If I ignore your weird racist overtones. Why would you trust Google/Apple/Firefox more?
Edit: "your weird racist overtones" crosses into personal attack, since the commenter was talking about a government. Please don't do that in HN threads.
I am not racist, I am not placing this blame on a Chinese person's race, persona, or anything. This isn't about the governed Chinese people in the first place.
No, neither the US's Great Internet Surveillance, and long track record of working with, arming, helping, and installing in power dictators and friendly lackeys all around the world, from Latin America to Europe.
As for the shitty foreign policy - if I had to buy only stuff produced in "ethical" countries, I'd be living naked and eating only dried fish.
No, but as a citizen of a third country, you worry about countries with a history of messing with third countries (especially yours), not about countries that mess with their own citizenry.
Someone in Chile for example, would probably worry more about their data falling in the hands of Google, than about falling in the hands of China (since the latter never was in bed with Pinochet, even if it censors the internet from its own citizens).
There's a thing called "chilling effects". People stop talking about "risky" subjects because they know they can get prosecuted arbitrarily for it.
The gameplan is simple:
* Someone says something the government doesn't like.
* A plan is devised to get this person in jail and/or to discredit them and/or to ruin their careers.
* In the case of jail, evidence for a crime is collected (from SIGINT) extralegally, and is used to innocuously find, or let someone else find, admissible evidence for the crime. This is called parallel construction and it is very real.
* Maybe they're only sued with the purpose of discrediting them via the press, while making them unable to keep their jobs. Maybe they're actually put in a cage.
It's not out in the open, but it has similar effects to totalitarianism, especially on the part of the population that is more observant and able to affect policy change.
It's not the same, but lets not pretend the US is a lighting beacon of freedom and democracy. Maybe compared to China, but definitely not when compared to e.g. the Netherlands. (I'm biased though.)
It's a very different thing, simply because it cannot be deployed on a large scale. It's equivalent to old-school spycraft of honey-trapping and blackmailing. You can apply this process to a few individuals, but not to everyone without massive effort - the framing and follow-up takes too much manpower - and without risking reputation damage from repeated abuses.
On the other hand, detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law, triggering police intervention and letting the system work as it should, is trivial in the extreme.
Sorry, I'm not a fan of the US system but China is still a step below IMHO.
Yes, but on the other hand, speaking of "detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law", China has 1/2 or 1/3 the prison population per citizens that the US has (which is the world leader in this regard, with 25% of the worlds prison population for just 4-5% of its general population).
The topic at hand is "why trust your data to X".
If everybody trusts their data to Y, which has the same or even worse track record than X, then "how's Y worse than X which you already trust with your data" is a very relevant question to ask. It can make people consider both X and Y in perspective, and even consider moving their data to a safer Z alternative.
>whataboutism
I don't particularly care for knee-jerk accusations of thought crimes like "whataboutism".
"What about" is a very useful question. Only idiots speak of something without placing it on a larger context, and without considering the alternatives.
Invocation of whataboutism basically makes it a thought crime to put things in perspective. It's a tool used to constrain discussion, whereas "what about x" expands the scope of the discussion.
Obviously in the US there's more checks and balances, to make a company's statement more believable. Or that's what we believe anyway...
Without significant prove that this is not the case this handwaving way of comparing the US democratic state to China is just wrong. From Consumer protection to free and fair elections the US system is almost nothing alike the chinese system. Of course the US has massive issues (as do other Western democratic nations) but this handwavy "well they just don't tell you' stuff without actual good data behind is just destroys any credibility and is a huge problem for our democracies. Please stop doing it unless you provide exhaustive evidence.
Or maybe oooh "We have massive issues, but China is worse.".
Also I don't think Obama ever did any curtailing of the NSA's program. Hello to the NSA machine reading this!
Because "it's obvious in the case of China"?
I don't trust them.
2) Apple
Previous stands on privacy/security, knowledge of where they make actually make money and widely spread shareholder base/publicly identifiable managers.
3) Firefox(Moz://a)
It's a bit for profit and everything of theirs is open source, and therefore auditable.
Mozilla was historically almost entirely funded by google for fueling their personal data collection and profiling (this only changed when firefox started to become irrelevant and mozilla had to scramble for survival and their first move was to keep the same offense but with a different actor), they refuse to block tracking and ads not to infuriate their income source (gave rise to a free software version that does this and removed the mozilla proprietary "phone home" plugin), firefox includes a remote spying mechanism called "telemetry" and punish users that take step to protect their privacy from this as demonstrated during the recent dropping of alsa support debacle.
Let's not forget their origin, the name "mozilla" stands for mosaic killer and clearly states that they aim to be dominating the web browser market. The move open source was forced and due to circumstances, firefox is a failed attempt at fixing performance issues in the mozilla suite, etc.
Mozilla and Firefox also has a deserved reputation for making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. I'd rather not trust them much either.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...
> funded by Google
It's still an in profit producing open source software.
> a remote spying mechanism call telemetry
So does almost every other browser. It's easy enough to disable from memory.
> attempting to dominate the browser market
It's the reason IE isn't the market leader. There's a good reason for it to want market share.
I don't particularly trust Moz://a, I just trust Firefox a butt-ton more than Chrome or Opera.
Yes it still is open source software, but that itself does not mean that it puts user interest before its main income source interest, the point here was that mozilla has a strong stance for refusing to include tracking prevention and ad blocking while marketing itself as privacy minded and user centric software. Says one thing and does another.
What other browsers do or do not is irrelevant to the criticism and trustworthiness of mozilla, but for the record AFAIK there's no telemetry in otter or arora or rekonq or konqueror or pale moon or waterfox or iron or qupzilla or uzbl. Point is free software usually comes without spying mechanisms. Besides telemetry is only one spying thing among many others that have come and gone or are still in firefox (hello, pocket, automatic geolocation, etc.) and at times disabling them does not actually prevent the behaviour from happening. have a look at the privacy patches for firefox[1] for some examples.
You seem to have missed the point about the objective or market domination, it predates IE but the point was that the vision and priorities are wrong.
That's being said, we hold similar stances here. No trust at all for chrome and opera. A bit of non blind trust for mozilla for lack of a better alternative.
Racism is hate due to (tl;dr) skin colour and/or ethnicity.
The comment you don't agree with quoted nationality (a totally different subject).
It's pretty outrageous to lump these three together.
1) Google is an advertising company that makes its money selling user data/impressions to advertisers.
2) Apple is a hardware company that makes its money selling gadgets to consumers.
3) Firefox is free/libre software produced by Mozilla, a nonprofit foundation that champions the interests of users.
Then there's history that shows that firefox is mostly free software but not entirely see icecat, iceweasel, firefox pocket, talkback, etc.
Then again a free license is not a guarantee of no wrongdoings.
Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture: - Users asked for blocking of tracking and ads, mozilla repeatedly refused to deliver. - Users asked for keeping the UI they were accustomed to, Mozilla did not care and pushed the new Australis to fit their agenda of unifying experience over desktop and mobile - KDE users asked for something more integrated than simply dropping the gnome file selection windows, the bug has been lingering somewhere for more than a decade - Linux users asked for alsa support, a dev came forward offering to fix mozilla own shortcomings and maintain it, the answer was that they would continue their plan of abandoning alsa for pulseaudio. - Users have repeatedly ask to not make firefox more chrome like, firefox is still getting increasingly a trying hard to be chrome lookalike. - Users are asking to keep support for extensions as it is the reason they use firefox, mozilla is adamant they will go on with theirs plans of replacing support of extensions by the one used by chrome. - Users asked for the return of the removed status bar, Mozilla denied this. - Users wanted to keep DRM out of firefox, Mozilla put DRM in firefox. - Users did not want mandatory signed extensions, Mozilla gave then mandatory signed extensions.
This list could go on and on and on, firefox history is littered with such examples of not caring about the interests of users and not listening to them and giving priority to their own agenda.
That been said, google, apple and mozilla are all collecting personal data of their users and they're all us based and as such are all under the effect of the patriot act.
I admit that I do distrust google and apple more than mozilla, but history and experience taught me that I should not trust mozilla/firefox for something else than doing their own thing whatever that is.
As a result I keep away from google/apple as if it was the plague, but I still have firefox around because with the addition of a dozen extensions[1] I can disable most of the crap mozilla put in there, add what they removed, add what they refused to put in and getting closer to be something I can use. Nonetheless, Firefox is on its way out now that it is unable to provide audio and is about to drop support for extensions that are required to make it useful. I have to admit that it's not as much the dropping of alsa that motivated this but the way mozilla handled this and their attitude. It's maybe the 3rd or 4th time I quit firefox but this time I'm not coming back.
[1]: ublock origin, noscript, classic theme restorer, all-in-one sidebar, all-in-one gestures, downthemall, firebug, new add on bar, privacy settings, self-destructing cookies, tab mix plus, request policy continued, tab groups, tab groups helper, screengrab (fix version), random agent spoofer, SSLeuth, and a few more. I had some extension to make bookmarks usable in firefox but I stopped using bookmarks altogether and now use a combination of wallabag and shaarli instead.
Renaming Firefox in Debian had nothing to do with it being only "mostly" free software. If you fork the Linux kernel, modify it and then call it "Linux", Linus Torvalds has the right to ask you to change the name because he owns the trademark. Perfectly fine with the GPL.
As Debian stable doesn't ship bug fixes this reflects back on Firefox / Mozilla, because user will complain about it. See https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop... for another example.
> Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture: - Users [...]
Please prove that these are the majority of their users. Because I'm perfectly fine with removing the status bar for example or showing KDE users (which are in the minority btw) the middle finger (aka the stupid GtkFileChooser). Also for extensions: Users who still use XUL extension are in a minority (Mozilla did an analysis about this). I know many people who are even using Firefox without any extensions, most people I know only use an adblocker.
So everything this shows that Mozilla doesn't listen to ALL its users, but I guess it's impossible to satisfy everyone. The majority of Firefox users have already switched to Chrome anyway :(
Also annoying is that a huge percentage of 'power users' have disabled telemetry, which screws us over when it comes time for Mozilla to pick the feature of the week to remove.
Anecdotally, I switched to Vivaldi shortly after Mozilla started removing useful features (like tab grouping) and replacing them with Pocket and Hello. I couldn't be happier and I kind of wish I had joined the Chromium bandwagon sooner.