Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of cryptocurrency, but I'm also less than impressed with jwz's maturity. If I didn't know he founded Mozilla, I would've taken him for an angry teenage kid trying to be edgy on the internet.
Regardless, it's sad to watch Mozilla debase themselves, not only by supporting crypto at this stage of the game, but with cringeworthy meme language like "HODL." That was funny for about a week during the Gamestop fiasco; a year later it's another "how do you do, fellow kids" moment.
Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar cap. Can't blame Mozilla for openly scraping the bottom of the barrel with their marketing.
Yes I can. It makes them look cheap and corny, and weakens their credibility.
> Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar cap
Sure, for about a month, a year ago. It's old news. Anyone still "HODLing" Doge is just a speculator who missed the last wave and is desperately hoping it'll come back so they can sell out.
Point is, Mozilla is wasting their time by marketing to that crowd. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is a bad look.
Beggars can't be choosers.
If this move was done out of desperation, then they're dead in the water as an organization. More likely, some tone-deaf middle management team thought it would be a good "trendy" outreach initiative.
He still maintains XScreensaver, but now his day job is the ownership of a bar/pizza/venue establishment.
Probably a better fit for him.
And Brave is more than just a "fork."
I believe this.
I'd like to understand how, exactly, moving from a non-profit foundation's browser to a for-profit corporation's fork of that browser with a built in ad marketplace is a net win for my privacy. That seems like a net loss: the incentive is now to make money off of me, and the browser is actually running non-website code with that goal in mind.
* Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil
* Trackers and third party ads are blocked.
When is FireFox going to block third party ads and trackers?
> * Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil
There are too many moving pieces to this to dissect in a single comment. But to roughly sum them up: just about every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving targeted advertising" via ML uses some information-theoretical definition of privacy that doesn't align with normal user's intuitions about the word "private." We saw this with k-anonymity schemes, and we'll see it again when these schemes attract more scrutiny.
And on top of that: Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently opt-in only[2].
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...
I see the part about trackers. What about ads? Does it also block YouTube ads? That's a really nice feature built into Brave.
> just about every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving targeted advertising" via ML
The difference here is it happens in the browser. Does ML happen in Chrome?
> Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently opt-in only
Your reading of that isn't correct. The opt in is for ads. And local machine learning comes along with opting in.
Ads are the way the internet can be funded. For most free sites, they need to either be subsidized by another income (see say a personal website that you host yourself - you pay for the domain and hosting if it's not local). Or by either selling a product (see many software companies), or lastly by using ads (see YouTube, Vimeo, and numerous other video sharing sites)
I understand targeted ads being a nuisance and vehemently despise the datamining that supports said systems. But ads in general aren't an evil until they obfuscate the core material of a site. When you block ads, especially on YouTube for creators who use the platform to attract ads and sell their content then you prevent people who've worked to supply their income. If your issue is the ethics that are at odds with Alphabet and the privacy concerns, your fight is with your government to restrict them, Alphabet's own trackers (which you can work towards disabling).
I’ve also contributed a significant amount to an open source developer on GitHub directly through Brave.
jwz and I were among the actual, full-time job, [email protected] Mozilla founders. There was no "Mozilla" to work at then, it was Netscape employing almost all staff members, with Chris Blizzard of Red Hat dotted in. Mozilla was not spun out until 2003 summer, when AOL laid off most of Netscape but kept three of us mozillans for a few months to complete the transition to the new nonprofit.
https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
I led Mozilla on all tech decision making from 1998 through 2014.
Does this mean I was "supplanting" myself by doing Brave? No. In doing Brave, I certainly was not supplanting jwz, who had nothing to do with Firefox (born as mozilla/browser in 2001, over two years after jwz quit).