Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by Chirael on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @01:42PM (#24123240)

I loved Firefox Send and really hope they can find a way to address the malware problem [1]. It was the only large file sharing service I fully trusted both because of the encrypted zero-knowledge aspect of the system and the organization behind it; I used it several times a month personally and told others about it. To me it was a "win" under the Mozilla/FF brand.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send-...

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by AsyncAwait on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @02:47PM (#24124215)

I like https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole as an alternative.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by leeoniya on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @03:34PM (#24124913)

also https://github.com/schollz/croc

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by 9935c101ab17a66 on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @05:19PM (#24126107)

Thanks for sharing, looks really cool.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by AsyncAwait on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @03:51PM (#24125148)

Neat. Honestly a single binary is a major selling point for me. :-)

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by psanford on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @04:17PM (#24125463)

This is a single binary that is compatible with the python magic wormhole: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by bscphil on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @06:08PM (#24126599)

I think they have rather different use cases. FFsend is asynchronous because I don't have to be online for my friend to download the file. But it's also less trustworthy than a system based on PAKE. And if you're sending a file to a Windows or Mac user with average technical ability, Wormhole is basically not an option at present.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by theobeers on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @02:22PM (#24123816)

Wow, that’s a bummer. I used Send semi-regularly over the past year, and recommended it to colleagues. By coincidence, I haven’t needed it since early summer.

How are they supposed to address the malware problem without making significant changes to the system? “Just add abuse reporting” sounds expensive, in terms of moderation. And there’s still the reputational risk of having God-knows-what encrypted content served through a subdomain of firefox.com. While I liked being able to share trusted URLs, something tells me that ain’t coming back.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by GordonS on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @02:18PM (#24123751)

I tried to use it recently and found it had been taken down. I was puzzled as to why they would do that, but didn't dig into it - now I know, thanks!

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by 9935c101ab17a66 on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @05:19PM (#24126102)

Yah, I really liked it. Have you found any other similar services that have a web ui (other commenters have shared similar CLI-based tools)? I loved using it to share stuff with my less technically-savvy friends and family.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by andredz on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @02:08PM (#24123611)

I too used Firefox Send quite a bit and told others about it.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by BMorearty on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @01:55PM (#24123454)

I love Send too! Didn’t know they took it down.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by laughinghan on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @03:12AM (#24129368)

Since this is so useful, and has operational costs because they have to run a server, could they solve two problems in one go by just charging money for it? Like $10/year or something tiny. Bet the malware issue would go way down.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by Chirael on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @11:36AM (#24133106)

Yeah, I agree. I offered on Twitter to pay a "small amount yearly" but my tweet was just a single random data point on Twitter. Hopefully some folks reading this who work at Mozilla or know someone who does, will pass on that a non-trivial people spoke up to say they got real value out of Send.

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