I’m using 1Password and have been happy using it. Any reason not to use it, aside from not being open source?

Asstivists?

Yeah, what kind of hacktivist group would go against Internet Archive? Not activists for good at least.

Edit: according to another article they are a pro-Palestinian group. Still not sure about their motives for Internet Archive.

BlackMeta, also known as SN_BlackMeta, appeared in November 2023 and has a history of claiming responsibility for attacks against organizations in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. In May, the group claimed responsibility for a multiday denial-of-service attack on the San Francisco-based Internet Archive. In April, the group claimed to have attacked the Israel-based infrastructure of the Orange Group, a French provider of telecommunication services in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The group also targeted organizations in Saudi Arabia, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates.

Dark Reading

Yeah, you argument about pragmatism resonates with me. If all tracking was turned off over night that will break a lot of streams of revenue that many businesses/sites online rely on. Those businesses has grown because it has been possible and profitable to track you every step online. That does not mean that system needs to be preserved, or replaced with something similar. Markets adapt, we don’t have to help this business find new ways to make money.

And also, cross-site tracking is not necessary to do advertising, it just make is more cost efficient. I don’t accept the argument that they need my behavior data to have a working business.

Ads in newspapers have worked historically without the tracking. (Newspapers a hard time now though competing with the more profitable online ad business)

Also cookies have other functions aside from tracking your behavior, while this new feature only benefits ad/product analysis, with no direct benefit to the user of the browser. It’s essentially giving away information about my behavior, albeit without telling them who I am. (Indirectly users might benefit from having more ad-supported services online)

But sure, Mozilla is free to do what they want. I still like and use Firefox.

But Mozilla is not in the ad business so why are they appeasing advertisers?

I could see Mozilla thinking advertisers will back off when they give them a more integrity-respecting tool, but my expectation is that advertisers will keep doing what they already do. Because why not?

Either way, distributing reports about my (anonymized) behavior, to advertisers, is still a slight breech of trust.

And even if it’s aggregated and mixed with others to a point of pure anonymity, it’s still a tool to manipulate your behavior on a large scale. I can see others not having a problem with it but I do.

But why appease advertisers, I don’t see the point? The current ad business only exists because it’s been possible to track people. It does not mean it’s impossible to do advertising without it. It’s not like it’s a right for advertisers to know in detail how their ads are performing.

Why wouldn’t Mozilla just disable all tracking? Why do they see any need to give anything back when minimizing another form of tracking?

But what is their incentive to make this feature to begin with? Who is it really for?

Edit: this is more of rhetorical question I guess. To rephrase it a bit to get closer to my point: who is the browser designed for? For the person using the browser? For the website owner? For advertisers?

While I’m not hating on Mozilla it still warrant a discussion.

Won’t they just use both this new feature and the classic way of tracking you, now having more data than before.

Yes

Not that I will convince you to use signal, but there are desktop versions as well, so technically not required to use a smart phone.

You’re right, it would be very annoying to change up your gait all the time unless you’re a potential target. Like you, I try to avoid being tracked and surveillances as much as possible just by principle. But for something like this it would be very impractical.

Well, if you did it all the time they would consistently identify you.

I’ll play the uniformed devils advocate here:

1. Is the GPL license enforceable?
2. And if so, I assume “derivative” will still subjective to some degree. Where do we draw the line between derivative and non-derivative?

I’m torn about my personal opinion about copyrights and software licensing in general. I think the main problem is the huge power imbalance between people and corporations, not so much the fact a company analyzed a bunch of available data to solve programming problems.

They don’t copy the data and sell it verbatim to others which would be a legal issue and in my mind also a moral issue, as they don’t add any additional value.