What a hilarious story. Talking about email ethics. I remember myself doing a similar mistake, new at work. This old timer came barging into my cubicle and commanding me to “stop emailing all!”.
The gigants buy up competitors and bury it, shot down the project.
We would have more freedom and viable options as consumers if not the big companies such as Facebook, Google buy up the competition. It should be illegal to do this. The world is a more poorer marketplace because of this.
I did some terms in the board for our cooperative housing association (Sweden). The association signed up for a web hosting account. The association paid for the account but a private person had to own the account, which had all the access.
Changing the owner - even if the association paid the bills - was a big hassle and not easy. The hosting company where/are pretty strict about this.
Hence, the everyone in the OPs story made bad choices.
Of course, you are totally right. The future is for those companies and app vendors that respect privacy AND take good care of the personal information they have been giving, keeping them accurate and secure, not selling them around for the highest bidder.
The best thing about FF is about:config. It tunes in to the legacy of Netscape and Amiga where you could and can configure everything to how you like it. This is freedom, unlike chromium.
Sadly there are also 'secret prefs' that are considered so potent that they're not exposed by default in about:config
If you know about them, for example from reading the code, you can create them. So at present about:config is a strange sort of place with lots of knobs but not all of them.
If there's something you really need to configure in Chromium and it's not available as a flag, you can add that feature and submit a pull request. It's an open source project.
The thing is, flags in Chrome exist only until Google decides it shouldn't be an option anymore. Then they take the choice away from you. I disabled the material "design" styled themes for as long as I could, until the flag disappeared.
When a company gets so big that it doesn’t have to listen to customer complaint, it’s time to go.
I had a great car repair shop with awesome care for customer. Gave you special care and nice deals. Well, because of great reviews they grew very much, rebuilt the shop and hired a lot of staff. The culture that made them successful was forgotten, the CEO had no insight in the employees so the experience as a customer deteriorated, hence left.
Lesson: don’t grow so fast that you forget what built your company in the first place.
That's very true. In the early years we all loved Google. Good and fast searches, spartan interface, do no evil mantra... So different from AOL and Yahoo. Then, with time, it became a monster that you practically can't get away from even if you want.
I'm not sure who you have been giving money to, but Gorhill notoriously does not accept donations as he does not want this project to have money be a goal what-so-ever and does not want to feel like he needs to work on ublock origin. That said he strongly encourages donating to the ublock origin lists as without them ubo would be nothing.
I would absolutely love to, but does the author even accept donations? I just combed through my about page and the Github README and didn't see anything related. I was kinda hoping he had a Patreon. Am I blind, or is it just not there?
> I don't want the administrative workload coming with donations. I don't want the project to become in need of funding in any way: no dedicated home page + no forum = no cost = no need for funding. I want to be free to move onto something else if ever I get tired working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).
> Have a thought for the maintainers of the various lists. These lists are everything. This can't be emphasized enough.
The point is to make money from the users, not from advertising companies, which is the opposite of adblock. He could still refuse ads by ad tech, I don't see how donations by users would force him.
That's exactly the point. You want to be financially independent, or at least earn enough to live to reduce the risk of being corrupted by ad tech money.
"Freelance software development", problem solved. Not that the tax authority cares at all where the money comes from. They don't have a "cash income" category because they have a deep and burning desire to know these things. They're primarily busy with taking their cut.
Patreon aren't donations, they are recurring income in exchange of something (membership model with specific rewards per tier). In many jurisductions these must be declared differently.
See, there are some good ideas in that list, but then it gets to disabling Safe Browsing without any explanation. There's a lot of false information around about what Safe Browsing sends to whom, and you should make sure you know what you're doing when disabling it.
Also, the DNS cache size explanation is a bit backwards. "Number of cached DNS entries. Lower number = More requests but less data stored." Where do you think that data is stored? Bigger cache size means fewer requests that inform a third-party (your DNS server) of which sites you're visiting. (Information leaks from the speed of resolving a query might be a concern, but I'm not sure how doable this is from a webpage.)
And then it disables all caches (including in-memory) for... what reason, exactly? You can configure firefox to clear all your browser data when you close it.
But then they force-enable WebGL, which enables quite a few tracking techniques. This list is weird.
I guess all I want to say is don't blindly apply settings from this list. The author traded a lot of convenience, speed, and security for some perceived privacy.
I am not a security expert, but I tend to agree with this. I took a look at the script and noticed a few of the things you pointed out, and I have had horrible experiences running random scripts I found on Github before from claimed-to-be "experts", so I'll stick with the defaults (and UBlock).
Unfortunately, there is no real documentation of the various about:config parameters. So one has to trust doubtful sources on what settings would be useful, or spend many hours reading the source code of Firefox.
I don't understand why each setting is not documented on the about:config page. It would bind the documentation to the release, providing the info suitable for the FF version. I can't see any drawback, except that developers would have to provide a small description of every setting they introduce, which I hope they already do somewhere.
Here is my own frustrating experience with about:config.
I sometimes hit Ctrl-q when I meant Ctrl-w. So instead of closing a tab in FF, I close the application and loose my input on some pages. I tried to restore the (previously default) behavior of asking for confirmation before quitting. I had 2 settings in "about:config" named "browser.warnOnQuit" and "browser.showQuitWarning". Only the former one is documented in the mozillaZine wiki. It seems the latter was the old name of this setting, which FF updates never migrated.
So I changed the config, and nothing happened. After several variations, I headed for the source code of FF, and saw this setting was ignored when "restoring sessions" was active. There is no way to ask for confirmation in modern FF.
Safe browsing would not be bad if it were just a warning. Unfortunately the concept of personal responsibillity is absent from Firefox. I remember a time when you could click "I know what I am doing take me to the site anyway".
As a smb sysadmin for a GSuite based company, I've forced it as an extension to Chrome, so whenever any employee logs into Chrome, it automatically adds it.
One thing that block my migration to firefox is the zoom thing. In chrome I can zoom pages and it stick (I need bigger fonts everywhere). Can't replicate the same with safari or firefox.
In Firefox the zoom levels are saved per website. It has had that feature for a long time.
Or do you want to zoom once and have it zoomed on all websites you visit?
Yeah, this is a major pain in the butt for me as well. I want to only use Safari and Firefox but they really should finally pay attention to this pretty intuitive feature.
Same here, the very first thing I do on a new FF is install uBO, switch to advanced mode and default-deny 3rd party scripts and frames. Then I noop sites only as needed:
What does your workflow look like in terms of Firefox? What all sites do you visit where UBO doesn't mess it up too much to not have any work done?
Just curious. I am on a similar boat but sometimes find some sites to be unreadable after having UBO and some other privacy adjustments through about:config.
It's just fine on actual websites. The only things it breaks are the single page app monstrosities (and the occasional crappy newspaper site) that I don't use anyway. It's very rare that I have to disable uBlock for anything.
On the otherhand I also run NoScript temp-whitelist only so all sites that rely on javascript are broken by default for me until I figure out which CDN/etc to temp whitelist.
”For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
I Timothy 6:10
Before you could live with 1 income and buy a decent house and have a car. Today you can be 2 but have hard problem even buying a house?
Who’s or what’s the blame? I have my opinion and thoughts about that, but it’s for another day.