Since the article mentions AI: I think good taste is to avoid LLM tools altogether. They hallucinate, seem to have provably no intelligence, and apparently frequently plagiarize. Then the junior coder in question wouldn’t need to wonder much about the LLM output quality either. There are enough reasons beyond the questionable quality to not use these tools.

Perhaps it’s just me, but to me this article feels like belittling the problem by not differentiating between “hated” products and “harmful” products.

If a company makes you work on something that is hated, it’s fair and good to have sympathy. If a company makes you work on something that is harmful or unethical, like many perceive Co-Pilot to be, then an article about getting user hate that doesn’t talk at all about ethics feels a little tonedeaf.

I don’t know, perhaps that’s just me. I certainly don’t envy the writer for being employed to work on it.

Some highlights from this talk: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/issues/413#issuecomment-4105667974 Quote: “Obvious, this is a copyright infringement.”

Kate is a great minimal VS Code alternative. Sure, it’s less features, but it has the basics.

Relevant article: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/you-the-problem-tpm2-solves.en.html

And if anybody thought TPM provides security: https://www.elevenforum.com/t/tpm-2-0-is-a-must-they-said-it-will-improve-windows-security-they-said.13222/ https://gist.github.com/osy/45e612345376a65c56d0678834535166 https://www.sophos.com/en-us/blog/serious-security-tpm-2-0-vulns-is-your-super-secure-data-at-risk https://www.covertswarm.com/post/how-secure-are-tpm-chips

Reader, you know what’s likely most secure? FOSS code, peer-reviewed and regularly patched.

I don’t get why one would trust security theater, aka TPM and secureboot.

I don’t think we’ve been reading the same link. In any case, I don’t think this conversation is going in a useful direction, so I’ll part ways here.

Point taken and I appreciate the correction, but it still seems to include e.g. all URLs which could leak all your search queries and other rather invasive conclusions. If anything, this makes me feel like it confirms Mozilla does sell data it shouldn’t.

deleted by creator

It seems like the official original source for this video is Youtube.

The linked reports don’t seem too useful since 1. the first one seems some automated scan not a code review, and 2. the second one is “Firefox Accounts” and not a browser code review. My apologies if I"m missing something.

I personally think you shouldn’t run software that accesses such intricate personal information if you don’t trust it, if it can be updated to change to grab all that data. Especially since Mozilla seems to potentially give itself a license to all your data, apparently. Update: This seems to only apply to “Mozilla Accounts”, my apologies for the error: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/services/

“Technical data”, “Interaction Data”, very specific, uh-uh. (I’m being sarcastic.) The latter especially sounds like it can be literally a keylogger. Update: it isn’t, see response, but it e.g. seems to include all sites and sub pages visited which already seems fairly bad.

I would love for Mozilla to fix this, which is why I try to be pragmatic and concrete. But so far, they don’t seem willing to do so.

My personal hope is if Firefox ever dies that the LibreWolf team will just use Chromium as a base instead. I’ll go wherever the LibreWolf team does.

Frustration post

Do you audit every release of any open-source program you use before you run it?

Open-source alone isn’t enough if the creators are known to do weird things.

I meant specifying the corner case of what exact type of data is shared, not an exhaustive list of companies it’s shared with that would inevitably go out of date.

That could be true, I honestly don’t know. The crypto stuff in Brave definitely seems weird.

I think to be fully safe, you would have to get prompted for any type of USB device including a mouse and keyboard. At least I think that’s the idea of USBGuard.

I use Librewolf myself, but I’m concerned about upstream Firefox dying so this whole situation frustrates me. The only reason I mention Brave is because Brave is also a company (unlike Librewolf) and has a Terms of use to compare Mozilla to (unlike Librewolf).

Since there are alternatives, I don’t find that argument too compelling. I’m hoping people will continue to speak up about this though. Ideally I would want Mozilla to do better with their policy, assuming they actually act nice and just aren’t very good at making their policy sound like it.

That’s fair, but that requires the trust that they won’t add any collection without telling people. And it seems like they kind of want a license for all data I enter into the browser, which again Brave doesn’t seem to do. It’s like Mozilla is going out of their way to look shady and to harm trust. It’s sad. I’ve been using Firefox for a looong time until I left it behind.