the PR and lawsuit risk

what risk? facebook & others conducted illegal human experiments. this is an enormous crime and was widely reported yet all fb had to do from a pr perspective was apologise.

as we all know, fb even interfered with with the electoral process of arguably the world’s most powerful nation, and all they had to do was some rebranding to meta and it’s business as usual. this is exactly how powerful these organisations are. go up against a global superpower & all you need to do is change your business name??? they don’t face justice the same way anyone else would, therefore we cannot assess the risk for them as we would another entity - and they know it.

So, while i personally disagree for above reasons, I can accept in your opinion they wouldn’t take the legal risk.

simpler metrics are enough

when has ‘enough’ ever satisfied these entities? we merely need to observe the rate of evolution of various surveillance methods, online, in our devices, in shopping centers to see ‘enough’ is never enough. its always increasing, and at an alarming rate.

local processing of the mic data into topics that then get sent to their servers is more concerning is not much more feasible

sorry i didn’t quite understand, are you saying its not feasible or it is feasible? from the way the sentence started i thought you were going to say it could be, but then you said ‘not much more feasible’?

Voice data isn’t

voice conversations are near-universally prized in surveillance & intelligence. There hasn’t been any convincing argument for any generalised exception to that.

I am not sure they could write it off as a bug

it’s already been written off as a bug. i didn’t follow that story indefinitely but i’m not aware of even a modest fine being paid in relation to the above story. if it can accidentally transcribe and send your conversations to your contact list without your knowledge or consent (literally already happened - with impunity(?)), they can 1000% “accidentally” send it to some ‘debug’ server somewhere.

Are they actually doing it? It ofc remains to be seen. Imo the fallout if it was revealed would roughly look like this

• A few people would say “no shit”
• Most people would parrot the “ive done nothing wrong so i don’t care” line.
• A few powerless people would be upset.

If they truly wanted to have mic access, they could for a long time

agreed

and it would have been known

are you sure?

The reality is it is too expensive

imo this commonly repeated view has never been substantiated.

we’ve yet to see a technical explanation for why it’s “impossible/too expensive” which addresses the modern realities of efficient voice codecs, even rudimentary signal processing and modern speech-to-text network models.

and risky

how so? previously invasive features are simply written off as “a bug”. they barely even need to issue some b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶ fines (typical corporate solution to getting caught), that is the level we’re currently at:

“whoops it was a bug, we’ll switch it off”

“whoops another update switched it on again” (if caught, months/years later)

“whoops some other opt-in surveillance switched itself on again, just another bug ¯_(ツ)_/¯”

as long as they have deniability as a bug, there’s almost zero repercussions and thus virtually zero risk. that is perhaps why a company out and talking about it openly is such a no-no. discussing intent makes ‘bug’ deniability more difficult.

in my experience when reading past the “they’re not listening” headlines, and into the actual technical reports, noone has been able to conclusively rule it out. if you know of conclusive documentation, please post.

then there’s the “they have enough data already” argument. which is entirely without foundation, as we all know very well: nothing is ever enough for these pathologically greedy entities. ‘enough’ simply isn’t in their vocabulary. we all know this already.

[i didn’t downvote you btw]

no idea why you’re being downvoted.

you’re entirely correct, and i don’t interpret you as defending telegram’s lack of user protections

(noticing a real uptick in reddit hivemind around lemmy lately, it’s depressing tbh)

Everything that’s encrypted is generally more private and secure than the equivalent which isn’t encrypted

They gave a fuck about negative pr

When you work in an industry where the entire collaborative workflow of everyone is based on software that doesn’t run on Linux, then not running that software is equal to not being able to work in that industry.

there’s no denying that’s true, though ofc it has alot to do with microsofts very agreessive and anti-competitive practices.

though its all a bit tangential, the main issue i think comes down to what someone means when they say “everything”. certainly if someone said “you can do everything”, i’d expect them to qualify what is (should be) obviously a slight exaggeration as parlance. they don’t literally mean “everything” they just mean most everyday things. i think its fairly common in everyday speech for someone to be able to work out thats what they meant.

in the few rare cases when someone literally means absolutely everything, then yes that silly statement would be incorrect. and if strictly intended with that meaning would certainly qualify as misinformation.

Not sure if when people say you can “do everything that windows does”, they should be interpreted to mean “every single piece of software/drivers ever written for windows was also written for linux”.

Yeah I don’t know. Just see how the modern world is shaping society to the negative I just don’t see where we are close to utopia But right now we are on a different path

That was essentially a big part of my point. We could be close to a utopia by now (from the perspective of technological possibilities).

Instead, as I said

for some suspicious reason we took a very different road, and here we are

That said I don’t currently believe technology itself is inherently bad.

Like all tools, it depends what you do with it.

Is a general purpose tool like hammer good or bad? It has the capacity for both. And therefore it’s up to the user which is which.

And that’s the issue really, what are we doing with our wonderous technology?

This might be a bit of a radical take. But in that ~125 year window i was refering to, alot of machines we’ve invented are actually weapons.

Weapons to destroy eachother physically (conflict/threats of violence etc).

Weapons to destroy nature (deforestation and probably most mining).

Weapons to destroy the mind (social media etc, actually most media now).

What if we’d had 1+¼ century of building a collective utopia instead of all these weapons?

afaict from the technical perspective it’s not really unfeasible, its the non-technical problem: the user and what they use the tools for.

Another clue for us is probably the term appropriate technology, which is a vibe i think eg. solar punk is helping to cultivate.

Anyway we’ve done ALOT of misuse. That’s why i don’t blame technology itself.

I still think it’s more about what we’ve done with it.

does doing so mean you can bypass the microsoft account bs?

necessary decline in our quality of life

i’m not refuting your core premise.

but on the note of this issue, not sure i can agree.

have a look at this public infrastructure technology from 122 years ago:

Youtube/Invidious

imagine if we’d spent the last 1+¼ century collectively working towards the utopia this kind of project hinted at - instead of developing new machines to destroy?

typically they say utopian dreams scatter in the face of increased technological awareness. have to say my experience has been the opposite.

the more i learn about technology, the more i realise we could probably be very close to a near-utopia by now. for some suspicious reason we took a very different road, and here we are.

i reckon there’s a good chance she was trolling. and if so, fuckin well played.

seems roughly accurate.

but probably would add

the mayor is a good person, and genuinely appears to want to see the best in people. but most of the reported incidents involve thugs with overt connections to an organised crime syndicate which is currently so powerful they mostly don’t have to answer to anyone.

the same crime syndicate has been granted the contract to light the field, cut the grass and keep everyone safe.

the mayor has a fairly good record of delivering on good community projects. so on the one hand mayor has a good rep, on the other…it’s an organised crime syndicate who is literally one of the worst offenders when it comes to making the field unsafe in the first place.

That’s wrong. The creation of PPA isn’t about getting paid

ok that’s fair, thanks for the useful info i didn’t know that. until money or other resources change hands i’m happy to withdraw the view that while firefox is underfunded by the community, it may not have resulted in these kinds of collaborations.

what i’m not understanding is how average non-adblock running users will be better off?

i appreciate you’ve stated how the sole purpose of this collaboration is intended by mozilla.

yet unlike the current implementation which appears to be opt-out, afaict meta’s particpation here is entirely opt-in, isn’t it? if meta etc decide on a whim they want to have their cake and eat it too, what is stopping them?

imo we’re all lacking innocence, regardless of using adblockers or not. we all, myself included, haven’t funded mozilla fairly for FF.

even if viewing ads for a website was an ethically sound exchange (in principle? probably achievable; in modern implementations? highly debatable),

regardless, that revenue is naturally for the sites not for the browser. maintaining a modern browser requires non-trivial resources, alot of us get hours/day from our browsers, advertisers are getting paid, and meanwhile ff has been missing out.

i could be wrong, but my gut feeling is mozilla is (mostly) a legit organisation with genuine good interests at heart. and if we’d all donated even a fraction of what its genuinely worth, they probably wouldn’t have to make these kinds of faustian deals.

giving advertisers enough to leave innocent people alone

I think this is very optimistic, the ad industry has virtually zero incentive to play fairly here. afaict they’ve currently got it far too good to have any genuine motivation to make concessions?

if i had to guess, one of the biggest actual threats on their horizon is somehow maintaining s̶u̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ infinite growth, which is further reason for them to NOT be satisfied with an equivalent or lesser scope than they already have right now.

imo its not a matter if but when it will be discovered meta’s behaved in bad faith here. i could be wrong, and hopefully i am because it would ofc philosophically be a step in the right direction.

To suggest that Mozilla PPA has no benefit to the average user is disingenuous at best or outright malicious malpractice with the intent of defamation

Thanks. Could you give some examples how the average user benefits from this collaboration between mozilla and meta, as implemented or due for implementation in firefox?

Dunning-Kruger effect

could you please explain further what you mean and what you’re referring to?

yet to use any OS where the default firefox install was good for too much, other than using it to install a clean firefox directly from mozilla

noscript is like a screwdriver. umatrix is the whole toolbox.

both have their place

Going cashless is a bad idea. But not because of this.

It’s pretty clear this incident has highlighted a myriad of very important issues.

It’s likely more productive to discuss the other issues in their own threads - this thread is clearly focused on the cashless problem.

not if they’re only covering the cost of parts