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posted by martyb on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-if-there-were-addons... dept.

Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox web browser and other open source projects, has announced its Mozilla Information Trust Initiative. This initiative involves Mozilla "developing products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called 'fake news' online."

Although the announcement from Mozilla claims that the "spread of misinformation violates nearly every tenet of the Mozilla Manifesto", this initiative does raise some concerning questions. Should a web browser vendor be actively patrolling content on the web? Is such patrolling of content harmful to a truly open web? Is this merely the first step toward web browsers censoring or controlling the dissemination of information available on the web? Would the resources expended on this initiative be better spent improving the performance and efficiency of Firefox?


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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday August 13 2017, @06:30AM (1 child)

    by jmorris (4844) on Sunday August 13 2017, @06:30AM (#553137)

    Universal franchise democracy (i.e. everyone votes) could only work at Lake Wobegone, where all the kids are above average. The problem really is that bad. Almost by definition most people in society are going to be "Have Nots" while only a few will be "Haves" so unless you can think out the long term problems and have the time preference to postpone gratification of desires, the idea of voting to seize and redisribute wealth is going to be a winner. Socialism makes sense, as it is the enlightened self interested move, from a game theory perspective unless you are capable of thinking long term and postponing gratification to an extent not typically seen. Most people are, by definition, on or close enough to the middle to not matter for this discussion, the left side of the Bell Curve and inability to think long term, desire for instant gratification and other negative traits will cluster on the left side, as those traits are generally what relegate one to the "Have Not" status.

    If you use a population of humans as they actually exist, you will fail with democracy. Even if you buy the worst of the "race realist" theories and build a "White Utopia" it fails, because it failed. America had already ceased to be a Constitutional Republic before blacks or any significant numbers of other "non-Europeans" were voting in numbers that mattered. Without the black / brown "coalition of the ascendant" base of the current Democratic Party they would be farther from their Final Solution but the Progressives achieved all of the preconditions for the final collapse to Socialism except universal healthcare around the turn of the 20th Century with a very monochrome voting population.

    Unless you have a way to restrict the franchise to the right side of the Bell Curve without quickly failing into an Oligarchy, we are still looking for a government model that could work. "Could work" being defined for my purpose as "without an obvious defect and likely failure mode."

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  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:21AM

    by coolgopher (1157) on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:21AM (#553151)

    Aye, there be a reason why the call democracy the worst form of government, except for all the others.

    I really wish I had a solution, but short of everyone being a lot smarter, more engaged and less self-serving, the most efficient and able-to-progress-humanity form of governance does seem to be the benevolent dictator. Ironically.