I’m not sure if that would be viable technically.

They might be able to make requestable the connection requests to outside sources (which I expect is something many extensions use, even those without data collection), but whether those requests relate to data collection is not something that can be determined programmatically.

I’ve commented it in the other post, but in my opinion, the issue of the “nothing to hide” -> “no worry in showing” statement is that in between lines (specially in the context for which it’s used) it seems to want to imply that having something to hide must be something rare or perhaps wrong… as if it were not possible to want to hide things that are good for society to keep hidden.

This isn’t a formal, logical fallacy, but an informal one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

From a perspective free of presuppositions and biases, I don’t think the logic of the argument on itself is wrong, because of course I wouldn’t be worried about my privacy if I had no interest in keeping my private information hidden… but the premise isn’t true here! the context in which the argument is used is the problem… not the logic of it.

It’s not incorrect to say: “nothing to hide” -> “no worry in showing” …what’s incorrect is assuming that the “nothing to hide” antecedent is true for all law abiding citizens …as if people didn’t have an interest in keeping perfectly legal and legitimate things hidden and safe from as many prying eyes as possible. The fallacy is in the way that it’s used, they are pretending that this means people shouldn’t be worried, when in fact it means the opposite, since everyone does, in fact, have information that should remain hidden. For our own safety and the safety of our society! …so everyone should in fact be worried about breaches in privacy.

In my opinion, this looks more like an informal fallacy, the problem is in the context and the intent that is given to the statement, not so much in the logic of it.

The postulate has some ambiguity… because in between lines it seems to want to imply that having something to hide must be something rare or perhaps wrong… as if it were not possible to want to hide things that are good for society to keep hidden.

This isn’t a formal, logical fallacy, but an informal one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

From a perspective free of presuppositions and biases, I don’t think the logic of the argument on itself is wrong, because of course I wouldn’t be worried about my privacy if I had no interest in keeping my private information hidden… but that premise isn’t true here! the context in which the argument is used is the problem… not the logic of it.

It’s not incorrect to say: “nothing to hide” -> “No worry for showing it” …what’s incorrect is assuming that the “nothing to hide” antecedent is true for all law abiding citizens …as if people didn’t have an interest in keeping perfectly legal and legitimate things hidden. So it’s not that the statement isn’t logically sound, the fallacy is in the way that it’s used, they are pretending that this means people shouldn’t be worried, when in fact it means the opposite, since everyone does, in fact, have information that should remain hidden. For our own safety and the safety of our society!

It’s more like calling “nazi” to all forms of authoritarian positions, even the left-wing authoritarians in the opposite side of the spectrum.

There’s a distinction between “informal fallacy” and “formal / logical fallacy”. Both have separate articles in wikipedia as well. Why not just call it “fallacy” without categorizing it into a specific subcategory it does not fit anyway?

Yes! I mean, blame those who post AI-generated translations as if they were their own, or blame the AI scrappers that use those poorly generated pages for training, but it makes no sense to blame Wikipedia when the only thing they have done is just exist there and offer a platform for knowledge sharing.

In fact, this problem is hardly exclusive to Wikipedia, every platform with crowdsourced content is in some level susceptible to AI poisoning which ultimately ends up feeding other AIs, the loop exists in all platforms. Though I understand wanting to highlight particularly the risk of endangered languages being more vulnerable to this, since they have less content available to them so the AI models have a smaller dataset which makes them worse and more sensible to bad data.

This still relies on servers to prepare the connection (you need the web server for the page but also I see it tries to connect to wss://0.peerjs.com/), even if later the WebRTC communication is peer to peer.

I’m just explaining the reason why it’s more reddish (but not as red as others). It’s something most spreadsheet software (this was clearly MS Excel) can do automatically with numbers for visual indication so we can more easily see the distribution, it does not mean 8 years old is bad.

If there’s a big unbalance in color it would just make it more visible that there’s a big unbalance in ages. Probably if that had happened more colors could have been added to the gradient, maybe maroon->red->yellow->green->blue->white. But I think it was not seen as necessary in this case (or the author was lazy, since these are one of the defaults I believe).

I think it’s just a relative color scale from a spreadsheet… with the older being the greenest, the youngest the reddest, and the rest just fall in between. ProtonVPN just happens to be in between, it’s not as red as the others but also not as green as the ones that have been around for much longer.

There isn’t much concrete information, but my guess is that OS/ecosystem is exactly what this project is, and that they are not talking about physical hardware. Specially considering that they are putting the emphasis on free software (not hardware) and they are involving a software developer. Making a phone’s hardware free would be an entirely different beast.

In the afternoon, FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman announced an exciting new project: Librephone.

Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF to bring full computing freedom to mobile computing environments. The LibrePhone Project is a partnership with Rob Savoye, a developer who has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since the 1980s. “Since mobile phone computing is now so ubiquitous, we’re very excited about LibrePhone and think it has the potential to bring software freedom to many more users all over the world.”

From the official FSF post about the event.

That doesn’t work, because rejecting all cookies means it’s impossible for the page to remember whether you skipped the banner… so the result is that the banner will always show.

The real solution would be to have this be a browser / HTML standard. Similar to other permissions managed by the browser (like permission to get camera/mic, permission to send notifications, etc)… then each browser can have a way to respond to these requests for permission that we can more fully control/customize… with a UI owned by the browser that is consistent across websites and with settings that can be remembered browser-side (so the request can be automatically denied if that’s what you want).

On the upside, the end user needs to use up less data for the same content. This is particularly interesting under 4G/5G and restrictive data plans, or when accessing places / servers with weak connection. It helps avoid having to wait for the “buffering” of the video content mid-playback.

But yes, I agree each iteration has diminishing returns, with a higher bump in requirements. I feel that’s a pattern we see often.

Compression and efficiency is often a trade-off. H266 is also much slower than AV1, under same conditions. Hopefully there will come more AV1 hw encoders to speed things up… but at least the AV1 decoders are already relatively common.

Also, the gap between h265 and AV1 is higher than between AV1 and h266. So I’d argue it’s the other way around. AV1 is reported to be capable of ~30-50% bitrate savings over h.265 at the cost of speed. H266 differences with AV1 are minor, it’s reported to get a similar range, but more balanced towards the 50% side and at the cost of even lower speed. I’d say once AV1 encoding hardware is more common and the higher presets for AV1 become viable it’d be a good balance for most cases.

The thing is that h26x has a consortium of corporations behind with connections and an interest to ensure they can cash in on their investment, so they get a lot of traction to get hw out.

This! Also there’s AI upscaling, if good enough it could (in theory) make a 1080p video show with a 4k quality only very few lucky and healthy young people would be able to tell apart. In the meantime, my eyesight progressively gets worse with age.

This was long overdue! …and it’s not just a meaningless fine, since a solution needs to be proposed within 2 months:

In addition to the fine, Google was ordered to end these self-preferencing practices. It has 60 days to propose a solution, after which the Commission will asses the proposal and either accept Google’s remedy or impose its own.

powershell, in concept, is pretty powerful since it’s integrated with C# and allows dealing with complex data structures as objects too, similar to nushell (though it does not “pretty-print” everything the way nushell does, at least by default).

But in practice, since I don’t use it as much I never really get used to it and I’m constantly checking how to do things… I’m too used to posix tools and I often end up bringing over a portable subset of msys2, cygwin or similar whenever possible, just so I can use grep, sed, sort, uniq, curl, etc in Windows ^^U …however, for scripts where you have to deal with structured data it’s superior since it has builtin methods for that.

I prefer getting comfortable with bash, because it’s everywhere and I need it for work anyway (no fancy shells in remote VMs). But you can customize bash a lot to give more colored feedback or even customize the shortcuts with readline. Another one is pwsh (powershell) because it’s by default in Windows machines that (sadly) I sometimes have to use as VMs too. But you can also install it in linux since it’s now open source.

But if I wanted to experiment personally I’d go for xonsh, it’s a python-based one. So you have all the tools and power of python with terminal convenience.

As I understand it, it’s not limited locally. Africa’s Continental Internet Exchange (CIX) connects Africa internally first, but it still links globally. It’s about sovereignty, not isolation.

In terms of networking, this is not different from Europe and other regions with many local IXPs that allow regional traffic within the continent… the thing is that in the past, Africa has not had an infrastructure that allowed connecting to another African country without it being routed through international networks outside the continent.

Oh, the way I understood “exclusive deal” was that the deal is exclusively with Google alone, not that Google is the only option for the user (which has never been the case, you were always able to change the default).

This would mean the new non-exclusive deal for revenue sharing implies Mozilla can have deals with other search engines or services (eg. Bing, ddg, etc) and get paid for featuring their search in the selection, joining the group of “recommended” options alongside Google. Google cant contractually tie Mozilla to exclusively recommend/prefer/set-as-default Google alone.

but again, depending on what is interpreted by “prefer” and whether the browsers are actually forced to not set a default (even when they are not getting paid for it) this can be an important change or no change at all.

Wait… that contradicts other parts of the article…

They are actually saying Google can’t pay to be the default, but they can strike deals to share revenue.

What does “prefer its services” mean? is Mozilla still able to set them as default even if they are not being paid for it?

If they use a selection window like you imply: would they be allowed to set a pre-selected “default” there? would it just affect the order/placement of the available options? a “preferred/recommended” underline? would Google be willing to pay the same amount for that kind of deal?

I feel this is very unclear, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s actually a perfectly valid punitive approach that effectively would fix the issue or just a slap in the wrist.

Similarly, it’s unclear whether this is really something that won’t affect Mozilla or not. “Revenue sharing” implies that they will get less money than they would otherwise when users don’t choose Google (which I bet would be a higher percentage than those who go with a chrome based browser, like say… Opera)

It seems it comes with 9 different themes.

Personally, I find the UI decent, specially considering it runs even on ie6, and that it’s ok for mobile devices too.