Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
so Firefox now has terms of use with this text in them:
this is bad. it feels like the driving force behind this are the legal requirements behind Mozillaās AI features that nobody asked for, but functionally these terms give Mozilla the rights to everything you do in Firefox effectively without limitation (because legally, the justification they give could apply to anything you do in your browser)
I havenāt taken the rebranded forks of Firefox very seriously before, but they might be worth taking a close look at now, since apparently these terms of use only apply to the use of mainline Firefox itself and not any of the rebrands
The corporate dickriding over at Reddit about this is exhausting.
How on Earth did I use Firefox to interact with websites and services in the last 20+ years then without that permission?
Luckily the majority opinion even over there seems to be that this sucks bad, which might to be in no small part due to a lot of Firefoxās remaining userbase being privacy-conscious nerds like me. So, hey, theyāre pissing on the boots on even more of their users and hope no one will care. And the worst part? It will probably work because anything Chromium-based is completely fucking useless now that theyāve gutted uBlock Origin (and even the projects that retain Manifest v2 support donāt work as well as Firefox, especially when it comes to blocking YouTube ads), and most Webkit-based projects have either switched to Chromium or disappeared (RIP Midori).
tech apologists love to tell you the legal terms attached to the software youāre using donāt matter, then the instant the obvious happens, they immediately switch to telling you itās your fault for not reading the legal terms they said werenāt a big deal. this post and its follow-up from the same poster are a particularly good take on this.
also:
nobody gives a fuck about that, weāre all technically gifted enough to realize the browser receives input on interaction. the problem is Mozilla receiving my website addresses, form data, and uploaded files (and much more), and in fact getting a no-restriction license for them and their partners to do what they please with that data. thatās new, thatās what the terms of use cover, and thatās the line they crossed. donāt let anybody get that shit twisted ā including the people behind one of the supposedly privacy-focused Firefox forks
Hello, I am the the technology understander and Iām here to tell you there is no difference whatsoever between giving your information to Mozilla Firefox (a program running on your computer) and Mozilla Corporation (a for-profit company best known for its contributions to Firefox and other Mozilla projects, possibly including a number good and desirable contributions).
When you use Staples QuickStrip EasyClose Self Seal Security Tinted #10 Business Envelopes or really any envelope, youāre giving it information like recipient addresses, letter contents, or included documents. The envelope uses this information to make it easier for the postal service to deliver the mail to its recipient. Thatās all it is saying (and by it, I mean the envelopeās terms of service, which include giving Staples Inc. a carte blanche to do whatever they want with the contents of the envelopes bought from them).
did some digging and apparently the (moz poster) itās this person. check the patents.
mega groan
related, but tonight I will pour one out for Conkeror
NGL I always wanted to use IceWeasel just to say I did, but now it might be because itās the last bastion!
Sigh. Not long ago I switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox because it has better privacy-related add-ons. Since a while ago, on one machine as a test, Iāve been using LibreWolf, after I went down the rabbit hole of āhow do I configure Firefox for privacy, including that it doesnāt send stuff to Mozillaā and was appalled how difficult that is. Now with this latest bullshit from Mozillaā¦ guess Iāll switch everything over to LibreWolf now, or go back to Vivaldiā¦
Really hope theyāll leave Thunderbird alone with such crapā¦
I often wish I could just give up on web browsers entirely, but unfortunately thatās not practical.
I hate how much firefox has been growing to this point of being the best, by a smaller and smaller margin, of a fucking shit bunch
Yeahā¦that could be a real deal breaker. Doesnāt this give them the right to MITM all traffic coming through the browser?
Maybe. The latter part of the sentence matters, too
Good luck getting a lawyer to give a definitive answer to what exactly counts as helping you do those things.
The whole sentence is a little ambiguous itself. Does the āas you indicate with your use of Firefoxā refer to
B seems fairly innocuous and the intended effect is probably āif you send data to a website using our browser, donāt sue us for sending the data you asked us to sendā. The mere act of uploading or inputting information through Firefox does not ā in my (technical, not legal) expert opinion ā indicate that Mozilla could help me navigate, experience, or interact with online content by MITMing the uploaded or input data.
A is a lot scarier, since the interpretation of what it means to āhelp you navigate, experience, and interact with online contentā does not depend on how you use Firefox. Anything that Mozilla can successfully argue to help you do those things is fair game, whether you ask for it or not, which seems a lot more abusable.
Opera Mini was (is?) an embedded/mobile browser for Symbian dumbphones and other similar devices that passed all traffic through a proxy to handle rendering on server side and reduce processing effort on the (typically slow and limited) mobile devices. This could be construed as helping the user navigate, experience, and interact with online content, so there is precedent of a browser MITMing its usersā data for arguably helpful purposes.
I would never accept hijacking my web upload and input data for training an LLM or whatever mass data harvesting fad du jour happens to be in fashion at a given time and I do not consider it helpful for any purpose for a web browser to do such things. Alas, the 800-pound gorilla might have some expensive reality-bending lawyers on its side.
The update on their news post supports the ādonāt sue us for sending the data you asked us to sendā intention.
Whether or not to believe them is up to you.
Text removed in Mozilla TOS update:
hereās the diff
digging around in the the issue linked to that, it seems like the person who closed/approved this is someone from a different, external agency who lists moz as a client (her hachy profile also lists that as her employer)
this pr was closed ābecause we have new copyā
thereās probably some questions to be asked around how this decision/instruction got made, but one would have to wade into mozās corp and discussion systems to do so (and apparently they also have a (people mostly communicating on) Slack problem - nfi if thatās open to community joining)
none of them look good tho tbh
Oh hey, this is good. Wouldnāt want to have obsolete strings. About time they did away with the obsolete concept of ānot selling your personal dataā. Looking forward to April when thatās finally deprecated.
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025) does-firefox-sell = Does { -brand-name-firefox } sell your personal data? # Variables: # $url (url) - link to https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/ + # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025) nope-never-have = Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. { -brand-name-firefox } products are designed to protect your privacy. <a href="{ $url }">Thatās a promise.</a>I think itās a nonsense nothingburger āclarificationā, esp. given the defaults firefox sets a priori on a fresh profile. even with the āno, donāt turn $x onā choices for things that it does offer those for, thereās still some egregious defaults being turned on
the cynic in me says itās intentionally vague because theyāre trying to, in advance, lay the legal groundwork for whatever the fuck they push on by default. my motivation for that thought is because of seeing the exact playbook being used by other services in the past, and it tracks with the way theyāve been pushing other features lately
Yep, the clarification doesnāt really clarify anything. If theyāre unable to write their terms of service in a way that a layperson in legal matters can understand the intended meaning, thatās a problem. And itās impossible for me to know whether their āclarificationā is true or not. Sorry, Mozilla, youāve made too many bad decisions already in the recent years, I donāt simply trust your word anymore. And, why didnāt they clarify it in the terms of service text itself?
That they published the ToS like that and nobody vetoed it internally, thatās a big problem too. I mean, did they expect people to not be shocked by what it says? Or did they expect nobody would read it?
Anyway, switching to LibreWolf on all machines now.
Whether the terms are abusable by design or by accident doesnāt really matter, you get is abuse either way.
How I wish we could have some nice things sometimes.
legally, it absolutely does, and it gets even worse when you dig deeper. Mozilla is really going all in on being a bunch of marketing creeps.