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Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

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Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So because you're a CEO you can't believe whatever you want in your spare time? Or does the same rules apply for everyone that works at Mozilla? If so, how the fuck does anyone know what is a fireable opinion? It's not like he used company resources to promote his beliefs or enforced his beliefs on others. What Mozilla did to Brendan is essentially to enforce thought crime on their own staff. It's kind of hard to tak…

> So because you're a CEO you can't believe whatever you want in your spare time? Clearly, if you a CEO and publicly supporting causes, your support for those causes will have an impact on the reputation of the organisation. Now, I sure you can think of examples of more extreme spare-time beliefs that you might think were incompatible with being CEO, so its a question of where you particularly draw the line. (Or perh…

> Clearly, if you a CEO and publicly supporting causes, your support for those causes will have an impact on the reputation of the organisation.

The furor was over positions Brendan had taken years before becoming CEO. And positions that were, at the time, the majority viewpoint.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you sign into Pocket with your Firefox Sync account, this is the behavior. It should only prompt you to re-login if you've cleared cookies. Even then, you can re-login via FF Sync without entering the password in again. If you're logging in with a service other than FF Sync (ex: Google), I'm not sure how you expect FF to know what your credentials are to log you in.

>It should only prompt you to re-login if you've cleared cookies Looks like Cookie AutoDelete extension somehow affects Pocket but not Sync. Thank you for hint!

Yes, I had to whitelist '*.getpocket.com' to avoid auto deletion of Pocket cookies.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#173

All this talk about openness and freedom, and Mozilla's builds still ship with the proprietary Pocket extension by default. I really hope they don't have to rely on the revenue from Pocket at some point. Not only that, but it also connects to Google's SafeBrowsing servers. Is that required by their search engine contract with Google? Shouldn't be turned on by default.

You know they own Pocket right? Pocket is basically their version of Read Later, etc...And it’s completely optional whether you want to use it or not. So I’m not sure I understand this complaint. Mozilla’s first integration of Pocket was poorly done, and rightfully raised complaints. But since they have purchased it, a lot of those complaints have been resolved.

And they promised to open source it. They didn't.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#174
post #9

I'm using Firefox for years, after Chrome started to ask me for a login (at around version 40). Never looked back. One day I woke up to a chart showing browser market share of FF at around 4%, which surprised me - as I thought many people would understand the implications and directions. Maybe I'm too optimistic. Update: Loved chrome, used it for years, I also love most Chrome engineering and all the innovation they…

> Maybe I'm too optimistic. Don't be optimistic, but don't be pesimistic either. Do what you can - donate time or money, or just recommend everyone to not use the piece of carp that is Chrome. Anything based on Chromium counts as well, their codebase is dictated by Google, one way or the other. My mom had so many issues with ads until I installed Firefox for her, and honestly, the ad blockers make the internet a much…

i'm the IT guy in my shop so when i got here i switched every machine to firefox + ecosia.org for search and only one guy went back to chrome.. i try and spread the fox around as much i can.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#175
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've got it plastered around the UI. It's the very top menu item. It's also in the Pocket address bar button right under where they advertise to you to "Sign up for Pocket. It's freeeeeee!" Not only that, but on new installs and after some updates Firefox nags you to sign up whenever it can, for instance when you log into a website - right after you save the password it will show some animated crap in the address…

> Chrome (my default browser) actually nags me less and in less annoying ways. Because they just log you in without asking, as noted in the comment you're replying to. It also has more severe implications in Chrome privacy-wise, directly linking your Chrome profile with all kinds of other privacy-sensitive Google services. Since Google is in the business of making money from the data they have on you (and hence colle…

I opted out of that once in Chrome and I never saw it again.

I see no way to opt out of all the nags Firefox gives me.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted the comment to mean, they run old FF (with extensions) alongside chrome (incompatible), because they don't want to run two versions of FF. I don't quite understand this either, but it makes more sense than the other interpretation, I think.

Bingo. DownThemAll is something I would describe as "mission-critical". I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another in odd ways such as everything running fine until I open a file with Firefox as the associated program and one version would open but have all the settings from the other version and Portable Firefox refusing to save settings or extensions at all. Using Chro…

>I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another

This shouldn't be an issue if you run your secondary instance with -no-remote -profile="your separate profile".

>Using Chrome for casual browsing was just less of a headache.

That still doesn't answer the original question though. Why choose chrome over firefox, when it has no legacy firefox extensions? Does chrome have those legacy extensions' features built in? Was chrome better than firefox, and the only thing keeping you on was the legacy extensions?

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#177
post #127
post #105

It's funny how Mozilla preaches privacy, but if you open `about:config' and count 1) parameters that include word "telemetry" 2) everything that looks like a unique token 3) "mozilla.org" URLs you'll see that the sum is steadily going up with every release. It leaves me under impression that Mozilla is trying to follow Facebook and Google. Lately they removed setting to use a custom page for the new tabs, leaving onl…

telemetry ≠ tracking

Telemetry is absolutely a polite word for tracking. It is fundamentally about sending information about your system, your usecase, your software and your data to a remote party (usually without notification).

Calling it anything except tracking is super bullshitty.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hey fired Brendan for ridicolous reasons Marriage equality isn't a particularly ridiculous reason.

So because you're a CEO you can't believe whatever you want in your spare time? Or does the same rules apply for everyone that works at Mozilla? If so, how the fuck does anyone know what is a fireable opinion? It's not like he used company resources to promote his beliefs or enforced his beliefs on others. What Mozilla did to Brendan is essentially to enforce thought crime on their own staff. It's kind of hard to tak…

If you're a CEO, you no longer get the luxury of "personal time" when it comes to beliefs and opinions. Everything you say, you now also say as CEO of a company, because for as long as you're the CEO you are the voice of the company. You have an advisory board, but what you say you want, or think, or believe, is now inextricably linked to the company you run. You don't get to have a private opinion anymore that you can publish in the safety of "opinions are my own and do not reflect my company's". All opinions you voice, and all acts you take based on them, are now official dictum.

There's a lot of amazing things about being CEO, but this is one of the downsides. If you want your own opinions that may conflict with the company line: don't accept the CEO position. Or accept that people will remove you from that position if it becomes clear your opinions and the company's moral compass do not align. In this case, we saw the latter.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a privacy enthusiast, what's wrong with Google's SafeBrowsing service? It provides protection from low-hanging fruit with anonymized data (hashes of URLs).

It's not very anonymized. Google already has a list of URLs, so they can just hash them all and see what matches. And if they have URL 1, 2, and 4, odds are they can interpolate to find out what #3 is.

> so they can just hash them all and see what matches

Matches _what_ ? Firefox doesn't send hashes to Google Safe Browsing. This would not only be a privacy problem it would also make the browser much too slow. Instead Firefox periodically downloads a summary of what might be unsafe, and then it compares hashes to that summary. If there's a match in the summary (rare but it happens) it fetches more detailed parts of the total Safe Browsing map to make a decision.

As a rule of thumb I'd say when a person complains about Safe Browsing without any clue how it actually works I'm confident they're exactly the type of "power user" who most needs Safe Browsing to keep them out of trouble because they're falsely confident in their own abilities.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#180
post #99

1) Thirteen banner ads, most of them animated 2) Tracking from Google and Facebook 3) Cookie warning with no way to opt out 4) You can only opt out if you live in California: > Opting out of the sharing of your personal information by Protocol with marketers: Please send an email to privacy@protocol.com with the following information: -Name -Email -Confirmation of California residency

I often forget how does the internet look like without the adblocker

Not using a dedicated ad blocker (just Firefox) and the article looks very clean to me.
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