Almost Everyone Involved With GNOME/GTK is Part of the Troll Farm. Also, More on Libera Chat.

Almost Everyone Involved With GNOME/GTK is Part of the Troll Farm.

I haven’t come across anyone in the KDE/Qt world that is as difficult, arrogant, and politically toxic as the GNOME/GTK crowd.

I was having a discussion with someone on IRC today about how the FSF let loose a monster (GNOME) on the world because they didn’t like how Qt was licensed ~25 years ago and now that monster has not only gotten away from them and been taken over, functionally at least, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM (through Red Hat, which basically owned GNOME prior to the sale).

With a bunch of dirty corporate money, this troll farm full of bad software continues, due to being a subsidy blackhole, and it gets shoved into a lot of distributions as the default desktop, even though it’s far from the best.

IBM also gets to dictate things like, putting in screens that tell you your computer is not “secure” if you disable Microsoft firmware garbage, and in the mean time, they drop practically all support for things you are going to have to use in that desktop, and its toolkits and APIs, and, going further, anyone who complains about it is canceled from the “Free Software” public square.

This has had some ramifications for me, due to a troll mob on Libera Chat consisting mainly of one mentally deranged person in another country pulling the strings of a operator who is “in on it”, as well as one of the relatively few remaining “Fedora Community” members who lets IBM dictate the terms under which free work is performed.

And since the operator is the “Chair” of Libera Chat, there’s nobody to complain to.

It has made it somewhat more of a bother to deal with the projects I am involved with, but thanks to their own incompetence and the fact that a lot of the same people are on other networks (and NNTP and through E-Mail) anyway, where the furry and the nutcase don’t seem to have any real sway, the Libera Chat situation is not that much of a nuisance.

The “we can use collectivism to push people around” (Molly de Blanc) idea is very much a product of the left.

One person who ought to be in a rubber room, can run the entire show by proxy, and stop you from talking on an entire community because of their own mental problems.

When the particular member of the troll mob who is fit for the rubber room gets banned, they just create sockpuppets. They’ve done a bunch of nasty shit and have been k-lined at least once.

When I let “moonmoon”, the operator, know about this, and specifically what the actions were that led to the ban that this person was evading were, they did nothing.

Some bad people get wise to the fact that everyone is onto them and they do things like posing as a member of a “marginalized group”, to shield themselves from criticism and to use it as a “do whatever and get away with it” permit.

There is no “community” around GNOME, and certainly not on Libera Chat, which is dying.

As you can see, “moonmoon” “he/him/awoo” (yeah…) has done such a “good job” with Libera Chat that it has only a quarter of the users it had when they took over from Freenode a few years back, and in this year alone has gone from nearly 50,000 active daily users in January to only 31,000 now.

Even before disconnecting from Matrix.org, leaving both networks crippled and barely more than a ghost town, Libera Chat was trending downward.

Some people don’t care if they knock it all down as long as they get to preside over the rubble and cockroaches.

The major problem I have encountered in these fake-FOSS communities are homophobes who are very, VERY open about it, but it’s fine because whatever they say as a “trans person” flies.

For a long time I just sort of grit my teeth and said nothing about the open (and welcome) homophobia on Libera Chat because I didn’t want to be “that guy”.

“moonmoon” has sat and watched people say things like how “gross” gay sex is, and has taken no action.

I am told that “moonmoon” allowed the abuser who got me banned to tell someone they should commit suicide, and took no action against the offender.

“moonmoon” also was present for at least several mentions of illegal content by others in the anime channel, on multiple occasions, and didn’t ban any of them.

This is “moderation”?

This is what they allow on their network.

But they devote a lot of time and energy viciously trying to mob and cancel me. I, who have not done anything untoward.

Firefox takes another step in the direction of being malware with “Firefox Suggest”.

Yesterday I was surfing the web when I found out that LKML.org, a centralized place to see what’s going on in Linux kernel development, was attempting to load an ad script from a company called “BuySellAds dot com”.

When I investigated the company in more detail, I found that there was an entire page where they plot with some of the titans of the web industry to track and psychologically manipulate people.

One such partnership was Brave. Apparently, this company is pushing Brave’s “ethical ads” from behind the scenes, and another was Mozilla.

It said that they feed ads into “Pocket”, which is where the “Sponsored Content” (including from Big Oil companies like Exxon) keep popping up in the Firefox New Tab page, and now in your address bar if you live in the US (under the guise of Firefox Suggest).

Well, what I suggest that Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker does with Firefox Suggest and Pocket is probably anatomically impossible, but that’s outside the scope of this post.

It sickens me, that a great piece of software that I used from its inception in 2002 (pre-releases), and even before that (as Mozilla Suite, and before Mozilla, as the proprietary Netscape suite) has gone and done this as a cash grab on the way down.

Each release, there’s more stuff to turn off, and you have to remember to do all of that every time you install it somewhere.

There’s like 5 different settings (something like that) to fully disable DRM and keep it from coming back on or demanding it. That’s pretty bad when many of the sites using it are using it not for DRM, but as a fingerprinting attack.

Firefox ceased being Free and Open Source Software when distributed according to the Mozilla Trademark policies long ago, when they enabled Google DRM by default and pestered the user if they turned it off and then didn’t do some “about:config fu” to make sure it stayed off and disappeared from the GUI, but with Cloudflare DNS (a privacy hazard that OpenBSD patched to turn off!), Pocket’s Sponsored Crap, and Firefox Suggest, Firefox has not only straddled the line of what I consider to be “malware”, but has finally crossed it.

Perhaps there’s something very wrong with Debian for not going back to calling it “IceWeasel” and patching this stuff out of the source code so that it can’t come on. They are now in abeyance of their Debian Free Software Guidelines all so they can ship malware and call it Firefox.

You can perhaps forgive, under these circumstances, that some GNU/Linux distributions are throwing in the towel with Firefox, which doesn’t perform very well and uses gobs and gobs of RAM to perform the tasks, and are shipping some other browser.

Manjaro spins are even putting in Vivaldi. And, if you frame it as a choice between Vivaldi and Firefox, I’d say Firefox is even worse than Vivaldi at this point, though Vivaldi doesn’t pretend to be open source like Firefox does, and they don’t beg for donations while they sell you down the river to adtechs like Mozilla does.

What Mozilla fails to understand, obviously, is that by pissing off users into leaving, they not only have less who will stay and drive “ad hits” for them, but they’ll see a further collapse in their search royalty value to Google, and incoming revenue will fall faster than had they just left it alone.

Furthermore, by letting this incompetent twit remain as CEO and firing the engineers while leaving a “Global Chief Diversity Officer” and other dead weight so that they can be a political party, development of the browser’s underpinnings lags while they fritter away valuable capital towards these nutjobs.

Well, enough was enough so….

I finally figured out the dependency matrix to get Debian to allow me to apt purge firefox-esr from my Debian 11 system without trying to take out GNOME metapackages and the X server.

It turns out that I had to give up on using the GNOME Web flatpak from FlatHub, because it collides with the Stable version from Debian. So I backed that out, and deleted its settings and cache under the .var folder hierarchy, and put the epiphany-browser package back in.

As long as that’s there, and those internationalization and LibreOffice Help Packs and foreign spell checkers and such that I removed the other day are gone, you can remove firefox-esr and the system won’t complain that you need a web browser.

It seems that Apt only wants to remove the gnome metapackages and xorg (Jean-Baptist…Emanuel….Zorg! Sorry.) if epiphany-browser is not already installed. If it is, it’ll shut up and let you get rid of Firefox.

Now you can also reclaim some disk space by removing .mozilla and all of the .mozilla and .firefox stuff under your Home folder (it’s all hidden but unhiding it with Ctrl+H and then using the finder is easy enough). In my case, I don’t use Thunderbird either, so I got rid of its stuff and now it’s just GNOME Web and Evolution.

Mozilla lies and says Firefox Suggest is off by default and that it is opt-in.

In the Bleeping Computer article about Firefox Suggest, which also notes Firefox’s dwindling market share (they went from being almost half of all web users at their peak to being only slightly more popular than Vivaldi, and still falling), they say that in their own tests and user reports, on a clean install, Firefox Suggest is on by default and doesn’t even ask whether the user wants ads or a keylogger malware in their address bar.

I installed the Firefox 93 Flatpak to find out myself. Mozilla even builds it and uploads the builds to Flathub, so they are official. Firefox Suggest was on by default, no message asking me if I wanted it.

When Ubuntu briefly implemented a keylogger that sent your Shell searches to Amazon in their now-abandoned Unity Shell, Richard Stallman called Ubuntu malware.

In its default configuration, Firefox not only sends everything you type into the address bar to Google (even though you can turn that off and split searches into a different box), but also to Mozilla, and Mozilla’s advertisers. This is certainly malware.

How much longer will “Free” operating systems like Debian continue ignoring their own Free Software Guidelines to package this? It already had a grabber that’s on by default to download Google DRM blobs, and now this.

It’s bad enough that Fedora chucked its own Free Software policy out the door when IBM took them over, and started pushing Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge.

How is it that Debian says the firmware to run my wifi, SSD, and graphics chip isn’t allowed (in the official image, which will lead some people to think Debian is broken and not bother figuring out why….while others have to know there’s a real installer that has firmware that is semi-hidden) but Widevine DRM blobs and a malicious keylogger in Firefox are fine?

Sounds like someone at Debian should explain this.

As an aside, Mozilla is also considering changing the default search engine to Bing.

Every few years, they come in and decide which crappy privacy-violating mess with worse search results than Google to switch all their users to as part of a cynical ploy to ultimately get Google back to the table for more money.

Microsoft has never offered any browser vendor more money than Google, which is why Google is the default search engine on almost every browser, and the iPhone/Safari, even though Apple pretends they’re bitter enemies (over 60% of Apple iOS apps have Google tracking libraries in them).

I’m not a big fan of Google, but Bing is much worse. Instead of Google violating your privacy, it will be Microsoft, and then the search results often won’t even be usable.

When will Mozilla learn to stop manipulating its remaining users? Never?

Chicago gives us a good look at the notion that violent felons need “therapy” – or why Cook County Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans is a complete moron.

Chicago had 55 people shot and 11 killed last weekend and the police blame Cook County judges for allowing violent felons out on ankle monitors.

The Chief Judge, Timothy C. Evans, released a very long reply, but the part that shows what a true idiot this man is, I will quote:

“[…]our system has shown that 94% of these defendants charged with murder released pretrial are not charged with any new crime and about 99% are not charged with a new violent offense. While the court cannot comment on individual pending or impending cases, jail detention cannot under the Constitution be applied to 100% of those facing certain charges because less than 10% of those released cannot conduct themselves properly. I believe these results could improve with the addition of cognitive behavioral therapy for high-risk defendants, which the court will be able to pursue more actively as the coronavirus pandemic recedes.”

There you go. Only 6% of murderers kill again (as far as you know) if you let them out pre-trial and therefore you need to let them all out on ankle monitors so that they can get what they really need. Therapists.

The fact that people like this flipping moron are JUDGES anywhere, let alone the Chief Judge, along with prosecutors like Kim Foxx who let many go without charging them, tells you why nobody (at least if they’re a minority) worries about breaking the law in Chicago.

If you went to Indiana, I’m not saying you’d never witness a violent crime, but it’s a pretty rare occurrence outside of some Democrat cities that have become miniature Chicagos.

You really do wonder if the courts have sympathy like this for white people, but I can tell you now that they don’t.

White people fear the cops because nothing happens if the cop shoots you, you will be held accountable, and the entire system goes into overdrive trying to over-charge and falsely convict you. Certainly, nobody will riot and set an entire city on fire and say they’re getting justice for you by picking the local Walmarts clean down to the last pack of AA batteries.

The race for reverse-racism and political correctness has led to a system where only white people get to court and are punished to any meaningful extent in places like Illinois. Everyone else needs reparations and psychological treatment.

Visit Chicago. Your car is already there.

What’s really tragic is that while the state of Illinois oppresses white people with unconstitutional FOID laws and having the police rough us up (you just never get to hear about it from the fake news), minority offenders get put back out on the street, get another gun, and shoot someone else, usually in less than 24 hours. All while the judges make excuses for themselves and the violent offenders they let go.

When the Democrats are running things, you have to pretend like nobody has any idea what the problems are or what the solutions might be.