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LWD

@LWD@lemm.ee

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LWD ,

Criticizing this video for emotional arguments doesn't make sense. It lays down statistics, quotes privacy policies, and chips at the way Mozilla uses emotional arguments in its marketing. And I've seen many Firefox people simply argue "the CEO deserves to be paid well" and "Firefox is the last bastion of the open web" - arguments that I myself have at least semi agreed with, which means I might have proclivity to emotion myself.

So if there's a problem... Can you cite specific examples in the video?

LWD ,

She switched places with another CEO that promptly fired even more workers, yes.

Can you link to your critiques? I looked for them on your behalf and found three other posts of this video, but no comments from you on them.

LWD , (edited )

I have carefully considered the arguments. Perhaps I have even contributed to them indirectly. I find them to be incredibly legitimate and in dire need of Mozilla's action.

https://i.imgur.com/cMNeTCY.png

I'm kind of surprised your comment on this post got so much attention because it says so little; it should be dismissed out of hand as purely rhetorical IMO.

LWD ,

There are definitely bad actors who have "Mozilla must fall" ideology, like Brian Lunduke (who gets one hell of a shout-out in this video despite doing nothing but reposting already publicly accessible documents and speculating about them). Lunduke is clearly ideologically biased and doesn't care about whether things are true or false as long as his statements back up his personal agenda.

But the flip side to this is the "Mozilla mustn't fall" arguments that dismiss all criticism of Mozilla and insist that continued compromise (throwing money at every shiny new object, overpaying the CEO, cutting jobs, ignoring their officially stated principles) is necessary for Mozilla to survive, as if survival in itself is a valuable end goal.

And I don't think it is. A Mozilla that abandons its founding principles would be about as bad as a Mozilla that has ceased to exist entirely. We aren't there yet, but it's a death by a thousand cuts.

LWD ,

Google's influence on all web browsers (including Firefox) would definitely remain a constant even if Mozilla wasn't accepting money from them. Which is also why I have no problem with Mozilla accepting money from them. It's not the first time a company in fear of becoming a monopoly just threw money at a competitor; Microsoft did it with Apple.

The whole FakeSpot thing to me reads like a company pursuing new things on multiple levels. Back in 2022, FakeSpot was trying to get into NFT verification, and they only added the "with AI" label onto their product recently (with no changes I could detect). And given Mozilla's willingness to shift from random project to random project, I'm not excited about what this AI shift is going to do by early 2025.

Related: Mozilla's Biggest AI moments, published January 31 2024, may not age well

LWD ,

Brave can keep the old APIs but they'll still be affected, because developers for Chromium-compatible browsers still have to decide whether they want to create or support apps that will only work in a subset of browsers, and figure out how to distribute them outside the Chromium store.

LWD ,

Both uBlock Origin and Brave would be nothing without the maintainers of the filters they use.

Except uBlock's devs are transparent and supportive of the list maintainers, while Brave (AFAIK) really isn't.

LWD ,

Why I just hand my browsing data over to my ISP (and so should you)

Why I let random websites have my unique location-specific identifier (and so should you)

Don't think so

LWD , (edited )

If possible, I don't want my ISP to know, trade, and sell as little data about me as possible.

FTC Staff Report Finds Many Internet Service Providers Collect Troves of Personal Data, Users Have Few Options to Restrict Us

T-Mobile Employees Across The Country Receive Cash Offers To Illegally Swap SIMs

I know VPNs often exaggerate or outright lie, but they still benefit me in ways I consider valuable.

LWD ,

Market competition still exists for them, so they actually have a reason to live up to their promises still

LWD ,

I don't like the way it sounds, but I appreciate the honesty. Videos like this are always prescriptive, even if they present themselves as if they are a personal, "just for my needs" thing.

By the way, do you remember a video and Medium article posted by someone who was trying to convince us that big companies like Google aren't really privacy invasive?

LWD ,

My personal favorite is RethinkDNS, which is technically capable of running your favorite VPN provider alongside blocking ads and blocking/logging domains on a per-app basis.

It's a bit frustrating to set up for my taste, but it definitely works. (Kudos to Mozilla for sponsoring their project, BTW.)

LWD ,

Are you using a VPN?

Is this Chrome or a different browser I don't recognize?

Are you affiliated with any communist organization?

LWD ,

I've heard Reddit is starting to crack down on people using VPNs, which is a real shame because that also means that open information (ie intended by posters/commenters to be universally accessible) will not be.

Reddit is now protecting "their" intellectual property.

Ironically, shuttering access is where the profit is to be had, as it gets sold off to Big Data (AI) companies for processing.

LWD ,

The phrase "data governance" is so hosed online. In a better perfect world, you would be able to keep up whatever data you felt like sharing and take down the data you didn't. (Obviously third party archives could exist regardless, but hopefully you get my point.)

This whole AI thing could, or at least should, open up conversations about being able to revoke consent in a corporate relationship sense, in the same way you can already revoke consent in a personal relationship sense.

LWD ,

Heaven knows that ToS would allow companies to kill you unless the law stepped in.

LWD ,

I have little love for celebrities, but if any company needs to be held accountable for disinformation, it's the huge ones. Even 4chan kicked out QAnon conspiracy theorists in lightning speed compared to Facebook, and it's 4chan.

As the Internet Gets Scarier, More Parents Keep Their Kids’ Photos Offline (getpocket.com)

Here's a non-paywalled link to an article published in the Washington Post a few days ago. It's great to see this kind of thing getting some mainstream attention. Young children have not made an informed decision about whether they want their photos posted online.

LWD ,

My friends keep my photos offline too.

Anything that's genuinely good, is good in more ways than just "for the children".

LWD ,

"Privacy Sandbox" is just Google-controlled surveillance carried out with your phone/PC as the primary data provider. We've reached maximum perversion of the English language.

LWD ,

I'm pretty sure the old Privacy Sandbox was called FLoC, wasn't it? This is definitely part of Google's continued efforts to kill the (third-party) cookie in such a way that tracking your user activity will still be possible, but that Google itself will maximally benefit from because they're the ones controlling how it'll get implemented.

And given Google's near-unilateral control of web browsing standards, who will say no? Their biggest partners? Mozilla?

LWD ,

Kagi is one of the least trustworthy companies I've seen recently. I know it has fans, but it constantly talks out of both sides of its mouth.

Turns out Kagi does do advertising

Kagi does not give a solitary damn about privacy as the average person understands it.

We did not say we maintain anonmity, but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.

Kagi lied in its emails.

"AI is mentioned zero times"

https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/112/255/132/620/576/206/original/9eb0d03616f4e47e.png

...is clearly incorrect.

https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/112/259/430/662/373/613/original/b3392d8d788976d9.png

There's quite a lot more to distrust about a company that wants to lock you into a filter bubble.

LWD ,

It's barely a blog that was barely reformatted from the nearly inaccessible Gemini protocol. It's a glorified Lemmy post. If that's an article, then I'm a journalist and I want my Pulitzer

LWD ,

This is the second CEO to be a weirdo to a random person in the past month. First it was the Tumblr CEO, now it's the Kagi one.

Kagi was already in hot water for ignoring its paying customers' previous complaints, so this whole "I really want to know your opinion, we are a human first company!" thing really sounds disingenuous after the same CEO overruled away all criticism or tried shuffling it away from public channels and onto his much more closed-off Discord.

LWD ,

I don't think we have an argument except maybe on technicality, so I'll do my best to use your points as a springboard for further clarification/critique of Kagi and not of you.

They promote their search engine but their users don't get to see ads. I don't know what's wrong about that.

What's wrong is Vlad had just said "That community is 100% responsible for Kagi's growth as a business through word of mouth (Kagi does no paid advertising)"

And he should be the first person to know that statement isn't correct.

may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.

The problem here is that nobody in this community will recommend a corporation that "may know everything about you but respect your privacy."

  • When recommending a messager service, common consensus always leans towards the one that knows the least about you.
  • This is because corporations can change or be forced to give up data, which would render the pinkie-promise of "we won't" moot
  • I've seen an argument posted here or on Reddit that Google is technically private because they know about you and won't sell ads; it's basically the Kagi line. Basically nobody cares even if it's true (and it's turned out to not be true).

Vlad said "kagi.com" - which doesn't mention AI or AI tools.

Maybe not the homepage, but the site itself is very explicit about AI being the point of their project. And if Kagi will change their statements about everything else on a dime, and have such poor views on privacy, why not also follow their own manifesto?

You can read their pro-AI manifesto on the Kagi.com domain right here.

You can read a critique of this manifesto and how it talks about you "volunteering" your data to search engines, and other creepy stuff, right here.

LWD ,

The Tumblr (and WordPress and Automattic) CEO, Matt Mullenweg, banned somebody for life over apparently "explicit" Tumblr content, and that got backlash from the LGBT community.

Instead of shaking it off like an adult,

  • Matt (allegedly) DMed dozens of people,
  • followed the Tumblr user to Twitter to argue there too
  • complained that the Tumblr user had other edgy/explicit usernames

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/tumblr-ceo-transphobic-moderation-controversy

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/761/965/45d.png

This man's platform (Wordpress) powers most of the internet and he's worried about catgirlballsack on Tumblr.

LWD ,

It's basically a proxy for Google and other engines, think of it as a VPN for your searches.

LWD ,

Standard Notes has an unfortunate business model. Instead of charging for the convenience and security of syncing your stuff on your behalf (which is the model of Obsidian, Joplin, and Bitwarden), it wants to sell you a Markdown compatible note editor that

  • They didn't write
  • They don't maintain
  • Can just sit on your phone/PC

This isn't just true for their markdown editor. Most of their editors are wrappers for code that other people made, sometimes last updated years ago.

Fun trivia: Filen, the E2EE cloud storage service, actually implemented "notes" that include the rich text ones free of charge.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of the "everything under one roof" model regardless... You might pass up perfectly good services that cost less or are even free.

LWD ,

What was the surveiling government? I did a quick search on the article and didn't see it mentioned

LWD ,

Darn it. From the way it was phrased -- or maybe how I misread it -- I thought the implication was that the government was initially named in the article

LWD ,

I was wondering how they were planning on capitalizing on their own VPN service.

LWD ,

ICYMI, Mozilla goofed with their offering. They partnered with a business that had previously sold personal data and then shifted to a "pay to remove it" model. They've since reversed course on it entirely.

LWD ,

I'm... Not exactly sure. They severed their connection with the OneRep company but say they still want to provide subscriptions.

If you think that's wild, just wait until you look up what their FakeSpot subsidiary sells to advertisers...

Standard notes: what about don’t put all your eggs in one basket rule?

If the owner of the standard notes will now be a proton, doesn't that contradict this principle? I have a proton email account but I don't want it linked to my standard notes account. I don't strongly trust companies that offer packaged services like google or Microsoft....

LWD ,

I've been self-hosting Standard Notes for a while, and if you think it's something you can pull off, I'd recommend it. Especially if you can get by without folders, (too many) fancy editors, or some of the extra cloud stuff they have been offering.

If you don't feel like self-hosting, there are other options too, like

  • The non-self-hostable but E2EE-encrypted and open-source Notesnook
  • The closed source but extensible Obsidian, which doesn't seem very interested in locking you into any tying
  • The somewhat clunky but powerful and open-source Joplin
LWD ,

You can add two spaces at the end of every line to manually trigger
a line break

LWD ,

Is there anything won't with the company itself being in Pakistan, if it's explicitly hosting your data in Germany? I'm not aware of any nation-level threat going on over there, and their client is open-source on all platforms, so I don't imagine there's much that would be compromised.

LWD ,

You're asking the right questions.

Regarding keys: they never store those. If they did, that would be a problem from the beginning. The whole point of E2EE encryption is that the servers and server owners should never be able to access your data even if you wanted them to.

LWD ,

If you're worried about backdoors, you can build every client from source and verify the code. IIRC they haven't paid for an audit, but if they failed to protect your passwords/keys that'd be really bad for their reputation. And considering their target demographic, it's pretty important to keep that part of the reputation alive.

LWD ,

There's 0 vendor lock in (in the entire Proton ecosystem)

What definition are you using for lock-in? Because I'm pretty sure the Proton ecosystem qualifies to some degree.

LWD ,

Maybe, but I'm pretty sure "end a line in two spaces to ensure a line break is inserted" is standard Markdown. I can see the source fine but not the formatted comment.

LWD ,

How do you get "trapped" in it? I've never used it seriously, but my last experiment on Android requires you to create a folder to write Markdown files to. Which seems about as portable as any app can possibly be; it could disappear from your devices tomorrow, and you'd still have all your stuff, right?

FWIW Markor also lets you edit Markdown files locally on Android, and it's probably a far cry from Obsidian but it could easily serve as a drop-in replacement in such a scenario.

LWD ,

It seems like apps are all using web apps as a shortcut for deploying cross platform functionality. Which is sometimes fine until you run into compatibility or UI issues like those.

LWD ,

Thanks for the detailed answer! I was aware of the community plugins (and I'm very pleased Obsidian isn't trying to sell them to anyone) but wasn't sure if there was anything else going on under the hood... Plugin configuration definitely makes sense.

And gives me an excuse to start exporting the stuff I've got in my local Standard Notes instance too. I like their interface, but their mobile clients kept throwing me out by switching to the default server, and the web client disabled non-official synching too, so I'm starting to like the idea of having an actual copy of the notes rather than hoping SN doesn't have another fit.

LWD ,

From the looks of it, Trillium is halfway between Standard Notes and hosting your own wiki.

If you're happy with Trillium, I'd say stick with it. It looks pretty good, TBH. Standard Notes is self-hostable more as an afterthought, which is to its detriment.

LWD ,

The dark pattern is the fact Edge is the default OOTB browser on Windows.

LWD ,

In June 2023, Beeper became the first member of The Matrix Foundation.

LOL.

I've never particularly trusted the corporation behind Matrix messaging. They disrespect the GDPR openly in ways not even Discord does (a GDPR compliant deletion request from a British Matrix.org user to Matrix.org will result in no messages or usernames being deleted).

Matrix's primary goals are keeping your data online as permanently as possible and replicating it across as many services (including more explicitly anti-privacy ones) as possible.

LWD ,

TIL the things to build a browser take up less space than a package manager... But I don't do Linux any more hardcore than Ubuntu either

LWD ,

But in reality, bigots tend to be Republicans.

Is this you?

https://i.imgur.com/jTPhfxl.png

LWD ,

In the same way living a full life is equivalent to suicide, sure.

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