Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Make Firefox Private Again

make-firefox-private-again.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 348 posts

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#181

Post by brezelgoring »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #124

There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising. This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required. "Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to…

Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist.

Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#182

Post by spiritplumber »

lolinder wrote: post #141
mrinfinitiesx wrote: post #4

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base,…

> advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting. Advertising-based social…

Having run one, I have to say that towards the end people were moving to social media BECAUSE posts had a like counter. I regret not adding one to my forum.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#183

Post by [deleted] »

LunaSea wrote: post #110
nulbyte wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure? Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation. When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, wh…

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money. Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by. The content shared…

[deleted]

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#184

Post by dartharva »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #27
mrinfinitiesx wrote: post #4

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base,…

I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.

Hey, if the VCs don't want to run this site, I will gladly host it for free.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#185

Post by olejorgenb »

pointlessone wrote: post #91

Why does this have to be curl | sh if there’s a checkbox in the settings for this specific setting? Do you value your privacy so much that you’re ready to run arbitrary script directly from internet?

It annoys me that Firefox removed the ability to link directly to a setting in `about:config`. I'm almost certain this was possible before.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#186

Post by rcxdude »

brezelgoring wrote: post #181
jqpabc123 wrote: post #124

There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising. This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required. "Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to…

Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist. Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook inve…

All-sites still have a context in which their ads appear. You are looking at some content on their site, so thy can advertise in the context of that content.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#187

Post by kentrado »

shiroiushi wrote: post #18
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #10

Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I’m also not sure that the web can be made into something different unless web standards aren’t freed of influence by giants like Google

>Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission. From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead us…

This is the case with most software "foundation".

As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, she did make an important observation.

Parasites will be attracted to high value things in order to extract value, not to add to it. They climb the hierarchy of the organisation and then use it for their own benefit.

It is not only developers who do resume building oriented work. These people start social causes so that they can claim that they spearheaded this or that campaign. In order to gain prestige.

Engineers who only care about the product become the bottom of the hierarchy and the organisation becomes a reflection of the needs and wants of these parasites.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#188

Post by Zetaphor »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #138
LunaSea wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you say that the infrastructure costs are secondary? How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?

I pay my telecom for 500mbit up and down, what other infrastructure must be paid for to support torrenting?

Each individual seeder is paying for electricity, storage, and internet access to make those torrents available to you.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#189

Post by incidentally »

Vinnl wrote: post #93
red_trumpet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't explain how it works though, or why it is private. Only that we should trust them.

Incidentally this was published just now! https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/ He also linked to this technical explainer, though I don't think that's necessarily written for a broader audience: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...

[flagged]

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#190

Post by zanellato19 »

p-e-w wrote: post #52
idle_zealot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If HN didn't exist people would gather on another link aggregator.

And yet no successful link aggregator has ever been "free" or "open" in a meaningful sense. Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of p…

Centralization is what makes stuff like this interesting. I come here because the comments are nice, not just because the links are interesting.

It's the thing a lot of tech people miss about centralization. It has lots of good effects.

Post reply on HN