Honestly, Chromium seems to have the basic features like history and passwords figured out way better than Firefox (or rather, Chrome does), while stripping most of the junk away, as it luckily happens to be proprietary Google bullshit.

Firefox has a bunch of telemetry and bloat, but the fact that my only real dealbreaker for a browser is quality adblock makes Firefox pretty much my only “vanilla” choice.

A “10-month lead” less than a month ago at that

Honestly - just uploading to archive.org or their spinoff of Google Books would be acceptable. At least the stuff out of copyright.

Not only that…

They use this fucking incredible argument:

“We destroy the book because when we scan it - that’s a new copy. If we destroy the oroginal - only one copy (the scan) remains”

As if the model doesn’t get copied over and rented out in bajillions of instances. Its product - by all AI service ToS’s made free to use and copy royalty free (unlike say, every single library in this world, which universally forbid the photocopying of lent out books). Meaning - copyright infringement of the worst kind in any sane interpretation. Shame this world is insane.

Such an incredible spin on the rules. Using them as the excuse to go against the core cultural, civilizational and moral imperative of archiving, while going against the spirit of the concept of what copyright was initially made to do - give authors the path to a livelihood from their work and denying it to parasites such as publishers.

Copyright truly is dead. Indeed - the global copyright rules were on their last legs before AI and used only as anti-consumer protection for publishers (not authors!), but now they’re a sinked ship - the mask is off. It’s all plainly visible what they’re here to do now.

Late to reply, but

Imagine if, like how app publishers can seemingly magically deploy arbitrary code and send data at a high speed to and from your devices, society and technology went in a similar way with appliances:

Due to the obvious fire risk, all appliances need to be recorded. The recordings: accessible real-time to the fire department and yore utility suppliers. Don’t worry, installation of the beeded equipment is covered by the Stop The Spread of Fire association. You only pay a symbolic part of the real cost.

Sounds dystopian, and it is.

Hell, with the way some cashier-free stores are using solely scale-equipped shelves (no camera needed), a conclusion of "Why don’t we do that in OUR fridges by Samsung isn’t impossible. Give an eextended warranty and some bonus functionality like expiry tracking if the user registers their produce in the device’s built-in display. Then sell the data and profit.

You don’t get it. It was never about past decisions guiding or restricting future ones.

What precedent is: a) to be used as an argument and b) a way for the high court to set rules for lower ones to abide by… Until the next recalibration.

Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes

I’m a bit OOTL. How the hell does that even work?

Probably not. AFAIK docker isn’t a virtual machine in the traditional sense that it has its reserved storage other apps on the machine can’t access. And even if it were, it’s the same physical drive.

Now I’m not too versed myself in SSD firmware so maybe the large file size really is like a wide net, or maybe the file size isn’t important - only the fact you’re doing read operations on a small space on the SSD may give enough volatility in the read speed to infer the exact app that decided to spin up at that moment.

The simplest fix that comes to mind is to have multiple drives (e.g. install and data) and put the browser on the data one. Maybe this added complexity can throw off some naive attacks. Also, a HDD “naturally” has some variability in the access time (since it needs to physically locate the sector with its read heads).

So in essence, laptops with a single SSD are by far the most vulnerable.

However, adding sane limits on the vulnerable API mentioned and throttling read/write speeds (ideally with randomization) seems like a fix good even for single-drive laptops.

What’d probably work with Docker is a similar read speed throttling setup.

Spoofing identifying information won’t help much since read time variability is what matters here. It may make it take more info to infer performance rather than having the transparent information, but a good model is bound to infer pretty well after some initial data.

That’s putting it mildly.

It’s if they’d know the exact food in your fridge and where you got it from. Or the exact makeup of the clothes you buy. Oh, kid’s clothes? What a lovley daughter you have! Would you like some educational material targeted for 4-8 year-olds?

And aren’t you expecting another one?

Use a blender? What lovely strawberry milkshakes you like for breakfast. Why not tell the store most of your food comes from to raise their prices a bit, since it seems to be a trend in your city?

Do you have meds in the fridge? Well, these items are often sold together, have a look. Oh, and a price increase.

It’s not a just “you’ve made it” though.

It’s a “You push and shove it HARD down people’s throat to the point it’s almost the only thing they see now apart from ads”.

I remember accidentally searching through google once. The AI summary took half the page and there were a whopping 6 ads. Which is almost two pages of scrolling.

So I don’t blame users for taking the easy way out and just using the summary. Especially if they haven’t heard of uBO + Firefox on mobile. Rawdogging the modern internet is terrible UX. Popups, autoplay, consent forms with a bajillion data “partners”. And ads, ads and even more ads.

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Sure.

Using community-vetted software doesn’t have any security or privacy benefits over proprietary.

Neither will proprietary software arbitrarily be able to remove features, lock out certain users or raise prices dramatically.

Would you rather buy vetted cruelty-free foods or not?

There’s surely no benefits in doing so.

What about clothing?

Would you rather buy a shirt that has some guarantee of not using underpaid or child labor?

What about energy?

Would you rather your electricity comes from a local coal plant poisoning you and others with its toxic fumes, or from a solar+hydro mix?

What about furniture?

Woukd you rather get an item made from recycled materials and with well-paid labour, made locally and to high quality or get the not-so-cheap alternative from IKEA?

All the options above are morally superior. And so is FOSS software.

And there is a multitude of reasons.

But there’s two things I’d like to point out right away, regardless of FOSS specificalky

1. sometimes, these pros from above don’t even come at a higher price.

Hell, oftentimes they’re cheaper (for example, storebrand is vastly more moral than Nestle and it’s cheaper).

2. There’s a positive-feedback loop regarding standards.

First standards don’t exist formally and any “standard” (quality or otherwise) is pure coincidence. Pay is high because the market said so. Quality is high because machines are good enough. Privacy of our maiking list is high because our director chose to use a free (FOSS) local app instead of a paid cloud service.

Then ad-hoc (informal) standards form. Companies voluntarily do things in order to stay competitive. For example most every site uses hashing and salting, meaning your passwords are pretty safe.

Then real standards form. Still voluntary, but formal. They’re still voluntary, but you can’t half-ass things anymore abd say you did them. You’ve gotta meet real demands.

Then these standards get made a requirement by the legislature, so Nestle actually has to do some ethics now.

This exact same progression is present in multiple otherwise disjunct domains. Labor rights, pollution, quality standards. And yes, software freedom is one of them.

But what even is software freedom?

It’s the ability to vett code. The ability to switch providers. The ability to play a game after servers shut down. The ability to export data. The ability to not pay an hourly rate of $15 for your dial-up use. Interoperability. And a lot of other things.

Free as in freedom is much more than gratis (free as in no need for money).

Free software is the one that pushes this feedback loop forward the most.

And that’s why it’s a moral imperative.

Ironically, it’s free software that often times creates competition (and therefore lowers the price of) proprietary software.

It sets quality standards. Proprietary can’t be that worse than free - people’d find out soon enough.

It acts as competition (albeit oftebtimes unequal).

It expands accessibility by giving a gratis alterbative.

It drives change. Much more so than proprietary bullshit.

Using FOSS software isn’t easy in this day and age. But without it, using proprietary software would be way, way harder than the FOSS from decades ago.

No Internet/WorldWideWeb. No networking. No encryption.

Most of the infrastructure is FOSS. It’s too expensive to make well even for the big players - some 25% of Windows (as in the bloated mess) is made up of free software. 90% of Edge is.

You’re using free software even if you’re not trying to much more than you realize.

And that’s the result of small victories from ages ago. Victories which set standards and expectations.

Maximizing your use of FOSS software maximizes the amount of these victories. It speeds them up.

And it makes a difference way bigger than you may realize.

There are a few issues with there being… a single ideal privacy option line of devices (the Pixels):

• the pixel isn’t available for sale in all regions
• there are only so much Pixels out there… Meaning less options to choose from and potentially higher prices
• people using them stand out… So much so some agencies treat Pixel users like criminals even if they don’t have Graphene on it
• Google may choose to end the Pixel line, drastically limit production or remove some feature Graphene relies upon any time they feel like

Having more vendor choice drastically lowers these negatives. And I can’t really think of any negatives for the other side than increased dev time and operating costs.

Having the privacy features trickle down to other devices is great since some already landed in AOSP.

However, the trickle down is slow (and often a myth). And some protection is better than no protection.

Why are a multitude of poor options better than a few good options?

Is anything other than a Pixel a poor option?

They may be suboptimal but… Some hardening is definitely better than no hardening any day of the week.

What actively blocking “okay” or even “good” options when “the perfect” one exists should be plainly obvious.

Privacy-consciousness will never spread. Which also has negative effects on the privacy-conscious. Namely point 3 of my little list.

reCAPTCHA protects. your privacy

I love how they used that period. Seems way better than that lawyer guy from the Simpsons.

Yeah.

Edge still has its problems, but it’s nowhere near the hot mess it wass in 2015 when it was basically a reskinned IE. Once they switched to Chromium it was still a hot mess, butit did get polished and has all the features you’d expect of a modern browser.

That being said, Edge is the main innovator behind built-in AI chats and similar bloat, which Chrome also likes to shove down people’s throats.

And although the feature has existed as a Firefox addon for ages, I think the first browser to support tab groups and horizontal tabs was Edge.

So since both are pretty on-par feature (and bloat) wise, run the same engine and are made and maintained by billion-dollar corpos gobbling user data, both seem like two sides of the same coin.

So for ‘normies’, it pretty much boils down to which ecosystem you’re more ingrained - that will make you prefer Edge or Chrome.

Us lunatics on Linux and/or ActivityPub prefer an independent option.

Security wise Fairphone isn’t up to GOS standards, so a collaboration wasn’t on the table either way.

I don’t know the situation, but if it’s as this part of your comment implies, then that’s clear bridge-burning on Graphene’s part.

If the current phones don’t have a chip or whatever, that doesn’t mean they can’t reach out to Fairphone and say “Hey, we’d like to promote our OS and join up! However, we requure such-and-such hardware. Are you interested?”

Saying “It doesn’t have the chip, a deal with them will never work” without reaching out isn’t productive.

I assume that Fairphone has quite the problems competing with more established markets and the OS is an afterthought, so they went with /e/. But hey, I might be wrong, and it’s all a conspiracy to maie an illusion of choice with Fairphone+/e/.

But if the mission of Fairphone is fair production and repairability, the fact that security and privacy are afterthoughts seems like a reasonable (but foolish) standpoint. They should care.

However, since the mission of Graphene is security and privacy, that seems like they should be the ones to reach out and try to provide their world-class software to as many people as possible. This probably includes supporting more than one make of phone.

Well, I was thinking along the lines of, if you fall for a crypto scam, 24 h does nothing about it.

If someone calls as a Nigerian Prince and you want to buy in, a cooldown won’t help either.

If someone impersonates your close family, it just might. But I imagine scammers are smart enough to dissuade the victim from calling the known number with a reasonable excuse. Then the cooldown wouldn’t help in this situation either. Something something scammers being good and all that.

And even if we disregard all that, there’s always the option of having the switch have no cooldown if set during initial device setup. Afterwards - sure. Give a 24 or 48 hour cooldown.

If someone wants it immediately - they can do a factory reset.

But the problem is - this is not what’s being done. What is being done is the start of a 72 hour cooldown, then 1 week, then 3 months, then no option to switch off at all. This is what I’m against, and what most other Lemmings are.

And to top it off - acting like this to “protect users” is a slippery slope of ignorance in and of itself.

You see, putting users under a glass dome (what all these “security” measures are) takes away their knowledge. With enough hand-holding (“security” or otherwise), they end up dumb, ignorant and incompetent.

“With great power comes great responsibility”. Well, the opposite is also true: “With no power comes no responsibility”.

And such powerless users are the ones who will, ironically, fall for ALL the scams.

The ones who are so “protected” that they have no common sense idea of how and what their phone does.

Once “logic” turns to “magic”, you’re in for a wild ride.

Because, even if they do know (which most won’t), they won’t be able to prevent the scam.

Why?

Because they’re mostly locked out of and don’t have posession of their phone.

They may be the owners, but Google is the one who can do what it wants with the phone. Not the user.

Of course it wouldn’t work.

Do you think putting a 24 h lock on your grandma’s front door will prevent scammers from coming in?

No. No it won’t. Any good scammer will be organized enough to start the scam and release the lock, then return after the timeout to finosh the job.

Do you think people vulnerable to scams will magically notice the scam in 24 hours?

Also, do you think most scams use sideloaded apps? Amazon gift cards are an easier vector. There’s also premium SMS.

Modern scams have nothing to do with security. They prey on people who fall for them. No security measure, save for a trusted friend telling them it’s a scam will work.

What this is is a thinly-veiled attempt to lock users out of using their own devices and to strenghten a slowly-crumbling ecosystem.

Of course it did.

For two reasons.

First - if anyone complains they can always say there exists a bypass, no matter how idiotically unworkable and annoying the process might be.

Another aspect is that devs will probably want to test their apps easily and quickly - App stores are notorious for updates taking a few days to be approved. Even for Google, full-on lockdown might seem overkill. They don’t want to bother with speeding up their update approval process so devs can push test builds through the Ecosystem. Giving some route towards sideloading is a much saner solution.

Otaku is the Japanese direct equivalent of “nerd” in English.

In English otaku is used to describe a nerd nerding over Asian stuff (anime, manga, games, whatever). Some gatekeep it for Japan-only stuff, while others use it for K-pop and K-drama as well.

In Japanese it’s the opposite - they use “nerd” to decribe people nerding over American stuff.

Edit: both loaned versions are a bit more derogatory than their “native” version.