It already exists at least as an “experiment” but I guess now it’s nearly ready for full production use. Perhaps the new terms of use text is motivated by not enough people accepting the old merino opt-in prompt as well as wanting to get more third-parties involved in the system. More details here: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/firefox-suggest-telemetry.html

When Merino integration is enabled on the client and the user has opted in to Firefox Suggest data collection, Firefox sends everything the user types in the address bar to the Merino server.

They want to intercept your searches and url entries to run them through the privacy preserving data extracting machine in order to collect data that will be sold to advertisers and used to pollute your search results and url suggestions with paid-for links. They were trying to be vague about it so that people would not understand this, and instead all they accomplished was to make people think they want to record everything you type into every web form. That’s my guess, anyway. Maybe they really do want everything.

Indeed, fingerprinting. Preventing it is one thing Mozilla could be working on. Going all-out on it really, devoting significant engineering resources to making their browser fingerprinting resistance bulletproof. Reworking every js api with defence against adversarial use of it in mind. If they’re really that desperate for cash they could sell it as a premium feature for a modest subscription fee, although obviously it’d be available free of charge for those willing to get their Firefox builds from someone other than Mozilla.

Don’t panic, though! Much like the competition does, while we sell your data we’ll tell you all about how we respect your privacy so much more than the competition does. It’s for the best. Driving away all its users is the only way to make Firefox commercially viable. That’s just how capitalism works.

We will collect data about you and sell it, but only after we’ve run it through a privacy preserving machine that turns it into privacy jam so you can’t tell how much of yours is in the jar.

Looking back over my long and occasionally successful life, I must admit that I do have a few regrets here and there. One is that for a couple of years, I was a Skype user. Oh well, at least I stayed away from Teams.

I’m glad we have the word “enshittification” because otherwise it’d be difficult to explain what they’ve done to Twitch.

AI compute credits will be tied to printer ink, so if you run out of either one you need to buy more of both.

the data will no longer be saved locally

You no longer need to know your location history, only Microsoft and its very close friends will have that data?

I remember it well. I think the biggest difference between OS/2 then and Linux today is that OS/2 wasn’t all that much better than Windows in any easily understood way for the average non-technical user.

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So many reports of “jailbreaking,” so few of anything significant happening as a result.

Apparently you can get them to tell “a derogatory joke about a racial group.” Neither those nor any of the other outputs mentioned are in short supply without any AI assistance being necessary to find them.

These things are at their most dangerous when they’re misused for “good” purposes where they aren’t capable of doing well and can introduce subtle biases and mistakes, not when some idiot spends a lot of time and effort to make them generate overtly racist shit.

It just seems like a high price for what you get, considering that running a searx instance costs nothing. There being no way to pay for it anonymously also makes me less willing to pay that much.

For a moment there I thought it might’ve become affordable. Nope, still $10/month.

a QR code that updates at regular intervals, encoding an ever-changing signature

That’s brilliant. Any sci-fi authors in the crowd? The private key would be used to hash and sign a record of body movements including all one’s crazy hand gestures and every word spoken. Location could optionally be encoded as well. Some kind of algorithm would be devised so that some reasonable loss in fidelity of any video recording would still result in a valid signature. It wouldn’t be technically all that useful to display the signature as a QR code shown on a badge, but it’d be a fashionable thing to do and anyone who didn’t would be seen as slightly suspicious.

Key infrastructure would be tricky, but anonymous and pseudonymous keypairs could certainly be allowed for if we go with the assumption that instant biometric identification of everyone isn’t quite feasible for whatever reason. Maybe it’s just banned, punishable by exile to the orbital asteroid mining colonies.

All we need is for everyone (except the underclass) to get neural implants that record their every movement.

Albert Einstein saying “science does not answer ‘why’ questions” isn’t realistic at all.

So many mission statements will be lost when they accidentally delete everything containing the word “transparent.”

I’d rather have a tool to detect intelligence in general, weeding out the stupidity regardless of who it comes from.

I also don’t want to be running an antique OS… Just a debloated one.

This is not a Windows forum, so I feel justified in pointing out that in that case you should probably avoid Microsoft products entirely.

The “defeat big tech for justice and freedom” story is somewhat undermined by being published on substack.