It's just sad. I love my Firefox and will always do....
mindlight
joined 1 year ago
Before IBM made that statement there were essentially no major software vendors that ported and supported their software on Linux.
Yes, one might argue that Linux-Apache-MySql-Php revolutionized things but other than that a clear majority of things were run on solutions that put money in Microsoft's pockets.
Feel free to name drop some major finance systems or similar enterprise systems you could run without Microsoft cashing in on the OS in some way between 1990-2005.
As I wrote before, it took us 20 years to get rid of IE and a lot of proprietary server side junk Microsoft blessed us with. It's not an coincidence. 99% of all companies were stuck in development tools from Microsoft.
It wasn't until the hardware really really caught up with Java requirements that things really changed.
A lot of people in this thread seem to downplay the article with "yeah, that might be your opinion..." but two facts that are facts and not opinions are:
- The market share Firefox hold is insignificant.
- Mozilla's business is a near 100% dependency on one "customer", Google.
This means that if Google decides to stop bank rolling Mozilla it's game over. Firstly because other revenue streams are currently near insignificant when you look at the total expenses.
Secondly because since Firefox hold no significant market share, no one else would be interested in investing in Mozilla and the future of Firefox. After all, whatever Mozilla will throw up on the wall as the "grand masterplan for world dominance" would just end up in the question "Why didn't you do this before?".
I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years. I started using it because I saw what happens when one company controls the browser market. That web browser did so much damage and we only really got rid of it some year ago.
Chrome is a perfect example that the history repeats itself and that people are fucking stupid. People are actually acting surprised and complain about Google putting effort into making adblocking impossible in Chrome.
So all in all, if Mozilla doesn't find other revenue streams, Firefox is dead... It just doesn't know it yet.
Now, everyone yapping about that Linux was an insignificant player and still made it to the top just sound like enthusiasts who really doesn't know history and the harsh reality of doing business.
Linux was just a little more than hobby project (business wise) that essentially only Red Hat and Suse made real money from in the 90's.
Arguably you could say that the turning point was when the CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, shocked the world by saying that IBM was going to pump in 1 billion dollars in Linux during 2001. Now, that doesn't look like much today when just Red Hat has a yearly revenue of 3-4 billion, but that's how insignificant Linux was at that time.
After that milestone Linux went for the jugular on Windows Server. For ordinary people it would still take almost 10 years before they would hold something Linux in their hands.
The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007. Linux's growth the last 20 years wasn't mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.
What future opportunities can Mozilla sell to investors with the market share Firefox has today?
The issue was never to get access to Reddit without paying a monthly fee. It was about the experience as an user. However, what really made me drop Reddit was the way Reddit management acted in all of this. They showed no signs of being someone to trust.
So I don't care if there are 3rd party Reddit apps since Reddit is irrelevant to me.
But guys.... Remember, according to Putin everything's a okay and the Russian economy is booming....
As a non US citizen this is just a Robin Williams in Jumanji moment...
WHAT YEAR IS IT?!?!
Anyways, welcome to the year of the interwebs.
Have you got rid of your cheques and faxes yet? 😉
Once you connect to this fake network, the attacker can intercept the unencrypted data you transmit over it, including sensitive information like your usernames and passwords, credit card numbers, and other personal data.
So essentially the blog post says that you should make sure you only use HTTPS does with trustee certificates (padlock and no warning from the browser). This is good advice.
On the "your ISP can see what site you access" now I'm pretty sure that when we're talking about open wifi, which we are, they can register your DNS lookups, IP-addresses and ports used by your computer but that doesn't mean they automatic know who you are, especially if you never logged in with credentials that can be traced to your person.
While VPN, generally speaking, is a good solution it essentially just means that while you might use 15 different open wifi providers during a month (=inconclusive information about you spread among 5-15 different operators), centralizing all your internet activity to one single VPN provider (= extremely conclusive information about you) also has risks and a backside.
Good information on the "Evil Twin problem" but in my opinion the focus should be on educating people on how to recognize when the browser is connected to a site without a trusted certificate and what to do/ not to do then rather than promoting VPN.
An evil twin can easily fake the VPN service, popup a browser window with "https://ProtonVPNUpdate.ru" and a request the use to update the VPN client.
If the user fail t recognize that the site is running HTTP or HTTPS without a trusted certificate there's a risk that the user will follow the instructions from "Proton VPN" ("But it was their logo and it also had PayPal on the site....") and connect to the Evil Twin VPN Server.
Investing in customers is not necessarily the same as customers being investments.
I would argue that HP made bad investments in their customers and their customers not being bad investments.
TIL Customers aren't customers. Customers are investments.
I can't speak for how unions work in the US but over here in Sweden they work because of member engagement. Of course, the opposite is true too: they doesn't work when there is no engagement shown by the members.
If unionmembers don't show up on the meetings, especially the annual one, where the board election take place each year, the board doesn't know what the members want. Furthermore, if members do hint show up on election day they are getting the board they deserve. (The same goes for government and elections)
My experience is that most of the people complaining about the union not representing them, being corrupt and/or being toothless, are people who never visited an annual meeting. They never participated in the election of representatives and they most often think of the union like it's their personal legal team.
Unions are positive and bring good things, not only to workers/members but also to the "area of business", when the members are active in the discussions and understand the issues. Unions are bad, almost cancerous, when members just pay the monthly fee and aren't really engaged...
I don't know if the persons complaining are super engaged in the union work but tweets like "you don't represent me but happily take my money" smell a little bit of "you're the worst legal team I've ever had".
When it comes to the issue here I wonder what the alternative would be? SAG-AFTRA saying no to AI voice overs? Going out on strike?
In what way would that not end up in the companies just use more AI VO AI is an investment and a recurring cost you can calculate. Human labor is not. There is all sorts of unknowns connected to human labor and AI never make threats about going out on strike (yet!?)
So, a little more in detail, what do you think will be the result of what they did here? What should they have done differently and what result would they have gotten then?
What should SAG-AFTRA have done differently do you mean?
One big problem, even if Google continues to pour money into Mozilla, is that more and more sites and systems drops support for Firefox. When I say "drop" I mean implement measures for making it harder to use a service if you use Firefox. Even Google does this.