dessant

It's not just browser extensions, but any popular software project that has no stable funding source. This extension has been maintained for years, and it requires a lot of effort to keep updated because it interacts with websites.

These developers are then offered funds for perhaps a new home, and they can hardly be faulted for taking the deal. This issue can only be solved by finding better ways to fund the development of popular software projects that serve the public good.

https://armin.dev/blog/2019/08/supporting-browser-extension-...

This is your cue to remove the extension from your browser immediately. I've been developing extensions for years, and I've never seen an extension acquisition done by a company like Avast not transform the extension into a data harvesting operation.

Judging by the size of the user base the author was paid at least 100k USD, all for an open source project that is free to fork. Avast has acquired you, the user, and the original maintainer continuing to work on the project is just a ruse, the new owners prefer to do it this way to reduce user loss until the business end of a future extension update is pushed out to your devices.

> Google tooling knowledge doesn't transfer very well to outside projects.

A good number of their open source projects fall apart in real-world use. If you visit their repositories you'll often get the sense that beyond working on interesting problems, their engineers have no desire to properly maintain these projects for the next few years. The gamble of relying on a Google product unfortunately also applies to their open source projects.

Some companies do support open source projects, though that has no relevance here. We're talking about large companies that generate a profit on the back of open source projects, and refuse to support those projects.

> I think it is fair to talk about this and how it can maybe be done better.

I agree, though it's evident that the discussion is stained by the tone of this article.

They aren't approaching this topic with some respect and understanding, while being fully aware that these license changes are aimed at large companies which keep taking, but do not support the open source community.

What the article refers to as bait and switch is what open source maintainers call disillusionment, and the realization that nobody is there to prop them up and feed them while they work for the public good.

You should not shame people who try to build something sustainable, but instead try to improve the system that makes altruistic work difficult.

The base iPhone 14 is an upper mid-range phone, not high-end.

Google will be able to use a variety of ad delivery methods that are not yet blockable with the filtering API they will now also fully control in Chrome.

Ancillary data collection is against Firefox Add-ons policies. They should be reported if the extension does indeed collect such data.

https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-on-p...

> Prohibited Data Collection

> Collecting, or facilitating the collection of ancillary information (e.g. any data not required for the add-on’s functionality as stated in the description) is prohibited.

There is a difference between initial product design (also needs to follow regulations, but not the main topic of discussion), and failure to act on repeated bug reports spanning years that clearly describe software bugs which disrupt emergency calls on Android phones. There is not much to defend in their conduct.

I think it's important to hold people responsible for negligence that causes harm to others, even in the tech industry.

The repeated negligence around the handling of Android bugs related to emergency calls should result in criminal prosecution. It's unlikely that actual people weren't hurt because of these bugs. They have known about these issues for years, and they continue to give them the importance of an unresponsive button in Gmail settings.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29492884

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/rfld6m/pixel_p...

My favourite tool for one-off lossless image optimization is FileOptimizer, each asset is processed with several size optimization libraries.

https://nikkhokkho.sourceforge.io/static.php?page=FileOptimi...

Factory workers usually aren't snagged by headhunters, and many jobs around the world require online application.

Elderly and marginalized people do suffer because of restricted access to online services. People who cannot access the web and its services are at an obvious disadvantage in life, and that sometimes can have severe consequences.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320

In some cases Google can only be avoided at a potentially life altering personal cost. Consider how many government services use reCAPTCHA, and what it means to have no access or delayed access to these services.

It isn't intentional, the official implementations of M3 include a new checkbox.

With Android 12 they introduced Material Design 3, the latest iteration of the design system used by Android and other Google products. Their designers haven't even bothered to publish a proper and usable spec this time, but Google marketed it as production ready in blog posts, Google I/O talks and press releases.

The published Material Design 3 spec is missing several basic components, it doesn't even have a checkbox. Google is inviting developers to migrate to the latest version of the design system, while their own teams at Angular and Flutter are now mixing M2 and M3 components and design concepts, and hitting roadblocks because of incompatible elevation and typography changes in certain components.

https://m3.material.io

I wonder when will Google finally stop harassing users to enable Google Play Protect when they install or update an app with F-Droid.

I'd rather not help them in any way, given the company behind it. The best-case scenario is that they'll use the chatbot to decline your request for help after your Facebook account was suspended by a different potato algorithm.

But the more likely goal could be to sell access to advertisers, when it matures into a decent mass manipulation service. Beware of the Persil mascot that approaches you in a dark VR alley and asks you about your day.

Once a platform is past a certain size, they should no longer be allowed to permanently ban a person without due process.

See for example the people whose lives have been affected because they were banned from Facebook for absolutely no reason, and they could no longer access Facebook Marketplace. I think it's very dangerous to create a new type of second-class citizen that can no longer access certain online services, because naive algorithms were allowed to go rampant, without any checks and balances.

I wait for the day that this conduct becomes illegal, because it can destroy people's lives. It is actually surprising that consumer protection laws do not yet address the issue of due process.

I still remember how their jerk founder "saved" a village in Zimbabwe from a "problem elephant", and they have basically advertised their business using boobs for years. And that's besides all the scummy actions and questionable security practices of GoDaddy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Parsons#Controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...

The issue wasn't an occasional mistake done in good faith. The commenter has decided to explicitly dismiss contribution guidelines, and for that the healthy response is to call out their lack of respect for the time of open source maintainers. The focus wasn't on emotional burden either, it can simply take a lot of time to sort out issues and pull requests that do not follow contribution guidelines when you maintain a popular project. It isn't a bit of house cleaning, but hours wasted every week, depending on the project.

GitHub is indeed a platform that can be used for social coding, and it is also a service that encourages the use of contribution guidelines. If the maintainer asks you to open an issue to discuss your contribution before submitting a pull request, you are expected to follow their wishes.

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/setting-up-your-proje...

It's one thing to stumble upon a repository that does not have contribution guidelines and submit a pull request, that is obviously fine. But you're advocating against respecting the wishes of strangers, and disregard their request to coordinate with them before submitting your work.

You have the option to walk away and not contribute if you don't like the rules for interaction that have been set by the people that manage the project. Or just follow the rules. Those are your only two sane options, unless you become a maintainer yourself at that project, and modify the contribution guidelines.

To be very clear, you have to understand what NO means in this context, and realize that "I don't like bureaucracy" is not a valid reason to push forward on your own terms.

> When they make a project public they’re explicitly condoning the fact they may get a PR

I don't think that's true. It appears you just assume that because pull requests cannot be disabled on GitHub.

Sending unsolicited pull requests to people that clearly told you to open an issue first is disrespectful. You don't have to engage with a project or a community, but if you decide to participate by submitting a pull request, you should follow their contribution guidelines.

Your quick PR becomes the maintainer's burden, and rejecting a pull request can also come with a substantial time cost. It's best to conform to the contribution process described by the maintainer to avoid wasting their time as much as possible.

It can auto decline the canvas request and return fake image data from the API by default when privacy.resistFingerprinting is enabled. privacy.resistFingerprinting.autoDeclineNoUserInputCanvasPrompts must be set to false to always show the popup, and even then they shouldn't serve fake data when the user declines the request, but throw an error for the API call.

> What more do you want?

Inform users when they silently pass garbage through web APIs such as HTMLCanvasElement.toDataURL(), when it happens. And the UX of that should also be very carefully considered.

Otherwise you might end up with some critical document scans on a government website being uploaded as striped nonsense images without your knowledge, and the "may degrade your Web experience" that you glanced over a year before when you enabled the option may not cut it when your Visa application is delayed or rejected.