It already exists at least as an "experiment" but I guess now it's nearly ready for full production use. Perhaps the new terms of use text is motivated by not enough people accepting the old merino opt-in prompt as well as wanting to get more third-parties involved in the system. More details here: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/firefox-suggest-telemetry.html
When Merino integration is enabled on the client and the user has opted in to Firefox Suggest data collection, Firefox sends everything the user types in the address bar to the Merino server.
They want to intercept your searches and url entries to run them through the privacy preserving data extracting machine in order to collect data that will be sold to advertisers and used to pollute your search results and url suggestions with paid-for links. They were trying to be vague about it so that people would not understand this, and instead all they accomplished was to make people think they want to record everything you type into every web form. That's my guess, anyway. Maybe they really do want everything.
Indeed, fingerprinting. Preventing it is one thing Mozilla could be working on. Going all-out on it really, devoting significant engineering resources to making their browser fingerprinting resistance bulletproof. Reworking every js api with defence against adversarial use of it in mind. If they're really that desperate for cash they could sell it as a premium feature for a modest subscription fee, although obviously it'd be available free of charge for those willing to get their Firefox builds from someone other than Mozilla.
Don't panic, though! Much like the competition does, while we sell your data we'll tell you all about how we respect your privacy so much more than the competition does. It's for the best. Driving away all its users is the only way to make Firefox commercially viable. That's just how capitalism works.
We will collect data about you and sell it, but only after we've run it through a privacy preserving machine that turns it into privacy jam so you can't tell how much of yours is in the jar.
Looking back over my long and occasionally successful life, I must admit that I do have a few regrets here and there. One is that for a couple of years, I was a Skype user. Oh well, at least I stayed away from Teams.
The idea that any military attack on Canada is most likely to come from directly across the southern border is not a new one. It's one of the main reasons we need an army at all. Many years ago I mentioned this theory to some people in the military and was slightly surprised that they all took it seriously and said yeah, we do have plans for that possibility of course. I don't know to what extent they were serious about it then or whether they've all gone soft and forgotten about it in the decades that have since passed, but unlikely as we thought it that an invasion would come from the USA it's even more unlikely that it'd come from anywhere else.
Pointing people to reddit, as if that's an alternative. When a VPN provider makes such bad choices it's tempting to imagine that the decision was influenced by somebody who wants to secretly get the message out that the company is no longer to be trusted, because it's hard to see any other logic in it.
The centralized social media have demonstrated again and again that content moderation at scale can never work well the way they do it. They are a menace to society. The problem isn't that Elon Musk is the wrong person to decide how a billion people should be allowed to talk to each other and which of their voices should be amplified, it's that nobody should ever have that power.
A diverse network of smaller instances where each is free to take its own approach is the future of social media, if it has a future.
If it does turn out that "racist Dahlia supports killing Palestinian children. 20,000 is not enough she wants even more Palestinian blood spilled" really is the worst that he posted, as the law student suggests, then all the ridiculously slanted reporting about it — which unquestioningly takes the accused at his word — might turn out to be not too far from the truth after all. We'll find out eventually, I hope.
I don't think that's just "collateral damage." Destroying the universities along with the rest of the education system in order to stop people from becoming too well educated seems to be part of the plan.
kbal @ kbal @fedia.io Posts 13Comments 1,087Joined 2 yr. ago 
Looking at the
FirefoxLibrewolf "print preview" it does actually look quite easy to read.I wonder how many of my stupid comments on lemmy have been converted to PDF, printed on paper, and stored in a filing cabinet.