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Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
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I‘m really anxious for firefox as google is the main financier afaik.
It is a worry. I think we might end up needing to pay for Firefox ourselves.
I will happily donate.
If, of course, money won't go to the CEO.
it is lol, have you seen how much the ceo is paying herself?
its kind of a reddit situaton, where money wouldnt be that much of an issue if it werent all for the ceo.
A CEO is a needed possition, I know in the past the Brendan Eich was controversial in his political views, but Laura Chambers seems ok so far
At least Brendan Eich was a developer, good on him for being Christian.
Not sure firefox will be on our side after the recent ad tracking debacle. If they implement one more anti consumer feature I‘m jumping ship.
Jump ship to what? Not like there's s lot of choices out there. You could always try LibreWolf.
They plan a release for 2028. It's going to be a while before it can be used for everyday browsing.
I agree.
That would be my first address, assuming the librewolf folks will never accept anti community code, hopefully.
If everything fails i‘m fine to join a small project and help with it. I have some skills and can contribute financially.
Plenty of Firefox forks out there.
Netscape Navigator and Opera raise their hand
Well, Opera is also based on Chromium.
Do they still pass everything through a spy proxy to "speed up" browsing?
Wait, Navigator still exists?
Nah, it's Firefox now
Librewolf is just a reskinned Firefox.
Purged of unwanted and intrusive features, UBO pre installed, and is pre configured for increased privacy.
Tried librewolf recently and although worked well (linux mint) had all sorts of scaling issues and wouldn't keep my settings. Just using as a backup to FF until I can figure it out. FF only just started failing to play YT unhindered.
Could very well be a mint issue. It's a bit wonky at times with regular system windows.
Things are getting strange if you activate too much privacy settings. For example, all websites appear in light mode (because most people use light and thus is less value to track you) and for some reason, webUI with integrated terminals were not able to draw the ASCII text, it was just rainbows 😂 (proxmox and hombridge)
Oh really, are they building their own engine?
look up ladybird. we may soon have a 3rd browser!
Looks promising. Lets see where it goes. https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
It’s hard to take a project seriously for championing our privacy if the only communication options are Discord & Microsoft Github
Feel free to offer hosting something else for them. Be the change you want to see.
There are free (both kinds) options to these problems if they can’t afford it—and that still isn’t an excuse to require all coms go thru US-based proprietary services with big privacy implications.
Although I‘m not a fan of the options either, the implications regarding the project are minimal and I wasnt talking about the money. Hosting communications platforms isnt easy. It requires the team to change their habits besides their already challenging tasks of producing usable software.
Being the change you want to see does not implicate money, it implicates you contacting them, talking about their reasons, convincing them the comfort loss of non big tech platforms is worth it and only them it becomes a question of money.
Contact how? When you cut yourself off from the FOSS com options to build FOSS projects, you are unwelcoming to those actually using the tools whose philosophy match your project—just not your communications for some reason. There isn’t a listed email address or a gateway or bridged room.
The few teeny, tiny projects I have, I welcome emails & XMPP chat for anyone that wishes to collaborate which doesn’t require anyone to create an account on any particular service.
For those still not getting it, it is as wild as saying you need to have a Facebook account to communicate to a project as these services are all on the same level of propriety & lacking in privacy.
You‘re barging into open doors mate. You should still accept that the best way of changing things is taking up responsibility. You can definitely open an issue regarding their communication choices and propose changes.
And again, they probably have an ongoing community on the existing platforms which means bridges will be necessary which means proprietary platforms will listen in on all convos on bridged platforms.
You cant make people do the thing you think is best. You can only help them.
You can’t just “open an issue” if you don’t have a Microsoft GitHub account or live in a region under US sanctions or censorship where you can’t get access to it. These are pillars of sand to build your community on that not only lack freedom for users, but access too & control for your own content + moderation.
Gateways don’t need to be the only answer too—even just mentioning an unofficial space lets those that don’t want their data harvest can hang out together under the same topic but away from those service (even if most of the chat log is public, unencrypted anyhow).
Developers of all folks should know better & know the issues caused by proprietary services. They should not plan for where users are now but where they want things no be in the future but there’s a myopic view of this is where the users are. They don’t even give folks a place to air grievances like you are suggesting.
Oh man… I don’t disagree completely but thats still not how this works.
Github alternatives are very early in their existence. Things like gitlab, forgejo and such are very limiting if you want to promote a new project.
Although you are technically right, your premise is much too strict. If you cant be asked to help people do the right thing, I dont think you‘re in the right place discussing foss things.
I can solely repeat what I said earlier: be the change you want to see. Help people do the right thing and stop bitching about all the things that unpaid volunteers are doing wrong in your opinion.
I am hopeful they will get some more corporate backing. We can donate all day but that is a drop in the bucket compared to a few million from some large companies
Now, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...
In 2026
That's supoosed to be the preview release date on Linux and MacOS...
If they can stay funded I believe them
2026 isn't soon.
IIRC, only like 2% of Mozilla spending goes towards FF (I may be misinterpreting something, but I remember 2% being thrown around), so funding FF without rest of Mozilla bullshit shouldn't be that hard. Of course, since Mozilla did spend so little on FF, it's a question how much they actually care about FF and what would happen if they lost access to their golden goose. They shouldn't have problem funding FF, but they probably have other bullshit they don't want to let go and that has more priority for them.
A list of Mozilla's "other bullshit":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products
You are right, it was unfairly harsh wording, I apologize for that. Most of those products are super cool and important, I've kind of extrapolated it from what I've read in other posts about them spending too much on stuff like events and other, non-developemnt, related stuff that I actually never checked, while also not realizing that they also have a ton of other projects, which mixed with the dissapointment with the recent development about the Meta partnership led to me choosing that wording unfairly.
For now. They could default to yahoo and make money. Maybe not as much, but they could sustain browser development.
Firefox is still far superior to chromium.
I agree. That could work. We‘ll see.