davel

The sequel: The Freedom Fighter's Manual Practical guide to liberating Nicaragua from oppression and misery by paralyzing the military-industrial complex of the traitorous marxist state without having to use special tools and with minimal risk for the combatant.

Apparently Signal still requires it, though you no longer must reveal it to others.

Wired last year: Signal Finally Rolls Out Usernames, So You Can Keep Your Phone Number Private

Those features, which WIRED has tested, are designed to allow users to conceal their phone numbers as they communicate on the app and instead share a username as a less-sensitive method of connecting with one another.

Whittaker says that, for better or worse, a phone number remains a necessary requisite as the identifier Signal privately collects from its users.

I think the downvoters can’t hold these two thoughts in their mind at the same time:

1. Firefox is the best browser.
2. Firefox has serious problems because Mozilla is a terrible steward of it.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-company-now/#comment-249969

Preemptive subtwit.

Let's say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren't covering it.

So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.

Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren't selling kitten deli slices?"

Some might say -- maybe you aren't an animal shelter any more. Some might say.

Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money. It doesn’t need any more to maintain a browser and an email client.

From jwz, who founded Mozilla & Firefox:

• 2020: This is a pretty dire assessment of Mozilla
• 2023: Remember when Mozilla made a web browser?
• 2024: Mozilla is an advertising company now
• 2024: Mozilla's Original Sin

.

Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.

Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of "growth hacking", with Google's ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.

And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.

(Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that's all Google cared about.)

Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

As I have said many times:

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
3. There is no 3.

Yes, the World Bank and the IMF are major actors in post-WWII neocolonialism.

Guess which is the sole country with veto power in both the World Bank and the IMF?

• https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/leadership/directors/eds01
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_International_Monetary_Fund

• Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says [UN] Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
• China’s Energy Use Per Person Surpasses Europe’s for First Time
• At 54, China’s average retirement age is too low
• China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
• https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
• Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States [for China]

Jamie Zawinski (jwz) two weeks ago: Exterminate all rational AI scrapers

Today I added an infinite-nonsense honeypot to my web site just to fuck with LLM scrapers, based on a "spicy autocomplete" program I wrote about 30 years ago. Well-behaved web crawlers will ignore it, but those "AI" people.... well, you know how they are.

I'm intentionally not linking to the honeypot from here, for reasons, but I'll bet you can find it pretty easily (and without guessing URLs.)

It's kinda funny.

It doesn’t have access to all your keystrokes. An app can only harvest the keystrokes typed into it.

In the west I think it’s mostly used to sell ads

The Twitter Files showed us that this is not true. Though corporate social media didn’t invent propaganda. Previously.

This is bullshit projection.

• The Atlantic, 2021: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth
• Geopolitical Economy Report, 2022: China forgives 23 loans for 17 African countries, expands ‘win-win’ trade and infrastructure projects