Re:Open research, stronger privacy: Making Firefox users har...
by mschuster91 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @12:36PM
(#50456079)
> The further we allow the Web to stray from cURL http://example.com Just Working, the worse off we all are.
The problem is we don't hold bad actors accountable. That's how we ended up losing open SMTP decades ago.
Re:Open research, stronger privacy: Making Firefox users har...
by Vinnl on Thursday November 12, 2026 @05:16AM
(#50465275)
Unfortunately my pay grade isn't high enough to tell people what to work on, haha. That said, I am fairly sure that whoever is working on it would also prefer `cURL http://example.com` to Just Work.
But keep in mind that not doing anything isn't going to stop the rise of CAPTCHAs. If you've got specific alternative approaches in mind, especially ones that keep in mind the trade-offs mentioned in that blog post, then I'm sure it's possible to reach out to the author.
This feedback isn't directed at any one person but that proposal impressively suffers from the simultaneous problems of Being Way Too Fucking Complicated and Proposing to Make the Web Better but Actually Making it Way Worse (for Everyone Except Entrenched Megacorps). It's the exact same problem that Google's "anonymous ad attribution" attestation swarms suffered, and luckily that never came to pass.
From looking at the pictures in that article, it seems like in order for me to be able to browse "protected" sites (aka, most of the corporate-owned web, once they are aware that this exists and turn it on because "bots bad") my browser is going to have to negotiate for some scant amount of "allowed access" tokens or other such thing, through some complicated protocol that halts any chance of us realizing a future for the web that looks any much different from "locked down approved browsers visiting approved sites in an approved way."
The further we allow the Web to stray from cURL http://example.com Just Working, the worse off we all are. So to reiterate, this proposal looks insane and not at all aligned with Mozilla's mission...