Instead of trying to regulate everything, perhaps it would be better if consumers educated themselves and did not buy devices that do not run locally using open protocols in the first place. For me, it's a hard requirement -- I will not buy a "smart" anything device that isn't supported offline by Home Assistant. This restricts my choice set, but so be it. Sometimes, it means doing more work. I won't buy a Ring camera, so I had to build my own system using generic RTSP cameras, some hard drives and a PC.
I'm pleasantly surprised to see this opinion gain popularity on HN. When I raise the same point, someone usually replies with a cynical and sometimes snarky dismissal. I just wrote a long rant about it [1] in support of somebody else who made the same point.
Reminder: Ladybird is being developed by a handful of people with contributions from the community. It's far from being complete, but it clearly shows that you don't need an enormous budget to build a Web browser entirely from scratch, let alone maintain one.
> The O-1 category includes the O-1A, which is designated for individuals with extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business or athletics and the O-1B, reserved for those with “extraordinary ability or achievement”.
> My whole thing is being the funny Jewish girl with big boobs.
The O-1B category is broad because it's mostly entertainment based so there's more squishy room two of the requirements match a Top OF model though.
> Evidence of a record of major commercial or critically acclaimed successes in the performing arts, as shown by box office receipts or record, cassette, compact disk, or video sales
> Evidence of having commanded a high salary or other significantly high remuneration for services in relation to others
A high earning OF model ticks both of those boxes pretty easily. We don't want to put dollar amounts on it to only attract movie stars because other professions don't pay as well would be blocked out and an explicit filter on (heh) explicit O1 visas would be a content based restriction that would (or at least imo should) be a 1A infringement. [0]
The equipment doesn’t have moving parts so I wouldn’t expect it to break down so quickly.
The real surprise for me was how much having solar panels on your roof adds to the cost of roofing work. Which is a problem because the roof is likely to need repairs more often than the solar panels.
Yeah it's a tradeoff on the roof. The panels also increase the lifetime of the roof.
Solar panels are incredibly durable, there's a thriving secondary market for used panels, and we're likely to see 30-50 years of usage out of any panel created today.
Cracking the problem of making the roof out of solar panels seems like a fantastic engineering challenge. But not one with small tiles, make the roof out of the bigger cheap large panels. I would love to see startups working on that. Asphalt roofs look like crap anyway, changing to shiny panels would be a huge improvement IMHO
This is totally wrong. I work in the industry. Solar panels should last for 30 years, but they degrade in capacity by 0.5 to 1% per year, depending on environmental conditions (temp, radiation, etc). Lithium batteries from tier 1 suppliers can last at least a decade of regular use. It depends on how their cycling and state of charge is managed. If you keep them between 20% and 80% charge, they can last incredibly long.
The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made.
Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.
> I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people
Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice.
The only "breakage" that I have encountered with such a hardened configuration is related to the spoofing of the time zone. But the fundamental issue is that Javascript/browsers should have not been designed to allow websites to extract this kind of personal information in the first place. But even that is not enough and users are still fingerprintable. In an ideal world, the only thing a website should see is the originating IP and nothing else.
If anything, Brave has done more to harden Chromium than Mozilla has with Firefox, even though Brave comes with its own set of problems (scammy crypto integrations, AI, VPN and other stuff).
> Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice.
I suspect that it shows that Firefox developers do a good job at making Firefox work, and this good job enables forks to work.
If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of websites suddenly stop working, and people assume that Firefox is broken.
> If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
It's not only what gets send to Mozilla as telemetry or crash reports that is a problem. That can be turned off (many Linux distros do), or firewalled.
The main issue is that websites can more or less accurately identify users uniquely by extracting information that they should not have access to if the browser was designed with privacy in mind.
This includes, but is not limited to, fonts installed, system language, time zone, window size, browser version, hardware information (number of cores, device memory), canvas fingerprint, and many others attributes. When you combine all of that with the originating IP address, you can reliably determine who visited a website, because that information is shared and correlated with services where people identify themselves (Google accounts, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) Even masking your IP may not be enough because typically there is enough information in the other data points to track you already.
All of this is true, but it's a problem of the entire web platform and specs, so if you want to favor untraceability above compatibility, you'll need a dedicated privacy-hardened browser. Firefox aims to be better at privacy, but still respect the web specs.
Sure, but then don't go grandstanding about privacy. You can't have both.
And saying that improving performance is impossible without it is hyperbolic. Developers did that before every major application turned into actual spyware. Profilers still work without it.
Yes, it's the stock configuration to be not broken. If you are ok with breakage in exchange for less fingerprinting, the config setting privacy.resistFingerprinting is right there: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting
It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor is always going to be better for this.
But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy" fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?
Unfortunately, the guys in charge at Mozilla are clearly enamored with AI. They like it so much (and value users so little), that they'll let it write the whole damn PR blog post about company strategy.
You probably like watching ads because Firefox is only browser you will have a true ad free experience. Unfortunately Firefox is slower than chrome has less support for audio, copy pasting is broken etc. So I use both depending what I am doing.
While I would love to agree with you, in America restaurants of all sizes (and personal transportation companies) seemingly often rely on tips from customers to supplement the wages of their workers instead of just paying them fairly.
It's a collective action problem: it can't be solved by individuals like this. All you'll achieve is complicity in wage theft. A viable approach might be to prefer doing business with companies who promise their workers a good wage, but this requires that your local businesses actually make that commitment. To get that, you'll have to go outside the abstraction of the market, and actually talk to decisionmakers within the businesses. (This is sometimes called "activism".)
No, I disagree that other peoples ethical failures spread to you if you don't participate in the ethical failure. If you disagree on ethical grounds with something, just don't do it. To the extent that you could simply not frequent those places.
The army of faceless delivery gig workers can’t exactly pick and choose. They deliver the food or they get banned from the platform and replaced by the next guy.
Because Apple makes privacy claims all the time, but all their software is closed source and it is very hard or impossible to verify any of their claims. Even if messages sent between iPhones are E2EE encrypted for example, the client apps and the operating system may be backdoored (and likely are).
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