I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.

As someone who started their career as a volunteer at Mozilla and was fortunate enough to become an employee (although am no longer), I can say with a fair amount of confidence that this has been their standard operating mode for over a decade. Nothing I’ve seen from them since I was let go has shown me they’re operating any differently.

I still support Firefox because I oppose a browser monoculture owned by Google, and the advocacy work the Foundation is vitally important. The Corporation lost the plot ages ago though, and does more harm to Mozilla’s mission than any other player out there. No amount of re-orgs or pivots can fix this.

I hope, someday, for Firefox to be freed from the Corporation as a sustainable community run project (like Debian), with infrastructure sponsored by the Foundation and others who want to see it continue. Unfortunately the Corporation will never let Firefox go because its existential for them, and will be stuck in this panic cycle for as long as Google keeps them on life support.

Anyway, still using Firefox and pruning all the weeds from it each release, but it’s become exhausting.

Hey, I’m a millennial! I not only remember Crossfire and SLI, I still hold a grudge against Nvidia for killing 3dfx.

Nice try, Officer, but I’m not falling for it.

Yeah, feed the AI slop to AI as a prompt and watch it slowly eat itself. Like the late Ray Liotta being fed his own brain in Hannibal.

Reading the “In Crime and Politics” section of the Calibri Wikipedia page, I can’t help but think the motivation here is so the State Department can release falsified documents predating 2006 without being found out.

This except I convinced my parents they didn’t actually need a computer in their lives anymore. It is win-win.

I’d imagine people on Linux who want to play Rust would be more than happy to shell out $15 and go through the little effort it is to download DLC so they can play on a Premium server when the other option is to shell out $140 for a Windows 11 license and go through the effort of installing that spyware trash to their PC.

On the other hand, Alistair clearly doesn’t want your money so maybe stop trying to give it to him.

My government seems to think otherwise.

Yes

rm -rf /

Twice a day, so the gaskets don’t dry out and leak.

Pebble: 30 days of battery life

Also Pebble: 30 days manufacturer warranty

So the warranty expires when the battery does. Lol.

Edit: still loving my Time Round even though it hasn’t been updated in nearly a decade.

Yeah, I can totally empathise. I used to work in QA for a couple different software companies, including around CVEs and security bug bounty programs. One company scaled back their QA department to near nothing, the other eliminated QA altogether, instead relying on devs to QA their own stuff or automation. It’s not going well for either of them.

Not going to downvote this because the source article is useful, but OP’s take is ludicrous. Have we really reached the point where ALL media is propaganda?

It might be time to unplug society and plug it back in again.

It reminds me of when climate hoaxers claim the hole in the ozone layer shrinking proves those campaigning to fix it were just fearmongering.

Former employee here. Firefox has been adding sponsored content to the new tab page since Firefox 60 in 2018. Their support article gives a good amount of detail on how it works, but perhaps more importantly for you, how to disable it.

That was actually a server-side bug 8 months ago which they not only fixed within 3 days of the issue being reported but followed it up with a hard block against more than 2 displaying at once to make extra sure this didn’t happen again.

If this is what you’re currently seeing then please report it to them. If instead this is an old screenshot then I’ll just agree that Mozilla has certainly suffered many avoidable self-inflicted wounds but this isn’t one of them.

I’d agree that it’s overblown and I suspect this reaction comes from users not understanding the complex legal framework Mozilla operates in globally and regionally, and Mozilla doing what it does best, miscommunication.

IANAL but my interpretation of the situation is that in certain jurisdictions, California for example (where Mozilla is headquartered and where they have a legally binding contract in place with Google), they are and always have been “selling” your data from a LEGAL standpoint. It is a difference between how we users define selling (a literal exchange of data for money) versus how the law defines selling which can be much more broad and include things we wouldn’t define as selling.

As far as the law is concerned, again, in some but not all jurisdictions, a) all data has monetary value to tech companies, and b) with Mozilla & Google in particular there is a monetary exchange (ie. a contract worth millions of dollars) for Google Search being integrated into Firefox as the default.

Therefore, as far as the law is concerned, when you type into the Awesomebar or search box in Firefox, Firefox sends (sells) the data you entered (your data) to Google (because of course it does, that’s how the internet works) and this is a “sale of your data” under the legal definition. This is just one example from one jurisdiction Mozilla operates within, albeit a majorly influential and litigious jurisdiction.

My understanding is they had to make that their terms of use because if they didn’t they’d be liable to get sued into oblivion in jurisdictions where using a web browser to browse the internet constituted a legal sale.

Does this open the door to abuse and the literal sale of our data in the future, absolutely. But it’s on us to trust but verify, and do what we, the community, do best and hold Mozilla to account when they inevitably screw up.

Anyway, this was a much longer comment than I intended to write, but that’s my take as a someone who has not just used Mozilla products for decades but also contributed labour as well.

I’m not banned on reddit, never have been. I use both daily. Lemmy to see what my fellow humans are talking about, Reddit for when I want to see what bots are talking about.

I don’t. I install a distro with sane defaults and get to work.

It might sound ridiculous but I switched to Linux to take ownership of the things I own.

The lesson for me was Windows Genuine Advantage in Windows Vista throwing a fit whenever I wanted to make a change to MY computer. In this moment I realized that so long as Microsoft was in my life, I will never truly own the hardware I purchased, the system I built with my own two hands. I was late-teens at the time working a dirty minimum wage job, so this was big to me.

This is a lesson I’ve carried with me the rest of my life and colours all purchasing decisions I make. I’m not giving up my hard earned money if I don’t actually own the product I’m purchasing.