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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
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 "as you indicate with your use of Firefox" refer to
B seems fairly innocuous and the intended effect is probably "if you send data to a website using our browser, don't sue us for sending the data you asked us to send". The mere act of uploading or inputting information through Firefox does not — in my (technical, not legal) expert opinion — 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 "help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content" 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 users' 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 "don’t sue us for sending the data you asked us to send" intention.
Whether or not to believe them is up to you.
I think it's a nonsense nothingburger "clarification", esp. given the defaults firefox sets a priori on a fresh profile. even with the "no, don't turn $x on" choices for things that it does offer those for, there's still some egregious defaults being turned on
the cynic in me says it's intentionally vague because they're 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 they've been pushing other features lately
Whether the terms are abusable by design or by accident doesn't really matter, you get is abuse either way.
How I wish we could have some nice things sometimes.