because Firefox has devolved into a Chrome wannabe that you suffer through for ideological reasons and little else. XUL addons were the reason to use Firefox; it's an otherwise mediocre browser that gets trounced by Chrome in every conceivable way but privacy (and even that might not be a guarantee). Mozilla started to get really into the whole ethics and responsibility arena around the same time they deprecated XUL, and them trying to act like they could do anything after giving their core competency a death sentence left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths, mine included. I say this all as somebody who has used Firefox for almost my entire life, and will continue to use Waterfox until the wheels fall off the bus. The best thing that can happen to Firefox now is for it dwindle into irrelevance and disappear so that people can see that good intentions don't make up choosing to create the inferior product.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#82

Post by blondin »

baby wrote: post #53
thinkloop wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money does pocket actually generate? It blows my mind that mozilla would pull a java and have us install a figurative toolbar.

pocket is such a useful tool that I have a hard time understanding this comment.

mind sharing how you use pocket? i stopped using the web and mobile apps. all i get now is a weekly digest and that covers all i want.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#83

Post by flukus »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #72
happytoexplain wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I opt out (or never opted in) and am still sent promotional material, it is an explicit message that the company disrespects me. Responding to that with shrug is layering more disrespect on top of it. Disrespect for users is a cardinal sin, and quickly reaches unforgivable levels if left unchecked. It is simply incorrect that this is an issue of bias against Mozilla. Other companies behaving worse doesn't make i…

You could argue that it's not promotional material, but an announcement, which is not exactly the same.

I'd argue they're merging into the same thing for certain products with frequent releases. Things like VS code get free marketing every month with their release announcements hitting the front page of HN, reddit and the like.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#84

Post by zobzu »

dblohm7 wrote: post #24
alyandon wrote: post #3

In a similar vein, I'd appreciate it if Mozilla would stop using updates to Firefox as a mechanism to re-enable misfeatures I've explicitly disabled like Pocket integration and the "recommend X feature|extension while you are browsing but don't forget we totally respect your privacy!" settings. :-/

That sounds like a bug to me.

a "bug"

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#85

Post by zobzu »

narag wrote: post #15
Lowkeyloki wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What browser would you suggest instead? I feel a bit cornered, especially now that literally every alternative is based on chromium.

What's wrong with Chromium? It's a honest question. I understand you'd say that about Chrome, but I thought that Chromium being open source it isn't exactly in the same bag.

honestly, its slow. icecat is quite nice.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#86

Post by terryd »

eridius wrote: post #71
terryd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renee DiResta: Mozilla Fellow, Director of Research at New Knowledge https://www.mozillapulse.org/profile/410 New Knowledge is the organization that setup a fake Russian botnet, and then tried to push a narrative about how the Republican candidate in an Alabama Senate race was being assisted by this "Russian election interference"... anybody involved with that organization is a scumbag - it has zero redeeming qualiti…

I hadn't heard of this before, so I just dug up the original NYT story. At least one person from New Knowledge was involved in a small experiment designed to explore how the sorts of tactics used by the Russians worked, which attempted to convince Republicans that Mr. Moore was receiving Russian help, but it was designed to be too small to actually affect the outcome of the election (as the goal was to explore how th…

First of all, the story has actually changed a couple of times. So if you really want to understand the timeline - you are going to need to refer to archives of those articles. Second, the "small experiment" had a budget of at least $100k that they are willing to admit to - traceable money that flowed through people related to the USDS and DoJ. You know that Obama repealed the ban on domestic propaganda before he left office, right? I couldn't tell you the number of times a counter-intel op leaked into domestic media (PopSci was really bad about it) - and months of work would instantly go up in smoke as the operation got scuttled, it makes me sick thinking that is no longer the case. New Knowledge's objective was to deceive voters. That is damage that can't be undone, they even tricked the media (a disappointingly easy task) into spreading the lie.

If you can't see something very wrong with this, well you'll be just fine in cold-war 2.0 - we can pick up where we left off in government experimentation on an unwitting public. MKULTRA 2 electricboogaloo. I'm sure its been a while since we updated our nuclear/biological/chemical weapons models... so long as it doesn't affect the public by a statistically significant amount - we should be fine to resume the 1970s practice of releasing airborne pathogens over major American population centers, doubling the number of deaths in the elderly.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#87

Post by minitech »

seabird wrote: post #81
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #58

So they emailed you about a new service; shrug . Of all the "spam" you could possibly receive this is by far the most useful. What is it with all Firefox/Mozilla hating as of late? They don't seem to be able to do anything right in the eyes of some people, and seem to be held to a ridiculously high standard (far higher than anyone else).

I'm going to wager that it's because Firefox has devolved into a Chrome wannabe that you suffer through for ideological reasons and little else. XUL addons were the reason to use Firefox; it's an otherwise mediocre browser that gets trounced by Chrome in every conceivable way but privacy (and even that might not be a guarantee). Mozilla started to get really into the whole ethics and responsibility arena around the s…

> trounced by Chrome in every conceivable way but privacy

and performance, and memory use, and UI.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#88

Post by lilyball »

terryd wrote: post #86
eridius wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard of this before, so I just dug up the original NYT story. At least one person from New Knowledge was involved in a small experiment designed to explore how the sorts of tactics used by the Russians worked, which attempted to convince Republicans that Mr. Moore was receiving Russian help, but it was designed to be too small to actually affect the outcome of the election (as the goal was to explore how th…

First of all, the story has actually changed a couple of times. So if you really want to understand the timeline - you are going to need to refer to archives of those articles. Second, the "small experiment" had a budget of at least $100k that they are willing to admit to - traceable money that flowed through people related to the USDS and DoJ. You know that Obama repealed the ban on domestic propaganda before he lef…

> New Knowledge's objective was to deceive voters.

From reading the article, the group's¹ objective wasn't to deceive voters, it was to research how these tactics worked. Are you suggesting that a single $100k research project was sufficient to alter the course of an election with a $51M advertising budget? As near as I can tell, that's just how the right-wing media is trying to spin it. Certainly if I were to actually try and alter the outcome of an election like this, I'd expect to be spending a lot more than $100k to do so.

That said, I find it hard to believe you're arguing in good faith when you're drawing parallels between a limited spread of misinformation centered around a single event with literally murdering people.

¹Which seems to have involved at least one New Knowledge member but it seems wasn't actually run by New Knowledge.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#89

Post by anoncake »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #58

So they emailed you about a new service; shrug . Of all the "spam" you could possibly receive this is by far the most useful. What is it with all Firefox/Mozilla hating as of late? They don't seem to be able to do anything right in the eyes of some people, and seem to be held to a ridiculously high standard (far higher than anyone else).

The most useful spam is still spam.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#90

Post by random878 »

Lowkeyloki wrote: post #6
aphextron wrote: post #2

Mozilla is ethically compromised at the highest levels. They’ve made a shift over the last few years from a scrappy, low-rent, nonprofit dedicated to helping the web to just another data mining tech company. Just try setting your Firefox browser to a blank page with no requests on startup and watching the Wireshark log if you think otherwise.

What browser would you suggest instead? I feel a bit cornered, especially now that literally every alternative is based on chromium.

I like Icecat (annoyingly not in the Debian repos).

I've also started to make use of text browsers. Links and Links2 are two that I use. Links2 is a nice halfway option as it will support images too.

I find them great for websites where I want to read info, but the interface is ironically designed to make that harder than it should be. News sites are a perfect example. Text browsers turn them from bloated billboards back into a readable format.

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