BaSeD

Still good to have, but too bad they couldn’t just piggy back off of Brave’s soft fork or something and keep the functionality.

Yes, the SEC is important and it answers to the court. If an unelected SEC admin makes a bad call they can get shot down. Happens all the time. But you want an example? Oh boy, I gotta story for you.

The EPA has the power to regulate navigable waterways (rivers, lakes, etc.) given by Congress under the clean waters act. So they also said they could regulate swamps and estuaries. Fair enough, they’re connected so something that effects those will effect the navigable waterways. Then they said they can regulate ditches and small disconnected streams. I mean all that stuff is sorta connected but it’s really stretching it and not what congress intended with that law.

Then they said that if birds land in a puddle in your backyard it’s a navigable waterway. Of course if a bird lands in a puddle then lands in a river those two things are the same and the EPA can regulate your backyard because it’s now a navigable waterway. Doesn’t matter that you’re in the Arizona desert.

[The Wikipedia page if I sound like I’m quoting the onion] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migratory_bird_rule)

The court gave them a pretty big removed slap, and we’re probably going to lose Chevron doctrine over it. Regulatory bodies always seek to expand their power. With no oversight things get bad fast.

Besides, how do you know someone at Google/Facebook/Microsoft etc won’t set “hey regulator, mind just bankrupting our competition or running them out of the UK?” All they need to do is convince one unelected official, no oversight needed.

Unfettered regulatory agency power that makes a random admin judge jury and executioner is a bad decision. I know the hate boner for big tech is strong here, but give it some time. I’m sure within the next 5/10 years the Lemmy crowd will be freaking out when some admin does something very bad and there’s no recourse.

It’s one thing to move fast and sell data to sketchy buyers. It’s another thing to give an unelected agency admin the power to interpret, enforce, and adjudicate laws with no oversights. That sort of thing never ends well.

Even if you absolutely hate big tech, what happens if some agency admin who has no idea what the fediverse is sees something they don’t like and say decides to hit the Mastodon nonprofit for 10% of their income per “violation”. No recourse, it doesn’t matter if it’s on some random xyz Nazi instance unaffiliated with Mastodon development. Agency man said it’s a violation so pay up.

I heard a quote once. Something along the lines of I cut down every law to get to the devil, but once I got there he turned and said now that you’ve cut down each law what will protect you?

Not even any checks on their power anymore, just agency thinks you’re bad so pay up. I’m all for getting some better regulation on big tech, but I have a gut feeling all this’ll be is the equivalent of persecutors sending in a stream of fees unchecked while nothing changes for the everyday person.

Nope, they cut all the Mozilla stuff out

As much as I hate to say it, Firefox is a privacy mess.

Pocket and Fakespot have very bad privacy policies. The Windows version has a unique Mozilla tracker if you download the installer from the website, and the android version has Google Analytics built in. The existing and new telemetry is a but heavy, but it’s anonymised so it’s really the lesser of the various evils.

My recommendation is LibreWolf & Fennec as alternatives.

IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.

They did that for years, and while likely technically a violation copyright the copyright holders never came after them. Then during the pandemic they stopped the artificial limit and just gave unlimited free copies of scanned books to anybody. Publishers, expectedly, had a meltdown and are now out for blood.

The next? My understanding was that similar rules have been in place since Bush Jr, and this was just a reauthorization with minor tweaks.