•  jet   ( @jet@hackertalks.com ) 
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    222 months ago

    The one thing Mozilla needs to focus on for internet freedom and independence is the one thing they never never never ever will talk about… The browser

    That 500m in annual google money is too precious to actually innovate the browser with.

    At this point Mozilla is just a political arm of Google.

    AI will solve walled gardens and decentralize the internet? Wishful thinking.

    •  NaN   ( @Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
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      2 months ago

      This is about the Mozilla Foundation, not the Mozilla Corporation.

      The distinction matters. The way they are organized, they can’t really overlap functions without jeopardizing the non-profit status of the Foundation. The Corporation is a for-profit company, it gets money from Google and it makes the browser.

      •  jet   ( @jet@hackertalks.com ) 
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        22 months ago

        The foundation owns the corporation so leadership decisions can flow through. Leadership matters, and what the new executive director says is the focus is a indicator.

        •  NaN   ( @Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
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          2 months ago

          Leadership decisions do not “flow through”, they are similar to the board in a traditional corporation. They legally cannot have operational decision making or be involved in the same work, that is a foundational aspect of “non-profit owning a for-profit”. It could just as easily be a for-profit soap company.

          The focus of the Foundation is drastically different than Firefox. That’s one of the reasons Firefox was spun off so it could thrive in an environment that was built around it.

          •  jet   ( @jet@hackertalks.com ) 
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            12 months ago

            If they can have no control of the underlying corporation why bother owning it? Why not just put it on the free market then?

            Obviously owning it does give some level of control, boards of directors can have opinions, the principal investors can set directives

            •  NaN   ( @Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
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              2 months ago

              Because it’s for fundraising, and they maintain very generic vibe setting, and they know Elon Musk won’t buy it.

              The Foundation literally cannot focus on the browser, so what’s your continuing problem here?

              •  jet   ( @jet@hackertalks.com ) 
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                12 months ago

                That the Mozilla organization as a whole, including the foundation, has lost track of what is actually good for a free and open internet. And it makes me sad

                •  NaN   ( @Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
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                  32 months ago

                  What is good is not letting unethical corporations and only unethical corporations develop cutting edge technologies because me Firefox user and me not like anything ever change.

                  Cat’s out of the bag, nothing ever goes back the way it was, you just get to live in the new world.

  • I started my career as a media lawyer to protect those who made things that helped us see one another, and the truth about our shared world. Almost fifteen years ago, I co-founded and built a media law clinic to train others to do the same.

    Hmm, sounds good.

    I am not naive about the Internet at its worst. From the Edward Snowden disclosures to a quick trip to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, much of my career has confronted issues of surveillance — including of my own religious community.

    Yeah, I like that we seem to agree.

    […] so we built an accountability journalism outlet, The Markup […] Our team imagined and made things people used to make informed choices. Blacklight, for example, empowers people to use the Web how they want, by helping them see the otherwise invisible set of tracking tools, watching them as they browse.

    Oh, Blacklight, I know that’s a cool tool!

    In our particular moment – as we’re deploying large-scale AI systems for the first time, as we’re waking up home pages from their long rests, and trying to “rewild” the Internet beyond walled gardens

    What? Why?? Oh fucking no

    We can imagine a future that centers human agency, and then we can build it, bit-by-byte.

    Yeah but AI is most probably not a toolbox for that