The place where my narratives originate.
This is Aram Zucker-Scharff's Tumblr. Aram is a web developer, journalist, and fan of many things. Find him elsewhere below.
Do you have thoughts about the changes to Firefox's Terms of Use and Privacy Notice? A lot of people seem to be freaking out ("This is like when google removed 'Don't be evil!'"), but it seems to me like just another case of people getting confused by legalese.
I’ve been trying not to get too fighty about it so thank you for giving me the excuse to talk about it neutrally and not while arguing with someone.
Firefox sits in such an awful place when it comes to how people who understand technology at varying levels interact with it.
On one very extreme end you’ve got people who are pissed that Firefox won’t let you install known malicious extensions because that’s too controlling of the user experience; these are also the people who tend to say that firefox might as well be spyware because they are paid by google to have google as the default search engine for the browser.
In the middle you’ve got a bunch of people who know a little bit about technology - enough to know that they should be suspicious of it - but who are only passingly familiar with stuff like “internet protocols” and “security certificates” and “legal liability” who see every change that isn’t explicitly about data anonymization as a threat that needs to be killed with fire. These are the people who tend not to know that you can change the data collection settings in Firefox.
And on the other extreme you’ve got people who are pretty sure that firefox is a witch and that you’re going to get a virus if you download a browser that isn’t chrome so they won’t touch Firefox with a ten foot pole.
And it’s just kind of exhausting. It reminds me of when you’ve got people who get more mad at queer creators for inelegantly supporting a cause than they are at blatant homophobes. Like, yeah, you focus on the people whose minds you can change, and Firefox is certainly more responsive to user feedback than Chrome, but also getting you to legally agree that you won’t sue Firefox for temporarily storing a photo you’re uploading isn’t a sign that Firefox sold out and is collecting all your data to feed to whichever LLM is currently supposed to be pouring the most bottles of water into landfills before pissing in the plastic bottle and putting the plastic bottle full of urine in the landfill.
The post I keep seeing (and it’s not one post, i’ve seen this in youtube comment sections and on discord and on tumblr) is:
Well-meaning person who has gotten the wrong end of the stick: This is it, go switch to sanguinetapir now, firefox has gone to the dark side and is selling your data. [Link to *an internet comment section* and/or redditor reactions as evidence of wrongdoing].
Response: I think you may be misreading the statements here, there’s been an update about this and everything.
Well-meaning (and deeply annoying) person who has gotten the wrong end of the stick: If you’d read the link you’d see that actually no I didn’t misinterpret this, as evidenced by the dozens of commenters on this other site who are misinterpreting the ToU the same way that I am, but more snarkily.
Bud.
Anyway the consensus from the actual security nerds is “jesus fucking christ we carry GPS locators in our pockets all goddamned day and there are cameras everywhere and there is a long-lasting global push to erode the right to encrypt your data and facebook is creating tracking accounts for people who don’t even have a facebook and they are giving data about abortion travel to the goddamned police state” and they could not be reached for comment about whether Firefox is bad now, actually, because they collect anonymized data about the people who use pocket.
My response is that there is a simple fix for all of this and it is to walk into the sea.
(I am not worried about the updated firefox ToU, I personally have a fair amount of data collection enabled on my browser because I do actually want crash reports to go to firefox when my browser crashes; however i’m not actually all that worried about firefox collecting, like, ad data on me because I haven’t seen an ad in ten years and if one popped up on my browser i’d smash my screen with a stand mixer - I don’t care about location data either because turning on location on your devices is for suckers but also *the way the internet works means unless you’re using a traffic anonymizer at all times your browser/isp/websites you connect to/vpn/what fucking ever know where you are because of the IP address that they *have* to be able to see to deliver the internet to you and that is, generally speaking, logged as a matter of course by the systems that interact with it*)
Anyway if you’re worried about firefox collecting your data you should ABSOLUTELY NOT BE ON DISCORD OR YOUTUBE and if you are on either of those things you should 100% be using them in a browser instead of an app and i don’t particularly care if that browser is firefox or tonsilferret but it should be one with an extension that allows you to choose what data gets shared with the sites it interacts with.
The State of California: In order to better protect our citizens and their data, we are broadening the definition of “sell” in discussions of data privacy so that companies which trade user data for non-monetary compensation (which might include shared computing time, platform priority, or any number of other benefits); this definition may be over-broad in some cases, but it is worthwhile to ensure that everyone possibly impacted by data collection be made aware of all the possible ways that their data can be collected.
Mozilla: Hm, seems like the anonymized data we collect from people who have not opted out of data collection could be interpreted as being “sold” when we share it with partners who make tools used by our browser, let’s make sure to explain that to people and while we’re at it make it explicit that we do actually have to store data temporarily in order to handle data.
Google: LOL sure, here’s our ToS update reflecting this change: “FEED ME STRAY CAT AND THAT BRA MAKES YOUR TITS LOOK LIKE JACK O LANTERNS IN JANUARY BUY EIGHT MORE FROM AMAZON”
People who definitely understand internet privacy: Wow seems like it’s definitely the time to install a browser used by seven thousand people that hasn’t had a stable release in three years in order to keep Firefox from turning me into confetti with a cheese grater that they might auction the pieces to chatgpt.
Have been using Firefox with pleasure for a couple of decades. Not stopping now. 😄
thinking abt how fucked up steam engine boiler explosions can look. theyre just pipes under there
gives me the idea of a ghost/monster engine that looks normal, albeit a bit battered, only to swing their smokebox door open and a myriad of pipes come bursting out like fucked up tentacles
I didn’t know a train could be an eldritch horror, but here we are.
I’m going to add to this with advice for any teacher running into this situation.
Ask to borrow the kid’s computer for a second, and use the AI. Pick a word, then pick a letter that is not in that word. Ask chatGPT how many times that letter appears in said word. (Avoid “how many Ns in Mayonnaise” because that went viral and got trained out.) Hell, give ChatGPT multiple tries. Ask it to demonstrate each time that letter appears in a word.
Let the entire class witness chatGPT fail. Because it cannot count. It cannot spell. It cannot think. Please put your lesson plans aside for a class and use it as a learning opportunity.
To add to your arsenal for educating these kids, please look into the concept of AI hallucination. AI cannot perceive things and has no ability to think critically, which means it cannot tell what’s real and what’s not. Really drill into these kids that they are better off asking advice from a toddler.
I used the characterAI bot instead of chatGPT in this case, but chatGPT has the same issues, because neither bot is capable of thinking about what it’s saying.
Calling these things “artificial intelligence” is a core part of the problem. They are not intelligent in any sense of the word. They are less intelligent than the spell check and grammar check functions in Microsoft Word circa 2010.
Musk is trying to downplay the chaos he’s creating by saying it’s much the same as the cost-cutting efforts of the Clinton administration.
“What DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s,” he posted on his X platform.
Rubbish.
I cut costs in the Clinton administration. The contrast with what Musk is doing couldn’t be sharper.
As secretary of labor, I took the Department of Labor down from 18,500 employees to 16,600 — but did it without any layoffs. No chainsaws. No meat-axes.
And we were careful to improve the services we were providing the public.
For example, when people lost jobs in an industry that was shrinking, we devised a way to get them job-training and job-search assistance in addition to unemployment insurance. This helped move them into new jobs faster — which also saved the government over $1 billion a year in unemployment payments.
We plowed that $1 billion back into job-training and job-search assistance, making the whole economy work better.
In Musk’s attack on the federal workforce, thousands of federal workers have been fired without warning. Or they’ve been offered fake “deferred resignation” buyouts that were never authorized by Congress and may not be legal.
Entire agencies have been gutted without legislative authorization, forcing judges to intervene.
Our “Reinventing Government” effort was authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation. We worked carefully over several years to identify areas where government could be more efficient, notifying Congress of what we were doing.
But the Republicans who control Congress today have allowed Musk to race ahead without them, even though the Constitution states that the legislative branch approves spending and federal law prohibits the president from cutting programs Congress has authorized without its permission.
Clinton sought that permission, and Congress accepted $3.6 billion in cuts he proposed.
We also involved federal workers, because they knew better than anyone what could be improved and how best to do it.
We introduced performance standards, we encouraged our workers to embrace the internet, and we gave out awards to employees who came up with ways to cut red tape and improve service.
“There was a tremendous effort put into understanding what should happen and what should change,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, which seeks to improve the federal workforce. “What is happening now is actually taking us backwards.”
We were deliberative and careful. Musk is the opposite.
Musk sees government workers as the enemy — as costs to be cut.
We saw government workers as assets to be developed, our partners in getting better services to the public more efficiently.
Musk also calls people who benefit from government programs the “parasite class.” Presumably that’s why he’s eager to cut back Medicaid. But Medicaid’s beneficiaries aren’t parasites. Half of them are children.
Oh, but if we’re talking about people who depend on government, Musk is the biggest “parasite” of all.
Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits, often at critical moments, helping seed the growth that has made him the richest person in the world.
That he views public servants as his enemy and the people who benefit from public programs as “parasites” tells you all you need to know about Elon Musk.
When you hear Musk say his effort is similar to what I and others did in the 1990s, know he’s lying. When you see him call people who benefit from public programs “parasites,” know he’s a hypocrite.
rose-and-bones Asks:
aramzs Said:
