• 0 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

help-circle





  • I’m not interested in anything based off Chromium, and I don’t really like the idea of going with a Firefox fork much either. You’re not only trusting them to actually care about your privacy and security, and you’re not even just trusting them to actually catch and fix all of Mozilla’s shenanigans as well. You are also trusting them to constantly stay on top of all the latest security patches. There aren’t really any Firefox forks I trust with all 3 of those things at once. Even if there was, there are certainly no forks of Firefox that have anything even remotely close to the capacity necessary to maintain a web engine on their own, so you’re still trusting Mozilla to keep Firefox updated and secure for your fork of choice to even have a chance.

    Until a new browser with a new engine comes along that actually lets me use the full uBlock Origin there’s not really any other option besides Firefox that makes sense. At least to me.



  • They removed a broadly worded promise that might theoretically be used to get them in trouble for selling anonymized data. I’m not happy about that, but it doesn’t surprise me.

    The rest is just people being angry at Mozilla for describing how a modern web browser works, because other companies have pointed at similar language to argue that they have the right to do whatever they want with any information they collect and no one has stopped them. That sucks, but the problem is that there are no consequences for large corporations, not that Mozilla is using the information you put into your browser to access the internet for you. Maybe Mozilla will also decide to intentionally misinterpret their own legalese to train some garbage AI, but the absolute worst case scenario is that they’re the same as every other significant browser, and a more reasonable interpretation would be that the non-profit organization is probably not profit motivated and actually means the things they say.

    Who knows. I can’t see the future, but without Firefox forks of it are a dead-end, and any other browser is still going to collect a bunch of information and use it to navigate the web for you, because that’s just how today’s garbage javascript laden websites work. Yelling at Mozilla for explaining that in their ToS isn’t going to fix it, and Ladybird isn’t going to magically change how those websites work. If you really want to do something about it, don’t use those websites. Good luck with that.


  • Is there anything in the new ToS that’s even bad? Like, there are lots of people breathlessly ranting about how privacy is dead because Mozilla mentioned the existence of third parties and gibberish like that, but when I read it myself it mostly seemed like they were just saying that if you use third party services through Firefox then the third parties will have your data. That seems kinda like a nothingburger of a controversy to me. I dunno, I’m not a lawyer, maybe I missed something, but if so I certainly haven’t seen anybody else explain it properly.


  • Yes to the first part, no to the second. For some reason people like to pretend that surveillance is a binary on or off thing, but that’s gross oversimplification to the point of being more damaging than an actual lie. All the various government agencies collect whatever easy to find information about you there is to get, but that information is possible for you to have some control over, and it’s too expensive for them to really properly process all of it. It’s just some random bits of trivia about you sitting in a bunch of disconnected databases until somebody takes an interest in you. If they start to take an interest in you, they start coordinating their information and actually targeting you for more individualized information gathering. This is adding gay and trans people to that next level up of surveillance, and that absolutely does change things. Pretending nothing the government does matters and there’s no point in even trying is maybe the most harmful lie you can spread. Please don’t.






  • SSNs are literally just handed out to hospitals and social security offices in batches and given out in sequential order. They were specifically and intentionally designed to be a terrible system of ID numbers because people actually used to care about their privacy. There are countless people who’ve gone their whole lives using the wrong social security number and gotten their benefits just fine, because unlike everyone else in this dumpster fire of a country the social security office has never been stupid enough to rely on just a single number.




  • BSD was the main open source option for a little while, but got into a big legal battle that dragged out for years, and Linux came out during that time and took over. BSD never made a major comeback because no one really needed it anymore after Linux came along. It’s still around because it was already done, so people have just had to maintain and update it since then. Hurd is non-existent for reasons that are contentious, but everyone agrees that at least one of them is that a lot of people got excited about the Linux kernel and lost interest in Hurd and switched to Linux development instead. It is possible that if more people had stuck with it there would have been a real, useful Hurd instead. These aren’t even the only alternatives that were being worked on at the time.

    The idea that any one person could will an entire operating system into existence by making a hobby kernel that fit a useful niche at the right time is just patently absurd. Linux is great, and Linus Torvalds is a good steward of it, but no, he is not the only reason why open source operating systems are popular.


  • They were trying to merge rust code into the dma subsystem, because what they were working on needed to talk to it, and it would be easier to do that with rust code in the dma subsystem. He said no specifically to that part. Just the stuff in the dma subsystem. That’s all. It can be worked around.

    It wasn’t actually a big deal until Martin stuck his nose into a discussion that was none of his business and then cried about it on social media. I get being frustrated. The old guys are weirdly hostile sometimes, but creating drama is not the solution.