It'd be really cool to see more barriers to entry limiting people's ability to access some tech, and limiting the size of businesses that are built around it. The internet was much better when it belongs to and was embraced by nerds, and not the general public, for example.

Our modern world is too complicated for most folks and now we have to build things so overly simplified that it is nearly impossible to be a power user or do advanced tasks when everything is reduced to single-button, shitty-app solutions in the cloud maintained by megacorps with more money than God

So went with the Norwegian Jottacloud. Looks quite good, performs well even from down under - uploaded 1.1TB in just a few days.

I have a lot of RAW images; their photo browser displays them fine, however they could do well to update the navigation a bit as it is cumbersome to jump say 15 years back in time.

Edit: It's still amazing to see my collection of NEFs and phone dumps (I clean our phones once or twice a year by moving all photos to the NAS) organised by time, extracted from the dark depths of my NAS drive folder hierarchies.

If it's in the App Store, it's not even a fork, it's just some piece of software using the "uBlock" name.

Not OP, but FWIW I'm just using standard lists (you asked, I'm not sure what use it is): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h... https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains http://sysctl.org/cameleon/hosts https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=domainbl... https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking... https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt

https://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt

You can achieve similar results with pihole, or hosts file managers.

Back in the day I used a local proxy tool, Proximator or something.

AFAIK uBo isn't doing anything particular unique technologically (which doesn't mean I'm not grateful, nor that anyone could make it).

Example Pentadactyl -> Tridactyl, noscript, ublock origin, stylus.

I'm not clear where you are coming from with the "greedy" accusation nor where you get off calling them sell outs. Based on what?

Your refrains betray "reduced to 180 characters" level of understanding of the matter and I strongly suggest you gain a more complete understanding of technical and business matters before attacking people who are producing so much value for the open source community.

Microsoft is a much older company who recently transitioned from being a proprietary software company selling licenses to a company who sell that but who also do services such as cloud (Azure) and who also do all kind of FOSS and tracking (Windows 10).

I fear the future is going to be that the poor are paying with their privacy/time/focus (as a result of advertising and tracking), while the rich buy licenses to pay off the licenses. Heck, it is already like that. My Scrabble clone application (Wordfeud) costs ~3 EUR in the Play Store. The free version costs nothing, but shows ads (not sure about tracking). I figured 3 EUR is a good deal for me for a perpetual license to never see ads. However, 3 EUR for me could be a lot of money for someone who's more poor than me.

It is much harder to get the site whitelisted once it has been compromised since it is on the same domain.

In my job, we had a site domain that was falsely flagged as malware-infected and it took about a few days before it was confirmed as removed (it is not automated apparently). It was never made clear why it was flagged in the first place but it scared us and we had to isolate any downloadable files (installer, ads, etc) away from the main domain as much as possible.

MPC-HC only works on windows, so it's not comparable. mpv has also a lot of target platforms, but not as much as VLC. It's really nice though, and I think a bit of competition is good.

The unofficial patches are presumably by definition not copyright the project considering they are written by a third party.

This is kind of how multiple source based packages work. Nothing is being distributed by the repo save instructions the end user does the fetching and building.

Normally people do a small amount of research before attacking volunteers who are providing free labor to make their package more broadly available.

An example dialog could have been opened like so.

"We at the Pale Moon project prefer that distributions package as close as possible to the default experience to ensure that all users have the same experience and aid in troubleshooting. Can we talk about the patches that are being distributed with Pale Moon to see if they are really needed for our product to work on your OS?"

If no agreement can ultimately be reached respectfully ask for it not to be distributed but use the know how generated to add a forum post "Building on OpenBSD" not burning any bridges AND actually profiting from the experience.

Instead Pale Moon devs appear to have learned nothing from the interaction.

I've noticed that you didn't bother to address the technical reasons whatsoever. Your browser is probably the best vector into your system and malware no longer just screws up your system. It's now common for malware to encrypt your files and hold them for ransom.

In effect an out of date firefox means that malware authors can use up to date firefox's security fixes to target users using old software that perforce is vulnerable to the same attacks. This needn't be specifically targeted at JUST palemoon users. All users of out of date firefox represent a possible victim pool with attractively low security.

Philosophically, yes. But moral relativity does not hold well due to the existence of culture. For western countries, no one can defend the morality of slavery or genocide. While those are pretty extreme, we have also collectively (democratically) decided that screwing over customers for your own profit is also not moral and should not be allowed. That's why antitrust law exists.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

I would never trust the judgement of the most important piece of software on my computer to a small group of tinkerers maintaining a fork of someone else's massively complicated and deeply outdated source code. I don't care who they are—if they don't have a big enough reputation on the line, there's no reason to trust them.

I'm sure your cousin is super trustworthy, but that doesn't mean anyone should put him in charge of the armoured vehicles division of a bank.

Besides, it's a lot easier for a microscopically small and individualistic outfit like Pale Moon to never disappoint you compared to a large, managed entity like Mozilla which has disclosure policies and hundreds of employees each with their own priorities and agenda.

UPDATE

After reading the comments on the linked blog article, frantically hitting the "Update" button (in developer mode) many times indeed helps! I had clicked it quite a few times already, but "normally", going crazy and hitting it a lot and quickly indeed lead to the update occurring.

Wow, what a crazy user interface that requires users to go berserk on the buttons...

Isn't that exactly the sort of thing the Apple walled garden is supposed to protect against? Surely anything that functions as a key logger and browsing history recorder violates their terms of service?

I'm fairly confident that this doesn't happen in Mozilla's addons repository. As I recall from the Stylish incident (Stylish is a similar browsing history stealing extension) they were not allowed to put this extension in AMO with the history stealing code, but it was left untouched in the Google Play store.

https://gsuite.google.com/

there doesn't seem to be any google earth replacement around but then again its not really that important to have one, not for me anyway as its mostly something i just browse for entertainment every now and again

It’s amazing software and I would like to see the developers and the organization thrive and be sustainable for the long term.

There's also, I believe, a regular firefox for android which I think does do extensions.

People clearly care about net neutrality, and they would/do also care about browser ad blocking. At this point it's clear to people what the issue is and how it affects them. Taking something away from people is much more painful than preventing them from getting it in the first place.

Even if there could be enough lobbying pressure to seriously propose such a law, it would be deeply unpopular and have difficulty passing.

Watch any new movie or TV show, and it’s unbearable to see the videography just to catch a car logo or drink logo. Shame. There’s even been full on descriptions by the actors of a car’s features, basically a commercial within the dialogue of the media.

My solution is to stop consuming it, not that I consumed a lot to begin with, but there’s no other option.

On what grounds and by what rationale could adblockers be possibly outlawed? If you cannot answer this question reasonably, then please don't even mention this as a reasonable possibility.

My guess is we will see much more sponsored content as a response to this.

“There are a couple components I want to touch on here - As mentioned elsewhere, we're still evaluating the adblock Manifest V3 changes, so we're not quite ready to commit to a statement one way or another on that issue.”

And:

“Second, we're committed to a strong extension ecosystem, including ad blocking. We're still evaluating some of the latest changes here in Chromium, but we're committed to the customer scenario as a principle. To be clear, we will not artificially restrict ad blocking for business reasons related to advertising.”

I do since years and here are the tips you may find useful if You would also like to run FreeBSD on the desktop.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/

... and please stay away from Project Trident or TrueOS or Lumina, they are from from being ready.

... eventually GhostBSD is quite OK.

... sorry for hijacking the 'Brave' thread but I am not able to reply to the original comment (time).

And a good chunk of it is maintaining & improving a large throughput backend system that is one of the top 10 in the world in terms of size and data volume.

And on top of that, an even smaller fraction is the people who think of and implement new front end things that you would interact with and think of the app changing. Like a lot of companies, it's probably a 10:1 ratio as far as backend:frontend people there are at the company.

As to why twitter changes so little, the company itself doesn't really understand why it's successful, so there is a lot of conservatism inside of it to not screw with the golden goose.

Yes, it makes tradeoffs that are different, and those tradeoffs are different in that they're better. Often, not always. That's the statement in a nutshell.

> Using a full well-written* dependency for something not part of your "core competency" (even something seemingly trivial) is often a better choice in my opinion.

If it's outside your core competency, you can't really judge if a dependency is well-written. Popularity is an entirely unreliable quality metric. "Well-tested" also means nothing, a lot of people write completely useless unit tests but still fail on integration. How much time are you going to spend researching and vetting the code and the development "team" for that "seemingly trivial" dependency? How about writing a few lines of code and building a little bit of understanding instead? You can still use other people's code as a reference, even copy parts of it.

> That dependency will often know the "unknown unknowns" to you since their "whole purpose" is solving that one issue.

Sure, a few lines of code may have unknown unknowns. You know what else has? Other developers. Unbeknownst to you, "the team" could be the left-pad guy, who turns out to be "political". "The team" could be the guy that just hands over an unmaintained repository to a cryto-thief from China. That one took several weeks to get noticed by the community.

You start with one little dependency for one use-case, you end up with hundreds if not thousands of dependencies. You realistically have no capacity to deal with this in a diligent manner.

One could argue that by using "modern Javascript" with its pathological reliance on micro-dependencies, one has already given up control to the hive of random developers anyway, so one more dependency wouldn't hurt. I probably would agree with that. That doesn't mean every Javascript program would be better off this way.

So now it costs me to run it (excluding time considerations of course) whilst before it paid for itself.

Also with sites like Stack Exchange I tend to use them for what I blogged before (computer fixes mainly), so most of my new content nowadays is UGC on other people's sites too. Personal stuff goes on Facebook, on the whole.

AdBlock should be about making the internet tolerable again instead of the cesspit it's slowly becoming, but it's exasterbating the problem.

Troy made a step in the right direction.

How sweet would that be? Friend gets a car, I make a copy of it at zero cost!

I guess the standard answer to that would be "but you're depriving the manufacturer of money to cover the costs of providing the car in the first place"

Which is reasonable, but I'd have to question their business model if their manufacturing costs are so high and yet I can copy it for free ...

I'm not saying absolute trust, I'm saying I trust them to write a better polyfill for extensions than I will. An argument from authority is okay when the alternative is an "argument from ignorance". I know I don't know the details, and I'm trusting someone who literally writes the runtime to know it better than me.

>Perhaps, but unless the code you are writing is "safety-critical", those "low chances" are outweighed by the fact that a malicious actor can do far more damage than some bug you introduced. >Also, you have to multiply those low chances with the large amount of micro-dependencies that you might bring in through this attitude.

I'm genuinely curious about this, because from my point of view the number of times that I've encountered a malicious actor is extremely small and is often dealt with within days if not hours. The number of times that i've encountered my own vulnerable code is much more common. And with non-malicious bugs/vulnerabilities the number is similar. It could be just because I find my own bugs easier, but I really think there is something to relying and trusting that the community is going to be able to do something better, faster, and more correctly than I will be able to. Add on the npm audit system which is constantly scanning and notifying about known vulnerable dependencies means I'll be able to find and solve bugs and vulnerabilities much faster than if I had written even most of it myself.

I'd love to see some actual studies done that aren't just relying on anecdotes to see how things really shake out, but I'm not sure how that would even work as there are so many other confounding factors here that make it really hard to make a hard rule about these things (there is a lot of garbage code on the internet and across most package managers, any study would need to separate the "nobody should ever use this" from the "looks good at first glance" code, and at that point you're just making an automated code reviewer...)

>This is a slippery slope argument. I think there's a distinction to be drawn here.

I completely agree, but often drawing those distinctions is arbitrary. You may draw it at the runtime, I tend not to because a runtime (or the tools that make the runtime, etc...) often have much more ability to cause problems than any runtime library does. Counting "number of dependencies" is extremely hard, because like I said cpython does have quite a lot of dependencies, it just depends on where you draw the line. cpython's compilation depends on quite a lot of smaller tools, and the compilers they support and use depend on even more. As you get further down the stack things slow down and are often vetted much more, but that itself doesn't mean much as the "payoff" for a malicious actor to get into it is often equally greater.

And even if you do draw the line at the runtime or compiler, does that mean that the JS dependencies in my package.json that are dedicated to compilation and building don't count toward your numbers? And if you don't count the transitive dependencies for something like cpython, then it seems disingenuous to include them in your statements about how a node package pulls in thousands of dependencies. And if you draw the line at some dependencies being "okay" and others not based on number of authors, dependencies, the amount of vetting, and more, well you're doing exactly what I was advocating for above!

>I put in the "Often" just to make it sound less dogmatic.

That is fair, and I did remove it from the quote. But I started this whole thing because you didn't describe the reasoning behind why you felt that way, and without the why it is literally just dogmatism.

And to be honest I still don't feel you've given a great answer for it besides the idea that as the number of some dependencies goes up the risk of a malicious actor goes up. Which I don't necessarily disagree with! I guess I just draw the line at a different spot. For me the risk of a malicious actor is miniscule compared to the risk of not completing the project from having to write so much code to avoid dependencies, writing bugs in domains that I don't understand, or copying code into my codebase that I don't fully understand breaking the dependency link that I can use to do automated scanning of. Not in every project, but in most.

Simple solution for you then: Don't visit sites with advertising. By repeatedly visiting sites with advertising, you're basically saying, "I want all this content but I'm not willing to support them financially."

Microsoft also keeps a copy of your full-disk encryption key. <https://theintercept.com/2015/12/28/recently-bought-a-window...

What's the point? They do it all the time when things start going bad. It'll turn to garbage as soon as they have enough of mindshare. Why be among the ones who run back and forth?

It's still awful.

It's not a great selling point. Not everyone thinks it's productive to switch operating systems once in a while.

very funny

You can remove them easily enough from a Microsoft account.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/