There’s probably lots of situations in anything but rural environments where open Wi-Fi networks are either already available, or highly likely to be. Dorms, apartments, anything like that becomes a mess.

I’m really sorry, but all I have is confidence and a little surface-level knowledge that self-hosting is possible.

What happens when there’s an open Wi-Fi connection close enough for the smart TV to connect to?

Ente and Immich are both projects like that, they’re both trying to be drop-in replacements for Google Photos. Immich requires you to self-host, and Ente makes it an option that doesn’t make it look too daunting.

The pricing is weird: Immich (like other FUTO sponsored projects) has a WinRAR-style license that requires you to pay them for hosting an instance, but only once, and you can technically ignore it. Ente, meanwhile, allows you to use their apps with third-party instances without charging for the privilege.

I would definitely recommend checking out either. I held out for a long time, because I thought image hosting might not be useful (and because deleting local photos is still a bit of a crapshoot, both backup-wise and functionality-wise) but it turns out to be pretty nifty.

If Mozilla must throw money at AI, this is the way to go… I guess. Ente is trying to build a Google Photos replacement that translates image contents into searchable text while being fully end to end encrypted (read: as private as it gets), after all. Ente also allows you to fully self-host, so you can get these benefits without even trusting their servers.

Out of the $65 million Mozilla has committed to throwing at for-profit and AI companies (that’s roughly 9.4 Mitchell Baker Salaries), $100,000 is a drop in the bucket, only 1.44% of the size of a Mitchell Baker Salary.

I remain skeptical about Mozilla’s commitment to “open source AI models” when I haven’t seen a single blob of AI data released that is reproducible or open source. They are black boxes, and black boxes so closed that not even the people that created them could tell you what’s inside of them (unless we count the blood, sweat, and tears of the underpaid workers behind it).

Full disclosure: I am a paying Ente subscriber

@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org would you consider submitting this picture in Mozilla’s latest Firefox fan art competition? So far, there aren’t any entries.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/open-call-for-firefox-fan-art-help-us-celebrate-the-upcoming/td-p/72082

To add to this, I’m not fine with this either. And I don’t think Mozilla should assume the consent of people, either.

Well, I don’t foresee any downsides. Hopefully they can continue making an incredible browser and operating system respectively.

Language removed so I can elaborate:

I don’t believe Google sets aside the money made through Firefox exclusively for Firefox. (If you believe this is the case, good luck demonstrating it, I guess.) Google’s money probably goes into a big pool named “ad revenue”, and that pool is probably filled disproportionately with Google’s own Chrome users.

Again, Google is doing to Mozilla what Microsoft did for Apple: hurling money at them with the facade of an exchange of something, in order to stave off regulators.

This isn’t the first time a company funded its competitor to avoid monopoly accusations. Microsoft did it to Apple. So it’s not like Google is simply returning the wealth Mozilla is providing it out of some generosity. Maybe they are, but I find the desire to remain out of the clutches of regulators to be an equally compelling explanation.

And given the fact that (despite Mozilla’s best attempts to the contrary) Firefox users tend to be on the nerdy and privacy oriented side, and they have both the proclivity and capacity to block ads, I imagine that Google probably pulls from the revenue sucked out of Chrome users rather than Firefox ones. But that’s just a theory, a browser theory.

I’m not a fan of Mozilla accepting money from Google, but it’s absolutely preferable to having a clause in their privacy policy that allows them to sell geolocation data directly to advertising partners. Pre-2023, I don’t think they did that.

It’s interesting they use code names but never really describe what the features should be. I think they’re changing the UI of Incognito Mode too, or at least doing something labeled under “Felt Privacy.”

I don’t expect it to be user friendly, but surely there is a description of it around somewhere?

Ironically, I don’t always agree with the Mozilla brass, but when the CTO said

We consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults.

… I kind of agree, in just this on instance. What a dialog to present.

You must be one of the few that do not believe they should diversify

This is an incorrect read of what I said. I said I don’t buy the assumption that Mozilla is diversifying into anything good:

If you believe this, you need to deal with the cognitive dissonance that comes from this, and explain the basis for why you believe in them while simultaneously believing in the opposite of them.

Unlike you, I provided explicit examples of bad diversification, where are your examples of the good?

You are surprised that you are supposed to back up your opinions and bring references to a discussion.

User-unique gets collected, and then the user-unique data sent to a remote server.

Only on the remote server will this data be aggregated, or so Mozilla says.

The argument that “It is just a new, additional means of tracking users” also doesn’t really make sense - even if we assume that this is new means of tracking.

It is a new means of tracking. It is extra telemetry provided by Mozilla to advertisement partners.

it doesn’t make a difference.

It makes a difference because Mozilla went out of its way to inject this tracking into a browser that is supposedly made for users.

It does not escape me, by the way, that Mozilla is now a de jure advertising corporation: since FakeSpot they’ve sold private data to third party advertisers, and since Anonym they’ve operated an advertising-specific wing.

Because of this this, Mozilla can no longer make any statements about online advertising without a huge conflict of interest, which they should disclose.

Except Mozilla enables the telemetry by default and does not ship an ad blocker.

Also the data is not anonymized until after upload. You must trust Mozilla to do this. And I don’t know how much I trust Mozilla after they refused to announce this change to its users.

I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.

Right. Not only didn’t they notify anybody, but they took to Reddit to defend the decision not to notify anybody:

we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.

Which is strange, because Mozilla has no problem with popups in general.

• Is Firefox trying to be my default browser in a sneaky way?
• Mozilla sends pop-up ad overlay in Firefox
• How do I completely disable this “reminder” from popping up again?
• Firefox reminds users to backup data and verify it periodically
• Keep pesky trackers off your tail

Is it just me, or is it strange that everything is conventional pixel art (all perfectly level squares at right angles) except for the M?

If you have a Mozilla account, or are okay with creating a temporary one, it’s pretty easy to synchronize from Firefox to LibreWolf with it. (LibreWolf requires an extra step to enable the account, but it’s trivially easy to find in its settings.)