Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

Re:Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible by mozball on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @07:51AM (#36876163)

Mozilla should really double down on Mozilla VPN. Judging by all the NordVPN ads on every major youtuber's video, the profit margins must be astronomical (or their business model must be suspicious). It should provide a good income stream for Mozilla. The entire space is shady and filled with dubious actors. It is just begging to be disrupted by a trustworthy organization.

I can't think of a single candidate other than Mozilla that has the technical expertise, experience, trust, reputation, resources (not to mention non-profit structure) built over 20 years defending the open web. I don't understand why Mozilla is dragging their feet on this. They should have owned the entire VPN market by now. VPNs aren't cryogenic rockets.

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Re:Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible by deadbunny on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @08:03AM (#36876278)

Don't Mozilla just resell Mulvad?

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Re:Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible by mozball on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @08:21AM (#36876440)

Yes. I don't know why though. I don't understand why they can't host and run their own OpenVPN instance. Or why MozillaVPN is only available in 30 countries (mine not included), 4 years after announcement. Or why i haven't seen a single ad for Mozilla VPN anywhere on the web other than in mozilla's homepage. Or what they are doing with their 800 million dollars in annual revenue.

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Re:Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible by gettodachoppa on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @08:06AM (#36876306)

VPNs are barely gonna make a dent in their income. What do you think the market is for VPNs? 99% of people don't know what VPN means.

Of the remaining 1%, most don't need a VPN for anything personal. It's literally just a handful of geeks who need VPN (mainly for secure piracy, or accessing different regional Netflix catalogs), and maybe a few dozen journalists living in dictatorships.

Mozilla needs to gut spending. Get rid of all the diversity /hr/evangelism people bloating their employee headcount and funneling people's donations to divisive causes like that org that doesn't hire white men (forgot the name but it made me cancel my monthly donation to Mozilla). They shouldn't need more than 25% non-technical staff, and the purpose of those 25% should be exclusively to support the technical staff. Instead they became another bloated Big NGO that's basically welfare for liberal arts majors in California.

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Re:Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible by mozball on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @08:24AM (#36876478)

If there is little money in VPNs, how is it that they are funding half the youtubers out there, potentially outbidding everyone else for the adspace.

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Re:Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible by codedokode on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @08:14AM (#36876382)

VPN is not only for geeks. VPNs (free ones) are popular in Russia because Instagram is blocked.

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Re:Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible by throw-ru-938 on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @09:18AM (#36877165)

But, conveniently, Russians cannot use paid VPNs anyway unless they accept Bitcoin.

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Re:Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible by dynamorando on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @08:59AM (#36876905)

Is the Mozilla organization generally responsive to social media? I have had a hard time trying to figure out where the organization responds to publicly, generally.

I would love to have a Mozilla hosted email and calendar service from them, for example. I don't understand why they aren't branching out into more common web citizen needed services.

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