I would say it’s more of a desperate attempt to continue the current paradigm of online advertising which deems indispensable the kind of data about conversion rates to which the industry has become accustomed, despite the recognition that their current means of collecting it must come to an end.
But either way, it’s incompatible with the principles of free software. Users are not meant to put up with features that are there for the sole benefit of someone else; someone they might normally consider an adversary. The only incentive we’re given to participate in this scheme is one that resembles blackmail. Except it isn’t even advertisers saying “do this, or we’ll spy on you like usual” — it’s Mozilla saying “do this, and maybe we can persuade a few of them not to spy on you as much, and to give us a cut.”
They are selling behavioural data about their users to advertisers. People are not going to be happy with that no matter how they try to spin it.
There certainly are many people who seem suspiciously eager to find fault with Firefox. But it’s not really a surprise when its authors do things like this. They chose not to make this feature opt-in because they know that nobody in their right mind would opt into it. There is no benefit to the user in it, only risk. Mozilla seems to be leaving us to go off and join the advertising industry instead. People feel betrayed, and it feeds the cynical nihilism that comes so easily to social media users under the conditions of late capitalism.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/06/msg00041.html
I was wrong, it’s 1024 not 256. It’s a soft limit, so easy to adjust once you’re aware that you need to.
I would certainly advise everyone to choose a phone with that in mind.
The desktop client is not great, but it works. There certainly are things Signal could do better. Its phone-centric nature is ridiculous and I have no idea why they cling to it. But it’s easier than trying to get everyone to use Matrix or whatever — mainly because more people have heard of it.
Yeah, Signal is good enough. If people use shitty operating systems like iOS or Google’s version of Android that’s another problem and not really one that it’s my job to care about that much. What matters is the network effect and every user who moves moves from Whatsapp to Signal is one more person who gains the freedom to easily improve their digital lives further if they someday choose to do so without it costing them the ability to chat with all their friends.
Added a warning that appears in Proton Log for systems that have low file descriptor limit
I’m glad to see that. There are reasons why debian didn’t choose to increase their default limit beyond 256, but some games require it and if you happen to find one it can be tricky to figure out what went wrong.
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It’s interesting to see that Linux has gotten popular enough that a few of the most user-hostile devs are going out of their way specifically to stop people using it. Other than ignorance it’s unclear what their motivations could be. I for one will remember the names of the studios that do it and try my best never to buy or talk about their games.
Aside from not wanting to rely on the same one as everyone else in the world, setting up port forwarding on proton looks unreasonably complicated.
In my years of using mullvad (before they took away port forwarding) I found probably half a dozen websites that blocked me based on that but it may be more common now. Often I found it was easy to get around it using Tor. Some of the smaller and better-run sites might fix the problem if you report it to them through the proper channels.
It has been falsely claimed that the measure undertaken by MCMC is a draconian measure
While it may be unclear exactly what kind of Internet traffic laws Draco would’ve written, allowing only the major landowners to run DNS servers does seem to be in keeping with the spirit of “aiding and legitimizing the political power of the aristocracy and allowing them to consolidate their control of the land and poor” as his laws are said to have done.
If you have time for an answer in audio form the CBC has some ideas.
They remove telemetry, such as the kind of telemetry causing the problems reported in this thread. They do not remove OCSP, safe browsing, Sync, and other things that connect to outside servers and therefore leak information about user activity. They do enable about:config so that those which are unwanted can be disabled.
This has been going around all over lemmy and I still had no idea what the actual news (if any) is supposed to be. So I did a diff against the 2022 version of this Mozilla blog entry. The differences:
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Changed “Starting today, Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection to all Firefox users worldwide” to “Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection to more Firefox users worldwide.”
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Added mention of Android.
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Changed “recent stories” to just “stories”, since the reporting on this is no longer recent.
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The somewhat whimsical image from the 2022 version has been replaced with one that to me looks more generic and illustrates the technology less clearly, with more irrelevant detail in the alt text and no credit for the artist.
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Changed “Today’s release” to “The release”.
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2022’s “Bringing Total Cookie Protection to all Firefox users is our next step towards creating a better internet, one where your privacy is not optional” changed to "While bringing Total Cookie Protection to more Firefox users has been one significant step in this journey, we have still kept our sights on an even safer, even better internet. And starting in 2024, all our users can look forward to Firefox blocking even more third party cookies. That’s right; we are taking big swings to adopt new cookie partitioning and clearing mechanisms so that users can browse with fewer cookies that won’t stick around as long and will result in an even better browsing experience. Just another step on our road towards creating a better internet where your privacy is not optional.
Declarations of an intent to reimagine social media are all well and good, but joining the actually existing Fediverse is probably a more effective place to start.
It may not be precisely what you would’ve designed, not the People’s Democratic Social Media of your dreams, not exactly like whatever Tarnoff imagined, but it is what we’ve got and as it continues to evolve it has considerable potential for new kinds of Internet-based social organization.
Organizing a boycott of Twitter is beside the point. All we need is for more people to join us in building up the better alternatives we already have. How is it even possible to put so much thought into the subject and not mention this?
Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005
It was funded through a deal with an ad company. It did not become an ad company itself until much more recently. jwz had a succinct and memorable response to the the absurd idea that really it’s been ad-funded all along and that this makes things okay:
You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”
Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text.
PET-enabled home routing
Oh, apparently it’s a “5G” thing. Perhaps everyone in Europe knows that already. Apparently the design of the new network is complicated enough that they’ve accidentally left room for just a little bit of user privacy. Europol claims to have become dependent on the situation where people using mobile phones have none at all.
Having read the actual description of the protocol, such as it is, I should add in the interest of fairness that those "30 generated porn credits” do get you 30 new key pairs each month. They are issued directly by the central authority which knows exactly who they’re issuing them to, and the public key is presented directly to web sites you visit. But they promise not to track how you use them.
That it’s so absurd and poorly designed is reassuring in a way. It’s difficult to imagine anyone using this.
Wait, what? You think they’re not planning on getting paid for providing this data to advertisers?
P.S. It looks like Mozilla’s Data Privacy FAQ is going to need updating. It doesn’t even mention this stuff. As the noyb complaint points out: