351–360 of 523 posts
Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market". Haven't you had enough?
Yes, that's why I've donated to the LadyBird project.
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> What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. They are trying to find a funding model that makes them independent from Google. - Building a fast, privacy-oriented browser that keeps up with web standards and fixes security bugs takes people, organisation and therefore money. Yes, much more than that CEO salary. - No one wants to buy for a browser. -…
Mozilla has tried experiment after experiment to try to earn money. Let's try forcing Pocket down people's throats. Let's automatically install Mr Robot. You know what people will love? Full-page ads for a VPN! No one has seen enough VPN ads! The one funding model they haven't experimented with at all is actually asking people to pay for Firefox. Donations or subscription, they haven't even tried it once. And yet peo…
I do expect that's the next step at Mozilla - locking features behind paywall with some premium plan. Cloud sync probably will fall into that basket. And if that eventually won't work - they'll surely announce it's time to "sunset".
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Yep. One of the things which the FSF did right was the GPL. They didn’t tried like programmers hack against bad things which never works in long term. The bad people will change the API, lock the bootloader, implement a problematic standard (ACPI, SecureBoot) or add more DRM. We cannot solve political issues (law) with technical solutions (programming). If we don’t like locked iPhones, the solution is a law. If we do…
> One of the things which the FSF did right was the GPL And the GPL is dying. Every year fewer projects are maintained under the GPL standard. Violations abound anyway. The MIT License and other permissive licenses; or commercially restrictive licenses like the SSPL, are the new go-to; because the GPL didn’t think about SaaS or “Tivoization” until it was too late.
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Sorry, what do you mean ""that" hardly worked"? Making any regulation at all? The GDPR did not do at all what I proposed.
There is a (lazy) line of argument related to GDPR, cookie banners, etc. that goes something like this: " That legislation failed, thus any legislation will fail." It was a while since I did proof by induction, but I do believe there is some step missing here. Personally, I am open to an argument that any legislation is folly. But we need to raise the discourse rather than just bash legislative failures (or merely pa…
My point was specifically that the GDPR put a law in place that when you send private data from users to third parties, you must ask the user for permission and allow that user to decline this and then not send that users' private data to these third parties.
The idea and intention and hope is clear: that site/app/platform owners don't send/sell data to other parties. Or, if they still do so, are punished by having to nag users with popups/banners etc.
The ad industry then spun this around, ensured that virtually every site nags users (mitigating that punishment), continue harvesting data exactly like before, and -above all- pursuade the general public that "the EU is forcing you to click cookie banners all day" or similar double-speak.
With which I was trying to put forward that any legislation must be a lot better than what the GDPR did here. So as to avoid being circumvented by the industry and also hated by the public.
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> One of the things which the FSF did right was the GPL And the GPL is dying. Every year fewer projects are maintained under the GPL standard. Violations abound anyway. The MIT License and other permissive licenses; or commercially restrictive licenses like the SSPL, are the new go-to; because the GPL didn’t think about SaaS or “Tivoization” until it was too late.
AGPL is the way.
Does connecting a AGPL-licensed database to your website make your whole website AGPL? What is the line between an innocent connection, or a viral integration?
What happens if you add a proprietary protocol to the database specifically for your app? Do you need to open source it, if that database is/isn’t publicly accessible? Why wouldn’t it be considered? Your project dependencies certainly aren’t directly publicly available, yet you agree the AGPL applies there.
Some have quoted the FSF about how “internal data structures” should be the distinction. But even that is something a lawyer could seriously bend - is JSON from your database, that only your app understands, such a structure?
The license is ridiculously vague in this regard. Not that it matters anyway - almost all of the big AGPL projects offer alternative proprietary licenses to paying customers, so it’s really more of a source available license.
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That is because Mozilla has consistently moved Firefox in the direction of a Chrome clone. When Firefox started is was not a copy of existing browsers. There is no reason it would have to be now. But they have rejected their core users. So now the only option left is a Chrome clone because that is what people are used to.
Even if it was a credible idea, how exactly do you think that Firefox - the browser that the minute anything changes, the internet blows up over - would significantly alter their product in a way to differentiate themselves from Chrome? This isn’t even getting into base level stuff like available engineering resources, or the scenarios where the other vendors often control or have deals to give them favorable distrib…
There would be value in being the only browser to actually stop when users tell them no. But they seem incapable of listening.
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Tor is (was?) heavily subsidised by secret services in a.o. the US. > likewise, agencies within the U.S. government variously fund Tor (the U.S. State Department, the National Science Foundation, and – through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which itself partially funded Tor until October 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28network%29?wprov=sfla1
While it has had funding from some sources we don’t necessarily trust, it’s still entirely open source and the code has been combed through repeatedly. When it comes to privacy apps, I’d place significantly more trust in something like that than literally anything closed source or unscrutinized to that degree.
I was merely implying that there's a major difference between the model behind TOR and that of Firefox.
And also similarities: if TOR is funded by entitities we don't trust and it turns out to work fine, then Firefox, being "funded" by Google should not have to be a severe problem either.
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Maybe they would have a better market share if they weren't constantly pulling this shit every two or three years...
I know it feels right to say that. But really, do you think the majority of people who switched from Firefox to Chrome did it because FF did not address their privacy concerns? Seems ridiculous. However bad FF is, Chrome is much worse. It seems far more likely that the remaining 3% are the few people who care, and therefore, "pulling this shit" did not cause the current market share.
I’m willing to put up with slowness and incompatability when I feel like firefox is on my side. Now? I’m going back to Safari.
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And of course this setting doesn't sync to new devices by default. So you need to remember to opt-out on every device. The underlying pref is dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled. I'm going to force this off in my policies.
How do you sync these settings across devices? I need such a thing, too.
Now I install an organizational policy that sets the prefs. I use NixOS to apply this and it looks like this:
environment.systemPackages = [(pkgs.firefox.override {
extraPrefs = ''
lockPref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);
''
})];
Edit: This is creating a lib/firefox/mozilla.cfg. IDK how exactly this applies to other distros.
Can companies not see how their ads are performing by looking at their income statements? An ad campaign costs x dollars. Widget sales increase by y dollars. Companies were able to run this method for a long time. I think ads have gone way too far. It’s shocking we’ve gotten to the point of this discussion on data collection to fuel ads.