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Julien Voisin blogs:
Today, I updated my Firefox, and had a new icon on my toolbar: pocket. I took at quick look at the ToS and privacy policy; here is my tl;dr:
Read it Later, Inc. is collecting a lot of intimate information and is tracking you.
When you share something through Pocket with a friend, the emails contains spying material using malware-like techniques to track your friends.
They are sharing those information with trusted third parties (Could be anyone they are doing business with.).
The policy might change, and it's your responsibility to check Pocket's website to see if it has.
[...] The Pocket implementation is not an extension (while it was available as an extension), it's implemented in Firefox. You can not remove it, only disable it, by going in about:config, since this option is not available in the preferences menu.
What the hell is pocket? on Mozilla's site:
The Pocket for Firefox button lets you save web pages and videos to Pocket in just one click. Pocket strips away clutter and saves the page in a clean, distraction-free view and lets you access them on the go through the Pocket app. All you need is a free account, an Internet connection and the Pocket button.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KBentley57 on Monday July 13 2015, @01:01PM
I hate to hate on companies, but FF has been dying a slow death for years in my opinion. As with all companies, it seems like they are at their best / most trustworthy in their 'build' phase, where they are up and coming. Remember the FF 3-4 era? What more could a person have wanted from a web browser. Features are nice, html5, sync, ect... but once the constant UI changes started, search engine switching, all those small things add up to bother users. Not to mention the deviation from what should be a single focused task - FF OS. I like the idea of firefox, just not the direction it has taken in the last few years.
I am glad they put thunderbird on maintenance. It's my fav. desktop email client, and it's complete. It doesn't need anything else to be added, and it's being left alone, as it should be.
Chromium on linux has been the browser of choice for about a year. Like all good things, it has its own set of problems. However, it gives the best browsing experience for me at the moment.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday July 13 2015, @01:27PM
The giant advantage of open source, though, is that if an organization becomes a problem, there is always the option to say "Fork you!", take the code, and the only thing lost will be the brand name and marketing. This has already happened numerous times: OpenOffice->LibreOffice, Xfree86->X.org, Ubuntu->Mint, green site->SoylentNews/Pipedot, etc.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by KBentley57 on Monday July 13 2015, @01:42PM
In concept I agree, the source is there and can at least be preserved.
However, a huge open source project is still a huge project. Because we have the source doesn't mean a fork is easy. Look at the backers of the projects you mentioned. Mint(http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php), LibreOffice( AMD, Google, Red Hat, SUSE, Intel...more), X.org(basically same as LO), and others. I'm actually very surprised to see SN continually up and running with the low level of funding, low number of devs, and so on.
The barrier of entry/modification makes it highly improbable that even a internet-community driven effort could evolve FF into something significantly different that what it is now. Palemoon is an example, but even that project has a crap level of documentation/build details. Iceweasel isn't different than FF, though I suspect that it would have the best chance of survival with the large debian ecosystem.
It takes money for large projects, and without it, they do not change.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zugedneb on Monday July 13 2015, @08:11PM
What you say is the reason for me never donating money to any project, although I would like to.
With "sufficient" resources, the projects just grow until a spoon is not a spoon any more.
Also, the better economy, the more psychos in the staff...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:46AM
This exactly. It always strikes me as a huge shame when a team refuses to release their freeware as OSS, as the people involved are almost guaranteed to become busy or bored at some point and let the project fade away (or be bought out by a company uninterested in it).
However, I wouldn't include OpenOffice/LibreOffice in that list... AFAICT, the only 'crime' that OpenOffice.org committed was refusing to let a subset of the developers change the direction of development to suit their own preferences. (I'm glad they didn't agree to it, as the add-ons integrated into LO aren't useful for me and eat up markedly more resources, causing it to run more slowly & struggle on my Core2Duo laptop to handle files OO works with smoothly.)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:49PM
> FF has been dying a slow death for years in my opinion
Netflix confirms it.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday July 13 2015, @05:26PM
Hmm... on my setup, Netflix kills FF really quickly. But I thought that was a Siverlight on Linux issue.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:45PM
Whoosh.
(Score: 1) by NullPtr on Monday July 13 2015, @06:54PM
You're joking. I've recently switched back to firefox, having used chrome for years. What swung it was firefox dropping their old, bizarre, shitty, tedious syncing system and going with the obviously superior "username and password" model. Also, the android app is far improved from the first naff effort. And chrome doesn't support plugins, so you have to look at adverts. Also, chrome is slow on android, and a memory hog on the desktop. Firefox has come on in leaps and bounds since I last used it maybe 6 or 7 years ago.
Also, what's all this bollocks about Pocket spying on you? If you use it, which is optional, then obviously it knows what you're reading. Duh! That's the whole point. Again, I have it installed on desktop/phone and when I go on holiday I use Calibre to dump all the stored articles into a .mobi and send to my kindle for offline reading. If you don't want to be tracked, pull your finger out and get tails and use tor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @10:18PM
Also, what's all this bollocks about Pocket spying on you? If you use it, which is optional,
It's not optional when it's opt out instead of opt in. I've used FF for years and this was the first I'd heard of Pocket.
(Score: 1) by NullPtr on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:32AM
If you can opt out, it's optional. Also, unless you sign up for an account, it's not adding links and therefore not tracking you.