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Mozilla is adopting a ton of the things that were wrong with Brave. Recently, Brave criticized Mozilla’s PPA data collection for being too centralized, which implies to me that otherwise, there’s a lot of overlap between the two allegedly “private” systems. I don’t trust Brave telemetry, but it seems not even they can come up with many ways to differentiate themselves from Mozilla.
If they’re different somehow, I would love to know how.
In a way other than accrued trust or distrust, that is. At this point, I don’t think Mozilla is owed any inherent trust.
I wasn’t going to make a generic comment about how cryptocurrency is only worth money to people if they can convince other people to also purchase the cryptocurrency…
… But then I looked at your post history, and it’s like a week of pivoting conversations to be about Monero.
- New GPU released? Perfect for mining Monero.
- FBI made fake cryptocurrency? Monero isn’t fake.
- People shouldn’t store your information, so use Monero
- Taylor Swift donates for hurricane victims? Monero is worth more than her!
Edit: oh god it was worse than I thought
- All cryptocurrency is good… JK just Monero
- Good YouTube video? They should accept Monero.
- Good nudes? (NSFW) Take my Monero
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
(probably more, but mods removed many) - Their phone wallpaper? Anime girl Monero
When a user interacts with an ad or advertiser, a record of that interaction is… sent to two independently operated services.
If a company is unethical, they will ignore the Mozilla standard. If a company is ethical, they don’t need the Mozilla standard, as they can adopt their own tracking-free methods of serving ads.
I have been told repeatedly by Firefox advertisement advocates that PPA only affects people that don’t use ad blockers, so it allegedly only affects people that are already blasted by tracking networks to the fullest extent possible, while people who use ad blockers wouldn’t see the supposedly less invasive ads anyway. So it’s either 100% tracking to 110% tracking, or 0% tracking to 0% tracking. Seems like a lose-lose scenario for both sides of the equation.
The Mozilla Foundation is a thin wrapper for the Mozilla Corporation, and it’s run by the executives themselves.
I can’t type right to save my life. If I want Boost it’ll either come up “Voist” or “Boat” depending on whether I tap or glide. (And switching to a private keyboard has made this more of an uphill battle for me.)
You’ve got me dead to rights about forgetting where things are (besides the home screen), which is why I’m glad my launcher of choice has things organized not just in the Apps drawer, but in folders within them.
I appreciate the insight though. Not everybody’s workflow is going to be the same, and needing X apps at a certain distance will affect different people different ways.
I’m not really a fan of “clean” and “minimalist” launchers when they get to the point of impeding my productivity. And keeping a curated list can tap into muscle memory, improving speed further.
For example:
I’ve got 13 apps I can launch with a single tap, 13 more one extra swipe away (unless you count the swipe into my app drawer, which would bring it up to ~32 more).
Just something to keep in mind when looking for a launcher: you might want to find your definition of fast. If KISS works for you, all the more power to you. But I lament the lack of FOSS launchers that are more Nova-esque.
Correct. This is one article that goes over a multi-hop VPN that’s sort of relevant regarding how you, as somebody in the middle of this process, would not see what is being relayed even if you’re closer to the end-user.
(Obviously this isn’t quite as far as Tor goes, but at least it explores the principle.)
All you need is a web browser running Snowflake to help people connect to Tor!
In the US there are several laws about providing abortions to women. If one such group existed on Discord, it could be used by legal, extralegal, and extremist interests to target those women.
Trans people just aren’t official targets of legal discrimination…
…Well, not across every US state.
…Not yet, at least.
That phrase is more often used as a post-hoc justification for harm, or to gloat, than as a legitimate warning.
I bring up “the email incident” because it’s a reminder that Proton may record stuff that’s not encrypted, which includes the vast majority of emails.
And it’s not to say that you wouldn’t trust it with one individual service, but whether it’s wise to trust it with so many services at once, from a security, privacy, and even monetary perspective.
Not every concern is FUD, and I think you’ll start seeing diminishing returns every time you repeat it.
There’s a lot of metadata Proton passes around, and two of their oldest flagship products (email and VPN) require you to put a lot of trust in one company. For email, you trust them to encrypt them without snooping. For VPN, you trust them to not collect logs about where you’re going.
And in the former case, they were compelled to give up at least a little data in the not-so-distant past.
Bundles in general are not great…
Companies and businesses benefit from the bundling bias, which usually is an indication that consumers are losing out. By creating bundled packages that people do not fully take advantage of, businesses are getting more money than they usually would and reap a greater profit.
And that’s before we factor in whether it’ll keep people from searching out alternatives thanks to convenience:
The successful deployment of a platform expansion strategy requires leveraging a customer group (composed primarily of end consumers) from one interaction to another, which would entail multiple contractual and technical tactics that differ in their degree of interference with customer choice. The more coercive these tactics are, the more they will resemble the effect that tying and bundling practices have on consumer behavior and thus the more likely to trigger competition law scrutiny.
Companies like Apple also keep people in their ecosystem by offering nice things upfront and then introducing sunk cost issues.
Gatekeeping valid criticism with ad hominem does nothing. I’ve already suggested multiple positive ways SN can make money, and it’s by offering value rather than selling subscriptions to editors they didn’t make and don’t maintain.
Thankfully I don’t need to show my contributions to open-source to prove myself to you, because I’m sure at that point you’d just shift the goalposts to some other arbitrary thing.
AFAIK there’s nothing to stop you from learning to code
I learned to self host. I learned to hack the extensions so they’d work when the SN company broke them.
But sure, it’s my fault for not learning enough. How dare I expect to take someone else’s code and just run it (ie, the thing they’re doing with their editors)
I understand the need for Standard Notes to make money, but I believe that offering the convenience and security of hosting is a good way to do this, not by selling subscriptions for self-hosted users to access extensions that are mostly wrappers for someone else’s work. Especially the editors:
- Standard Notes shouldn’t sell a subscription for me to use a thin wrapper for someone else’s markdown editor on something I host on my own server.
- Or a wrapper for someone else’s WYSIWYG HTML editor project that hasn’t been updated since 2021.
- Or a wrapper for someone else’s spreadsheet app.
(This is also probably why so many Standard Notes editors look out of place next to each other; they were made by totally different people at different times.)
I’ve been decreasingly enthused about Standard Notes since I started self hosting it.
- First, it was a little weird that the biggest draw of their premium subscription was not their cloud but extensions, which were mostly made by third parties and needed only a static site to host. But I could host my own extensions so this was no big deal.
- Then they made it harder to host and install your own extensions, making you have to select them one at a time instead of pointing to a single place.
- Then they started moving functionality like folders into extensions.
- More recently, a bug appeared where the logged in account would start trying to sync with the default instance instead of the one you initially entered, on both desktop and mobile apps.
- And possibly the last straw for me, they discontinued synching self-hosted instances on their web app, without warning.
And I haven’t been particularly thrilled with the idea of putting all my privacy needs under a single banner either. Email isn’t secure. You need to put a ton of trust in your VPN provider. I don’t think either of those services should be provided by the same company…
ETA: When did Standard Notes add AI generated pictures to their homepage? They don’t look good.
They posted a reason, but unfortunately the reason was it was getting abused.
But I did discover something: the list of alternative servers, which might not have been very up-to-date anyway, has vanished from their servers sometime after February.
Mozilla isn’t having a good time fighting on behalf of users privacy. They recently bought an AI company with private data, and now their new Mozillafied privacy policy still says they can sell it to advertisers.
The jury is still out about whether they can send your Monitor data to their ad-sale subsidiary.
I don’t like how privacy is becoming more of a binary. If the choices really become “either let the phone turn into a beacon or stuff it in a Faraday bag” then that’s one hell of a choice isn’t it?
And hypothetically, if phones were always capable of doing this to some degree and we just weren’t informed somehow, then they’re finally rolling that functionality out because it’s become culturally normalized. Which frightens me more, frankly.
No argument from me there. I didn’t mean to come across this argumentative, I just wanted to point it out here because of the context of this post (someone looking to move away from Firefox). And because, to me, ad telemetry still is a black box.