Comment by bigbugbag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigbugbag | Hacker News Reader

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Apple PR on privacy is not in line with the icloud based fappening[1] and this one got highly publicized because it involved hundreds of naked celebrities.

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...

The fappening was due to weak password security, and a set of criminals smart enough to sit on the exploit in order to achieve a goal. It wasn't due to some huge error or negligence on Apple's part.

> 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.

AFAIK the fappening happened through a security flaw in apple icloud API that allowed for infinite password retries without rate limiting and failure to notice and notify repeated failed attempts.

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.

[1]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=202766

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