It’s not as if humans slavishly obeying the algorithms was a much better situation than robots doing it. They’ve just sped up the process and it can only hasten the demise of the new technofeudalist content mills.

The Pirate Bay is perfectly fine for that sort of thing.

It’s too bad that “The Great Reset” they have in mind is just tearing down democratic institutions and handing all power to fascists, because a reset that was truly great might be worthy of consideration: All debts cancelled, all bank balances zeroed, all existing copyrights and contracts annulled, ownership of homes falls to those who live in them, ownership of factories and fields are granted to those who work in them, and after a period of great confusion we start again from there.

Welcome to 2014

They’ve removed the ability to do it through the normal settings menu a few years ago, so you’d have to type about:config in the Firefox url bar and do it there. You’ll get a warning about how dangerous it is, and then you can type the names of preferences you want to change and double-click on them when they appear to turn those ones on or off. Turning off EME can be safely done without any side effects, but it’s not recommended to change anything else in there unless you know what it does.

It would mean you can’t watch e.g. Netflix and some TV station websites won’t be able to play video — although I’ve found that on others, the TV programs play just fine but the ads don’t work.

Librewolf and the “EME-free” builds of Firefox are the two I know of. You can also set media.eme.enabled and browser.eme.ui.enabled to false in any Firefox-based browser.

approx $6.84USD

Huh. So definitely not worth it then. Just buy a space heater instead. When I did it a few years ago I got $500 out of it, but it cost me a $350 video card which died soon after.

One reason to use a browser with no DRM capabilities available is that it tells them in advance you won’t be visiting any more if they try to force DRM on everyone.

let’s all switch to Sumerian.

Librewolf is Firefox with all the stuff nobody wants removed. It’s exactly as “mature” as the latest Firefox build it was based on. Slightly more so, really. It comes with more-secure settings which may or may not suit you, such as having fingerprinting resistance turned on by default.

Instead of using a completely different web browser, you could use a separate profile by starting librewolf (or firefox) with “-P” to select different profiles.

Longer answer: Still no.

As someone who’s complained a lot about Mozilla, I feel like I should’ve added more often for people who don’t know it: … but at least it’s not as bad as Chrome.

Mozilla, please. The wording of things in the terms of use document is not the main problem. The exact legal interpretations given to them does not make much difference. That you suddenly feel the need to impose on your remaining users a “terms of use” agreement at the same time as you stop promising not to sell user data is not conducive to retaining your credibility.

From the time I started thinking about it around the date of jwz’s “Mozilla is an advertising company now” post, it took me 8 months to fully switch to librewolf. I feel like a windows user who was slow to move to linux.

Conscription Back on a Large Scale?

However long it takes, conscription is one of those things that will one day be looked back on as an unconscionable horror of the past akin to slavery. I’m happy to be saying so from a country where it already is.

The privacy.resistfingerprinting option works the same way in Librewolf as it does in Firefox, it’s just that it’s on by default. Having it break the website zoom is also a choice that Firefox made. In either browser, you’ll need to use an extension if you want both.

Lots of serious adult people on mastodon saying that Trump is basically working for Putin now. I’ve believed it for a while but it’s pretty weird to see everyone else saying it.

It already exists at least as an “experiment” but I guess now it’s nearly ready for full production use. Perhaps the new terms of use text is motivated by not enough people accepting the old merino opt-in prompt as well as wanting to get more third-parties involved in the system. More details here: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/firefox-suggest-telemetry.html

When Merino integration is enabled on the client and the user has opted in to Firefox Suggest data collection, Firefox sends everything the user types in the address bar to the Merino server.

They want to intercept your searches and url entries to run them through the privacy preserving data extracting machine in order to collect data that will be sold to advertisers and used to pollute your search results and url suggestions with paid-for links. They were trying to be vague about it so that people would not understand this, and instead all they accomplished was to make people think they want to record everything you type into every web form. That’s my guess, anyway. Maybe they really do want everything.

Indeed, fingerprinting. Preventing it is one thing Mozilla could be working on. Going all-out on it really, devoting significant engineering resources to making their browser fingerprinting resistance bulletproof. Reworking every js api with defence against adversarial use of it in mind. If they’re really that desperate for cash they could sell it as a premium feature for a modest subscription fee, although obviously it’d be available free of charge for those willing to get their Firefox builds from someone other than Mozilla.