I’m getting ready to file another Immigration case to make my spouse’s permanent residence, well, permanent.
As part of this next case, they want photos to show that our marriage continues.
Fine, fine. But my spouse sent them in this strange format called HEIC, which is apparently some bizarre iPhone format, that’s technically one of those “MPEG standards”.
As usual, Apple only takes what computers have done for 20 or 30 years and produces some dumbed down and incompatible version.
This one is nastier than JPEG 2000 or even Microsoft’s JPEG-XR, because it’s based on the HEVC codec, which means there’s several thousand patents.
Probably the entire point of pushing this HEIC format on iPhones and making it the default is to try to cause other people to have to pay money (patent royalties) for software that can actually handle the stupid things.
I’m on Fedora and had to go install a package from RPM Fusion called “libheif” which came with a conversion program called heif-convert, which can turn these into standard image files in the JPEG and PNG formats, which is what Walmart accepts when you have photos done at their One Hour Photo department.
There’s not really much use in information transfer formats that don’t actually open when you send them to have something done, and HEIC on an iPhone is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in that regard.
Sending photos from your vacation to Walmart to get prints is like, pretty basic, and yet the “amazing iPhone” can’t seem to do what my Kodak EasyShare digital camera from 2003 did, or even my cheap 35 mm cameras in the 1990s where you took them a damned roll of film and walked around the store while they made photos and handed you your negatives back.
In fact, if the iPhone was the only digital camera available, I’d encourage everyone to shout “NYET! The evil stops here!” and go back to film.
Essentially, thanks to Apple, we’re back to the problem that Richard Stallman described in 2000 regarding MP3 or Microsoft Office formats.
People will put the files out there, and then other people who live in the Free World have to figure out some way of dealing with them.
It will be another 11-12 years before HEIC is patent-free, but you don’t have to wait, because AV1F exists now and is more efficient, and is royalty-free.
So we’re back to JPEG/PNG for mass compatibility, and that’s unlikely to change for some time. The upside is that if people start using AV1F, then Free and Open Source Software operating systems can come with programs that can read the data and then forward it into another file format without making the user jump through hoops.
Also, at least some day we may have something to point at when people ask why we’re using the JPEG format from 1992 and what to use instead. By definition, that will never happen with an MPEG or Microsoft “standard” because they want money, and JPEG is “good enough” and nobody can sue over it anymore because it’s 30 years old, and tragically, software patents in the United States have caused it to become the de facto image format, forever apparently.
I mean, I was opening JPEGs in the 90s on a 486 PC.
I think it’s funny, in a way, that Apple inflicted HEIC on their customers.
If they try to upload their family photos to be printed, it won’t work any better for them in that format than it did for me, and they too will have to figure out some way of turning them into a standard file. So it creates a headache for their own customers.
It really does make you wonder if there actually was a problem that Apple was trying to solve with HEIC, because it’s still a lossy format, which means that to get those small file sizes, it discards image data that it thinks you won’t perceive, but this means that converting it to anything except PNG lossless introduces another generation of loss.
So the best you’ll manage to do is create these enormous PNG files to back up to “future-proof” your iPhone photos and make sure they don’t get any worse than they are today, which is ridiculous.
Cell phone cameras should allow “Save in PNG” format, but it seems that many, hell, maybe even most don’t.
But with my Android phone, at least when it saves to JPEG, it doesn’t HAVE to get worse than that somehow later on when I want to *gasp* print my photos out.
Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
I got a $397 check for my spouse last week and a $397 check for myself this week.
Facebook had been tagging us in our pictures and storing our facial patterns in their facial recognition programs. That turned out to be a big problem for them that cost them nearly $700 million in the resulting class action settlement.
Scumbag corporations have been losing big time due to the BIPA, and they want it repealed. There’s pending lawsuits against at least a dozen major companies, and lots of settlements too.
The only thing corporations understand is losing money. Facebook has already had a lot of fake stock value erased this year.
Facebook blamed the loss mostly on Apple’s alleged new “privacy” functions on the iPhone, even though Facebook already has patents pending on how to avoid those features and track people with iPhones anyway. As long as their apps are even on your phone, you’ve lost already whether you use an Android or an iPhone.
I use a Free and Open Source app called Frost from F-Droid that gives Facebook no significant access to my phone. It’s basically a blinged out webview that tricks Messenger into working. So it’s very likely that Facebook has less access to my Pixel 6 than anything Apple has done to box them in on an iPhone, where all you can use is Facebook’s apps.
Facebook’s financial problems have more to do with laws like the California and Illinois privacy statutes.
The only safe way to operate is to assume that anyone you track could be in Illinois or California, which is why although BIPA is an Illinois law, and Illinois is a state of 12.8 million people, Facebook disabled their tagging and facial recognition everywhere in the world after losing $700 million dollars.
Another source of Zuckerberg’s heartburn is the state of the economy in general. Major stocks of companies with real products are down 30 even 40%, and not even Walmart was spared.
Most of the ads I’ve seen go by on Facebook are from lawyers suing app companies.
Since the economy is so bad right now (Maybe call it the “Don’t Say Recession Recession”?), consumers have to tighten their wallets, and while that may or may not eventually break the hyperinflation (since most of this is due to Biden and Congress throwing around trillions of dollars we don’t have, that came at the expense of your bank account), it means the value of advertising is collapsing.
This is what set off the DotCom Bubble Collapse in the early 2000s.
Eventually, investors get sick of losing money, the hysteria wears off, and reality sets in.
Usually in an environment where the Fed loses its appetite for entertaining that round of mania.
Like what’s starting to unfold now.
The reason why Elon Musk wants Twitter isn’t because he has a plan to turn a profit. His Tesla company is down 41% YTD, you know.
It’s because he wants to be able to say whatever he wants without any censorship, and invite Trump back to scream and yell, but there will still be “content moderation” and spyware tracking the people foolish enough to have accounts there.
I’ve never really understood how a company that lets you post 140 characters from the toilet that disappear into the void quickly has managed to stay in business. Pretty much the only thing on Twitter are influencers, “brands”, and politicians. The 1% can say whatever they want unfiltered.
Do you even want to be on this thing?
I barely even have a presence on Facebook anymore. It’s not generally worth using. You hope other people will hate like your vacation or something and there’s a lot of stress to be fake popular on it.
I tried to tell Roy Schestowitz that he’d be a lot happier and lose nothing if he got off Twitter years ago, but the only reason he left was because they shoved him out the door for criticizing Bill Gates.
Merely criticizing the rich and powerful is enough to get you thrown out.
It is dangerous to have “social media” replace the Web, because then they can throw you out when they don’t like what you say, even if it’s not illegal to say that. And that’s why corporations and the governments want the Web to die. They can spy and censor better that way. It was much harder to do this in bulk when everyone who wanted a blog just got their own Web site.
Google even crawls my blog and I get readers. When you post to Facebook and Twitter, your thoughts just die immediately. It gives the illusion of having spoken, even though nobody is really listening.
I wonder if Elon Musk will let him back in. He is a “free speech absolutist”, or so he says. 😉
For now, it could be used for all sorts of nasty reasons, but after Roe v. Wade is officially struck down, states such as Texas could, and probably will, buy the data to collect evidence to criminally prosecute women who go to another state for an abortion.
Previously, something like this would have been difficult to prove, but in the age of iPhones and Android phones, all the government has to do in order to short circuit the Fourth Amendment is buy the data like any other parasite or criminal would.
Eventually, people will know that the states are using geolocation data to prosecute abortion seekers, but it will be too late for the first hundreds of women that Republican prosecutors turn into political prisoners.
Since many phones, such as the iPhone, only pretend to be turned off, it’s best to just not have one, or to leave it at home if you go somewhere you wouldn’t want the state to know about.
The government getting into phone records isn’t new. They have a lot of options to get your course location or GPS coordinates. Google and your phone company have both.
People already get caught violating probation and COVID restrictions because their phone leaks so much data. During the COVID restrictions in the US, the federal government was purchasing location data from in-app advertisers to monitor “compliance” with the restrictions without having to explain to a judge on what grounds they wanted a search warrant.
Now iPhones are another tool against women for Republicans that are looking to scalp them for a trophy so they can run for higher office later, while the women are in prison.
Dave Ramsey offers simplistic financial advice to “consumers”, but his advice on “extended warranties” is dead on. People should refuse to buy “extended warranties”.
They’re essentially a way to pay a “service company” that you may not actually get to honor any claims, or worse, the manufacturer itself, a portion of the device’s cost, in order to get a “service plan”.
The reason I say paying the manufacturer is worse is because it essentially tells the manufacturer that it’s fine to produce junk that breaks a lot, and even if you are buying it through the store, it signals to the store that it’s fine to carry products that are unreliable because they’ll only make more money when customers bet against the reliability of the device they are there to purchase.
Ramsey advises not to buy them because devices tend not to break down within the extended service period, and by the time one thing you buy has a problem, you’ll have paid for so many plans that you’ll be out more money than had you declined all of the plans, and have to fix one thing yourself out of the money that you saved by turning down the plans. And that’s _if_ you can get anyone to honor the plans. Half the time, they come up with some total bullshit reason why they don’t have to, or never even respond to your claim.
Car “warranties” are the worst. My mechanic says never buy one because most of them don’t pay and then customers get mad at the shop. He says it becomes a hassle where they fill out papers, and then 90% of them deny the claim while the remaining 10% usually want to buy a part on eBay and then haggle with the mechanics for half their hourly rate to put it on your car.
I just bought a deep freezer for $259 from Home Depot, and they wanted my to buy a $75 extended service plan that covers breakdowns for 4 years after the warranty ends. That’s nearly a third of the cost of buying another one and these things usually work for 10-20 years or more, trouble free. So the plan is a license to print money for the store and the con artists who sell them.
Now, you may be wondering, why I’m talking about cars and freezers and stuff on an article headlined “iPhone”. Well, Apple has their own extended service plan called AppleCare, and they arm wrestle people (I guess that’s a pun since the iPhone is an arm device.) to get them to bet their new $1,429 iPhone will fail between the end of the year that Apple has to warrant it, and the two following years. Even though in most cases, the hardware doesn’t fail if you just take care of what you buy. (In addition, carriers like “protection plans” with deductibles. They wanted $13 a month on my Google Pixel 6 (MSRP $600) and $18 a month on my spouse’s iPhone 13 (MSRP of $800)….
(I got them on an upgrade promo for $0 and $400 because they took over Sprint and shut down the network our old phones used.)
Even if you have to pay full MSRP at some point because your phone is totally destroyed, you’ll never break even with the plans over the long haul.
Ten years of the plans are $3,720 added to your phone bill even if you never use the plans once, and then each time your phone has an issue, there’s some bullshit deductible preventing them from even covering the full cost of repair.
In other words, if you used the plan twice over 10 years, you could have fully replaced 6 brand new phones. New phones….not some “You pay a $129 deductible and we throw you an old phone someone else traded in…..LOL!”
Remember that the longer you own it, the less remaining value it has. Shortly, the carrier is basically charging you for the market value of the phone even though they call it a deductible to your “service plan”.
This is how bad people are at doing basic math! Or budgeting. They keep throwing money at “service plans” because they go “I’m too broke to buy a replacement for this.”
If you’re too broke to replace it, what are you doing buying it?
They “asked nicely” to pay for a “service plan”, and something like half the people out there are not stupid enough, so it will no longer be a request. 🙂
I suppose Apple is angry that some people prefer to own their phone outright at some point and spend the next 4 years with no phone payment running it into the ground, like my mom did with her iPhone 6, albeit AT&T kept billing her for the “protection plan” because she’s not financially savvy. She just kept using the old iPhone because she didn’t want to pay money to upgrade, which she would have had if she had turned down the plan.
With iPhone as a Disservice, Apple can just refuse to sell you a device that you own, and they can call it a “subscription”. If you modify the phone at all, you’ve messed with “their property” because you’ll never be able to pay it off, and included in the plan of course, will be “AppleCare” so that you won’t have the option to decline it and save money and just be careful with your phone.
And while they’re in there, they can force you to pay for i”Clown”, Apple Music, and i”Clown” drive, and Apple TV, even though they collapsed twice in the past week and weren’t even accessible for hours.
The more people accept in order to stay in the “Cult” the more the cult leaders try to get away with. There’s no telling what Apple will try to shove into these “subscriptions” that you’ll be forced to pay for even if you don’t want them and never used them before.
The Verge keeps saying Apple doesn’t charge any “interest”. Why would they? The iPhones only cost them between $150-$350 to produce and they sell them for up to $1,429, and they get more expensive every year.
What is the profit margin when they start making you pay every month whether you “upgrade” to a phone that’s not that much better than the last one or not?
All of this is clearly designed to shore up Apple’s bottom line. They did lose a lot of money YTD and at some points, alarmingly so if you’re an investor.
They have had no new products in the pipeline since the iPhone came out (unless you count a watch that overworked ER doctors hate because it panics people when there’s nothing wrong with their heart), and they’re selling phones into a saturated market where Android clipped their wings a while back.
Steve Jobs was always furious about Android, because he knew it would limit the iPhone’s success with iterative updates that improved it until it overtook the iPhone…..which is what has happened, certainly with the Pixel series from Google. Then Jobs died and the Peter Principle put Tim Cook in as the CEO of Apple.
Unbelievably, Apple’s stock price has continued to rise, until you look at the fact that they’re using share buybacks and other financial engineering to raise Tim Cook’s salary without adding any real value to the company.
How else does a company that treads water continue to “add value” even as the job destruction in America and indeed the world (COVID-19 being the excuse) cause the number who can afford their products to plummet? The Federal Reserve has had interest rates at zero, so not only has Apple bought its own shares, but it did it at the expense of the American public, taking in subsidized loans which help strip the American dollar of its value, and putting it right into the hands of American Oligarchs, which include Tim Cook.
Also, being “so valuable” puts them in the S&P 500, where American workers who are basically forced at the end of a gun to put their life savings (401(k) plan) are captive investors.
How else do you think they buy a megayacht while you can’t get chicken at the grocery store? Whoopsie.
The curtain pulls back and the charade reveals itself. They do have a real business, but their “side hustle” is much better.
Buying anything on subscription where it goes away if you stop paying for it, instead of doing your computing locally, is a really really BAD idea.
When we were sending files to our immigration attorney last year, her Microsoft 365 kept crashing and it was really annoying. I kept having to send documents two, three, five times before she got them. We’d go down to Chicago to her office and she’d try to open her mail and it didn’t work and we’d have to take a lunch break.
Clown Computing is unprofessional and it saps productivity, but Apple doesn’t want you to choose. They want to license the iPhone to you and then bundle all of this crap so you’ll start using it because you have to pay for it anyway.
-/r/Walmart post about DoorDash contracting to deliver Walmart+ orders.
To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.
The employees at the local Walmart all had to attend a meeting today where it was stated that all Walmart employees get “free” Walmart+, which basically is free delivery of any size order to your house and 5 cents off per gallon of gasoline at Walmart or Murphy gas stations.
I guess it’s not nothing, but Walmart says that the Internal Revenue Code causes the “fair market value” of the Walmart+ subscription to be reported as taxable income.
So congratulations. Instead of a raise you got another way to spend money at Walmart, and you owe the government another $15-20 when you file your taxes next year.
Normally, it’s hard to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I doubt they’d be doing this unless they figured it benefited them more than you.
We’re already so tethered to Walmart at this point, it’s hard to shop anywhere else. Between the discount card (which works on some groceries, but not most) and the 5% back on my Capital One Walmart card for doing online orders, there’s hardly a point to shopping my groceries myself anymore, so I use the store pickup already.
The upside of having Walmart+ is marginal. I already know from Online Grocery Pickup employees talking about it that DoorDash drivers hate Walmart+ (verifiable through this article too) and they complain that they have to put groceries back that they’ve already picked and cancel the customer’s order all the time. Walmart probably pays more to have that happen than if they kicked a few more bucks to the drivers.
Walmart for their part says that a tip after some guy got $4 from them to deliver tons of groceries and a 50 pound bag of dog food up three flights of stairs is “optional”.
I just don’t see myself using it often unless I’m laid up in bed with the flu and absolutely cannot go out and pickup my own groceries, have an order for pickup that does not meet the $35 free pickup minimum and would normally be charged a $5.99 convenience fee (I’m there every day anyway, so this DOES happen), or an at Murphy filling up my gas tank and want to use the 5 cents a gallon off (in addition to my credit card, where gas always has 5% back).
The upside for an ethical person with Walmart+ is low. Ethics dictates a sizeable tip. Most Walmart customers are terrible people who don’t tip well, like the folks who already complain that their food arrived cold from restaurants with DoorDash. So the only ethical thing is tip or don’t use it.
With gas prices through the roof lately, I can’t imagine that Walmart+ isn’t on its last leg already.
If nobody wanted to make $4-5 taking a grocery order when gas cost $3 a gallon, who wants to do it with gas at $4.30 a gallon?
The whole thing is obviously in a death spiral because some manager at Walmart bought into this gig economy bullshit instead of paying a professional delivery driver in a Walmart truck to make the rounds (like Amazon Prime does).
And when we say “gig”, it’s a nice way of saying “slave”. People who work inside the store, for Walmart, make at least $17 an hour without having to drive all over the city not getting tips. They also don’t have to pay the employer share of social taxes at the end of the year.
The “app economy” has created a permanent underclass that cannot afford childcare (leading to Walmart warning that it won’t release orders to people with young children in the car) and do not make the legal minimum wage (which is $15 an hour in my state).
I’ve complained about these apps before, and how it’s dangerous for these “gig workers” from DoorDash to have their kids in the car.
Very recently, in the city I live in, a guy got into a running car and pointed a loaded handgun at a 16 year old in the back seat. A week before that, a guy stole a running vehicle and then ditched it a few miles later with some toddlers in it.
And you know how these app companies are. “We’re just a facilitator! You can’t sue us!”.
This is what comes out of San Francisco, folks. The most illiberal non-progressive system imaginable.
A return to plantations working slaves for subsistence living standards.
Samsung phones have taken a huge nosedive in the last several years.
The price has gone up, the quality has gone way down. They’re the most overrated brand this side of Apple. In fact, between Apple and Samsung, it’s like Democrats and Republicans. Just bad in different ways.
Sprint offered me $1,000 off any Samsung Galaxy S22 series phone, or $800 off any iPhone, or $600 off any other Android, so I chose the $600 off and ordered a Google Pixel 6.
Samsung has the steepest subsidies, because you get the phone, and then you realize that one of the things they do, it’s like buying a new PC with Windows and then having to root through 40 pieces of bloatware, spyware, and trial software, only with the Samsung phone, you can’t even disable a lot of it.
My Galaxy S20 FE 5G was the worst phone I’ve ever had. Roughly, in this order, here are the list of reasons Samsung can go climb a tree.
The phone barely works now because T-Mobile sold it to me months after buying Sprint, but it’s a Sprint phone. When I had them put the T-Mobile Network Experience SIM card into it, it started preferring their towers, which are not fully compatible with the phone and often just confuse it, and now they’re shutting down the Sprint network too, so you can’t even hope for it to lock on in “roaming” mode. This has led to the phone becoming a brick and you can’t even call 911 in areas where my spouse’s iPhone works fine. This turns it into a safety hazard. You can’t even call 911.
Microsoft threatened them with patents, and got all sorts of junk baked into the firmware that just takes up space and spies on you. You can remove or disable some of it, but some of it is literally in the firmware. If you disable Microsoft’s app for Bluetooth devices, the phone’s bluetooth functionality ceases to work properly, and there’s a big useless “connect to Windows” button that doesn’t even do anything on my phone, because I don’t use Windows on anything. KDE Connect works fine, and there’s also a GNOME extension that works with it.
Samsung has duplicated literally everything Google already puts into Android, including an account, an app store (which you can’t get rid of), a web browser that isn’t very good and has no desktop counterpart, and Bixby…..their godawful assistant program that they had to use Dark Patterns to try to force on people. When folks ignored it, the power button became the button that activates Bixby, and you have to agree to a Bixby EULA to turn it into the power button again.
Speaking of EULAs, Samsung is always popping things up that say their EULAs have been updated and I have to click to accept them. When I drag them out of the notifications, they pop up again a week or so later.
I discovered Samsung slipping in “Facebook Services” which spy on you even if you don’t use Facebook and have removed and disabled the stub apps. You have to disable Facebook Services, but that’s no guarantee they’re actually gone.
On the Apple iPhone side:
They can’t play Opus files.
They don’t allow you to use something like F-Droid. As such, if you use YouTube on an iPhone, it’s with YouTube’s app or no dice. You can’t run Newpipe and skip the ads, or play music in the background, or download things.
You can’t run the real Firefox or the real Vivaldi, Brave, Opera, or Chrome on an iPhone, so if a site doesn’t work, you have no other browsers but Safari because they all are forced to use Safari’s web engine.
Since I’ve never owned a Pixel, that will be another post entirely, but I can’t see how it would be as bad as the war between the Samsung douche and the Apple turd sandwich.
Facebook and Uber: “Hey boss, we have a critic!” Boss: “Make them Director of Product!” HR person: “Which Product?” Boss: “The human cattle, of course!”
Firefox has been going down the toilet for years.
According to Wikipedia, Blake Ross, one of the original creators of Firefox (it was a fork of the Mozilla Suite, which sort of continues in a badly broken state as Seamonkey….It’s no longer packaged by Debian or Ubuntu due to unfixed security flaws), ended up working at Facebook for several years, and then resigning to go work at Uber.
Both of these companies produce spyware for “smart” phones that run in the background and swipe information about you in real time.
They pretend that they are a social network and an alternative to calling a taxi. However, Facebook is constantly reading your contacts list and text messages, and finding out where you are at, at all times, accurate to within a few feet, if you use their app on your phone.
Uber does many unethical things. Recently, it was even caught checking how much battery life you have on your phone. If it’s critically low, the app offers you a higher price for a ride.
Richard Stallman has many pages on why not to use Facebook, Uber, or Apple. In fact, Facebook accused me of spamming for posting links to Mr. Stallman’s website on Facebook.
I barely use Facebook. It grows worse by the minute and so I just don’t use it much anymore. I have an account, but it’s only because they wall off everything if you’re not logged in because they’re competing with the web.
The other creator of Firefox, David Hyatt, left almost right away to take a job offer at Apple to work on Safari. Apple spies and so do very nearly all of the apps. It’s not a “private” alternative to Android, in fact, nearly two-thirds have Google’s tracking libraries, and almost all have at least Apple’s.
If you’re thinking “What odd places for people who are Free Software developers to end up.”, then you’ve made the mistake of confusing Free Software with the watered down alternative, called “Open Source”.
The Free Software side is interested in giving the user freedom to do whatever they want with their computer, and freedom from this sort of abuse by proprietary software companies and their spyware.
The Open Source people are only interested in source code being shared around as a way to develop software.
While most Open Source licenses are Free, and while most Free Software licenses are Open Source, the difference is important.
Even Facebook, Apple, and Uber do some “open source”, and some of it even ends up in GNU/Linux distributions. You almost certainly use some right now if you use a GNU/Linux system. In this context, those bits of code are at least probably not hurting you.
But the force behind the “Open Source Movement” are giant corporations who want free labor, and who appeal to the vanity of programmers in order to get it. If you license your program permissively to get “more users”, then those “users” might, in fact, end up being Big Tech companies who roll your program into Windows or the Mac or Facebook, and then use it to attack people and help nation states to murder them, or at least take away their other human rights.
Firefox is not Free Software. It’s not even Open Source anymore.
It includes DRM software that nobody is allowed to study, which is proprietary, and licensed from Google. If you even did go to study it, you might be committing a felony in the United States, and so reporting security issues with it might land you in prison, as those issues may allow someone to bypass DRM.
Mozilla allows you to view the Java source code that they claim sanitizes your keystrokes of personal information, before being sent to an advertising company. DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Policy (which they themselves ignore) mentions that nobody who has claimed to remove personal information has ever actually accomplished that.
In fact, AOL, which is what Mozilla was spun off from, was sued for dumping user search information they claimed to have anonymized, and didn’t.
This raises an interesting point by itself, however. Malware can be Open Source. Just because you understand how the software they abuse you with works, doesn’t make it non-abusive.
We also catch Mozilla openly lying about data collection and retention. Here’s what the description for Firefox in Flatpak form says.
Should read: “At Firefox, we troll people who expect privacy with our misinformation.”
Description of Firefox in the GNOME Software Center taken from Mozilla’s official Flatpak.
Notice the “We never collect or store your personal data.” part. We’ll come back to this.
So Firefox doesn’t collect your data according to Mozilla, but according to Mozilla, it collects your data. Then, according to Mozilla, it doesn’t store it. Except, according to Mozilla it does. And then according to Mozilla, they don’t share it, except that according to Mozilla they do.
They probably don’t technically “sell” the data that they “share”. The whole point of the scheme is to drive ads, and they are selling your screen to advertisers, and then they “share” the data with the advertisers.
My God, they can’t even keep their lying straight anymore. Did Donald Trump retire and take a job there?
Then to add insult to injury, they now develop all of their software on Microsoft GitHub, which routinely disappears and censors software repositories due to DMCA trolls and various governments with poor human rights records.
Doesn’t Mozilla say they block tracking?
Yes, like Apple, Microsoft, and others, they are working very hard on blocking OTHERS from tracking you. It makes the data that they collect worth more, either internally to force their own ad and spyware network (Apple) on app developers, or to command a higher price for the personal data that they steal from you (Mozilla Firefox Suggest).
Almost every article about Firefox 93 agrees with my position that Suggest is adware driven by a keylogger.
When I searched for news posts about Firefox 93, about 70-80% seemed to be about turning off Firefox Suggest.
While you’d have to be insane to do anything in your browser with it on, the “platform” is growing more hostile to your privacy and freedom by the minute, and it will definitely continue to get worse from there.
Nobody at Mozilla has any scruples. This is a quick cash grab on the way out. Like DuckDuckGo, they spent years pretending to be some kind of an underdog with a “Spread Firefox campaign.”.
One of Spread Firefox’s most enthusiastic supporters was Nathan Lineback, who runs a site called ToastyTech, and it included pages and pages devoted to how godawful Internet Explorer was and how Firefox was the solution.
I emailed him for comment about this, noting that Firefox has been slowly morphing itself into DRM with spyware and adware that also has a web browser in it. Here’s his reply.
Yea, I’ve been inches away from nuking my “firefox is good” pages. I’ve been sticking with a “New Moon” port for Windows XP, but lots of sites are breaking things for no good reason. I remember when one of the advantages was that Firefox was available for almost every OS out there. Crap like DRM and all of this compiling scripts to assembly makes porting that much harder. It really hurts because I used to actively promote Firefox. I’ve still got a bunch of stickers and stuff that the Mozilla folks sent me because I participated in their SpreadFirefox event for Firefox 3. I get so tired of not having control over technology I use. And even more tired of the attitude that I should just put up with it all like some kind of cow. Anyway, thanks for visiting my site.
Nathan Lineback, ToastyTech
He had posted to his rants page, previously, about another user who was fed up with Microsoft Edge, which is only slightly ahead of Firefox in overall nastiness at this point.
Edge now has a “feature” that tells you when you’re shopping for something and a big box retailer like Walmart or Amazon has a price that’s like $1-2 cheaper. When you click on it, there’s a GUID tracker that Microsoft uses in order to get part of the sale as a commission.
I’m guessing that “Firefox Shopping Assistant” isn’t too far away at this point. They’re probably just arguing about how much you’re worth if you’re part of the 3.5% and falling that still uses Firefox.
However, in this article, I have demonstrated that Mozilla has never been led by people who were diametrically opposed to spyware, human rights abuses, and surveillance capitalism. Firefox is the enemy.
At this point, they pitch a VPN, but with all of the shady stuff that’s been going on in there, would you even feel safe about using it?
A new report shows that Samsung is the worst Android vendor for invasions of privacy.
Among the problems unique to Samsung is that they’ve foisted Microsoft spyware and Clown Computing that phones home to Microsoft into the stock ROM as system apps.
Also, LineageOS could fix it, if you could get it to run. But Samsung’s “security system” will break your camera for no reason whatsoever if you do, in their newer phones. This isn’t “Oh, the other firmware has no driver.”. It’s Samsung Knox preventing the camera from ever working again.
They used to take Samsung Pay away if you unlocked the bootloader but they must have figured out that the first thing people did when they were allowed to uninstall Samsung Pay was uninstall Samsung Pay.
Nobody wants to be that douche holding up the line at the store with a goddamned phone while the terminal bleeps and buzzes and errors out, unless they have an iPhone.
BaronHK's Rants 
You must be logged in to post a comment.