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Comment by rgrieselhuber | Hacker News Reader

After years of being a Chrome user, I've been trying to work myself off of Google's infrastructure as much as possible. Firefox is great, but I was very disappointed to learn that they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news."

Edit:

makeee below posted a good source describing what Mozilla is currently doing, which appears to be limited to "researching" the problem of fake news.

I would love to support Firefox so I hope they come up with something more innovative than blocking (which they do not appear to be doing now - I stand corrected) or labeling (which has its own problems).

As I mentioned below, browsers, search engines, or social networks should not be, IMO, attempting to block or de-rank websites based on political activism, regardless of the source.

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I'm aware of a research project to see if reliable identification of "fake news" websites is possible, but there's no "blocking" coming to Firefox. That would violate point 5 of the Mozilla Manifesto.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

That would violate point 5 of the Mozilla Manifesto.

They can interpret that however they want. For example, you can always "shape the Internet and [your] own experiences on it", including removing any blocking, adding things they remove, etc... just get the source code for Firefox and make all the changes you want.

It's all a bunch of vague marketing doublespeak anyway, with around as much power over what Mozilla does as the US constitution has on the US government.

Oh, that's great news. Blocking fake news sources would get me to try to switch some relatives back over to Firefox.

I simply don't want the technology I use to be the arbiter of information. Teaching people to discern quality sources for themselves is far better IMO.

That seems to be exactly what Mozilla is doing no? Research and investing in tools that help people learn to navigate information online and judge for them self. Haven’t found anything that suggests they plan on blocking websites.

Thanks, the link you posted clarifies that what they are doing at this point is "researching" ways to combat fake news. In practice, the solutions I could imagine them coming up with would be either outright blocking / de-ranking, or preemptively labeling certain sites / articles as fake news. I hope to be wrong on both of those counts.

Where does it say that Mozilla is going to do this?

As it stands you're spreading FUD.

Source? Can’t find anything online that indicates they are partnering with political activists to block websites.

I assume OP is talking about this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42065644

Edit: Misread, thought OP was talking about Google not Mozilla.

their use of "but" would suggest OP is definitely talking about Mozilla

Ah yes, apologies, I have edited my post to clarify my mistake.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information...

Thanks, although link doesn’t support anything in parent commenter’s claim.

definite [citation needed] on that one

The confusion seems to be an AFP story conflating two separate programs. The AFP story mentions Mozilla at the same time as an organization called Full Fact, that has a product that does automated live fact checking. It was initially designed for use during televised political debates, where it could show "correct" and "incorrect" warning popups on screen in real time according to what was said:

https://phys.org/news/2017-08-mozilla-fact-checker-fake-news...

(Apologies for the awful link source, I can't find a primary AFP link. Several other sites that have published the same identical story.)

Full Fact does appear to be a real organization, they claim to already work with the BBC, Guardian & other media partners, as well as Google. Some of the controversy seems to be over their grant funding from Omidyar Network and an organization founded by George Soros. (Whether that's a reason for concern, I have no idea.)

https://fullfact.org/blog/2017/jun/automated-fact-checking-f...

https://fullfact.org/blog/2017/jun/awarded-500000-omidyar-ne...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/fake-news...

I don't think Mozilla has ever said we're blocking fake news in Firefox.

Mozilla is doing research into this, and may eventually release some tooling for this (an addon or something). But we don't even help block ads in the browser, I doubt this will be built in.

As I mentioned below, browsers, search engines, or social networks should not be, IMO, attempting to block or de-rank websites based on political activism, regardless of the source.

Indeed, whatever happened to "don't take sides". Couldn't an organisation stay completely neutral and only focus its efforts on the technology of accessing websites?

Same here, but I guess getting out of gmail and calendar will be tricky.

Plenty of great email, contacts and calendar services out there, you just need to pay for them. I went with FastMail and it’s been absolutely painless.

Any recommendations for a Google Drive replacement?

I have been using Microsoft OneDrive without issue for the past couple of months. The new Files On Demand feature works well. Of course this is only really helpful to Windows users which is a shame.

It isn't for everyone, but I host my own NextCloud instance on a personal server. Works fine after a bit of tweaking, but it can be a pain to set up.

I wonder what it would cost to run a fallback instance on Google or Amazon cloud, like if my ISP/cable modem craps out for whatever reason.

Dropbox/boxcryptor + MS Office. It’s of course necessary to use google drive for collaborative editing from time to time because it is so ubiquitous, but excel is still miles ahead of google sheets in terms of usability. Pages and Numbers are also pretty good for light use on the Mac and have free web versions for collaboration. The Dropbox desktop client is so much better than Drive in terms of CPU usage and straightforward sharing.

I use [https://syncthing.net/](Syncthing) because it's serverless, works on various Linuxes and Android, pretty easy to set up, and I trust it.

I trust it because I can get it from 3rd-party repos — Debian, Fedora, F-Droid — and I trust that they wouldn't all allow malicious software that claims all communication is encrypted.

Syncthing's forum uses Discourse. The whole thing just smells of competence.

Of course, it may not suit you.

I fear the actual migration, not the alternatives

Fastmail does the email migration in the cloud. It’s relatively quick and painless, and you can trial things for a period by setting up your gmail account as an alias (send from the fastmail web interface through gmail’s smtp servers etc) so you can always switch back if you don’t like it. When satisfied, set up an auto-responder and forwarding to let people know to stop emailing your @gmail account.

Fastmail has a decent calendar, but you may prefer to use iCloud or something else for that. Calendar clients on desktops and phones tend to be pretty good at supporting multiple providers so that is a lot easier to migrate.

I suggest email migration in 3 steps:

1. Set up an email client and get into the habit of checking your mail from it instead of the web interface (at least, on your normal devices). 2. Create and start using your new email account, which you can add as a second email address in your client of choice, alongside your gmail. Share the new address with friends and family; people who you want to recieve mail from. 3. Gradually switch over logins and the rare newsletter you care about to the new address.

Eventually, you'll find that you no longer get any mail you care about on gmail. That's when you download an archive (which you think you will look at but actually never will) and delete your account. As a side benefit, you'll likely get to cut down the amount of junk mail you get :)

I've never used Google calendar, but I presume there's a way to export as ical? That should make it easy to migrate to any provider you like.

Problem with the calendar is, that it is linked with those of the people I care about

The only difficulty with other services and contact syncing is 1) getting them to sync across both Android and iPhone bi-directionally and 2) syncing custom fields.

1 can largely be solved with effort (just about) but last I checked Fastmail doesnt use the same vcard formats as Google/Apple and doesnt support custom fields in contacts. That might have changed recently and I'd be very interested to look again if it has.

I even went as far as a fairly engaged back and forth with Fastmail support (reference to which is in my comment history somewhere here) to work out how they could get bi-directional syncing of custom fields to both platforms working. But they had no plans to implement it.

I appreciate mine is perhaps a niche use case but I've got a lot of contacts with multiple addresses and numbers in multiple countries and short of saving maybe 5 or 6 replica contact entries per individual (which is a mess over) the workable solution was to stay within a walled garden.

That's great new unless your party is the one thats generating most of the fake news, A.K.A GOP/Trump.

I personally don't think partisan propaganda is the big problem. The problem is the content farms that will write completely fabricated news articles designed to outrage/reinforce certain political views for eyeballs. The former is a problem to but it would be more difficult to pass off as factual in an environment without the latter. Also, there is plenty of the latter targeting left wing voters. I see it all the time on some of my less discerning friends' facebook feeds.

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