“Just use Firefox/Librewolf or any other privacy-conscious browser that isn’t Chromium-based.”I already do, but some websites/platforms don’t play nice on non-Chromium-based browsers due to Google’s monopoly on the web. Sometimes I can afford to not use that website/platform, but unfortunately not always.
Just a few days ago I tried to pay for flight tickets on flypgs.com. Multiple attempts on Firefox didn’t work, while the first attempt on a Chromium-based one did. It might have been a fluke, but every so often issues like these do happen. And for some reason switching the browser does bear a positive result. YMMV though.
With Street complete you can contribute to openstreetmaps by entering data for things in your proximity like house numbers, pavement types, directions of lanes, height of buildings and what not.
I think that is a feature of Google Assistant or some other Google product. It reads everything you have on your screen at any moment to give you “smart” help like easy opening of addresses or phone numbers.
That doesn’t prevent it. Keyboard is tied to many core OS processes that connect to Google servers and relay that information. I would recommend replacing it with OpenBoard which is based on Android Open Source Project.
Can activity pub change it’s terms to say that all crawlers that use this must be gnu open sources and all information crawled must be open to the public on gnu open sources software (no crawling to a private enterprise)?
My understanding is all the big tech companies are scared of what happened with router software (openwrt) and they don’t want to be forced to let competition be a foss community via gnu licensing.
Isn’t ActivityPub just an application protocol? To my knowledge there’s no ActivityPub inc. licensing the usage of the protocol or anything like that. A web protocol is just a series of guidelines everyone has agreed on following, you can’t attach terms and conditions to it.
So you want oppressed people to use the Chinese Yuan or Russian Rubel and Argentinian Pesos as their Currency (super unstable in value due to inflation, highly surveiled) rather than giving them choice to use something like Monero to transact in privacy?
If you do not live in a dictatorship you have no right to comment on the usefulness of a privacy preserving tool. Maybe you do not see its value, but others in different situations than yours might need it.
Yeah sure it should be used for its utility on a needs-basis, I don’t really disagree with you or care if people use it for whatever reason they want to.
Point was that as a global general-use currency it doesn’t provide much added utility for the average person or provide a real solution for any of the underlying structural issues that people say it does.
Why is everyone outraged when Google/Microsoft/Yahoo and others have scraped the whole internet for two decades and are also massively profiting from that data?
There’s a significant difference in the purpose of the scraping.
Google et al. run crawlers primarily to populate their search engines. This is a net positive for those whose sites get scraped, because when they appear in a search engine they get more traffic, more page views, more ad revenue. People view content directly from those who created it, meaning those creators (regardless of whoever they are) get full credit. Yes, Google makes money too, but site owners are not left in the cold.
ChatGPT and other LLM’s works by combing its huge database of known content its “learned” to cook up an answer through fast math magic. Content it scrapes to populate this database can be regurgitated at any time, only now its been completely processed and obfuscated to an insane degree. Any attribution of content is completely stripped in the final product, even if it ends up being a word-for-word reproduction. Everything OpenAI charges for its LLM goes directly to OpenAI, and those who have created content to train it will never even know it was used without their consent.
Essentially, LLM’s operate like a huge middle school plagiarism machine shitting all over any concept of copyright, only now they’re making billions off said plagiarism with no plans to stop. It’s a huge ethical conundrum and one I heavily disagree with.
Google et al. run crawlers primarily to populate their search engines. This is a net positive for those whose sites get scraped, because when they appear in a search engine they get more traffic, more page views, more ad revenue.
This is not necessarily true. Google’s instant answers are designed to use the content from websites to answer searcher’s questions without actually leading them to the website. Whether you’re trying to find the definition for the word, the year a movie came out, or a recipe, Google will take the information they’ve scraped from a website and present it on their page with a link to the website. Their hope is that the information will be useful enough that the searcher never needs to leave the search engine.
This might be useful for searchers, but it doesn’t help the sites much. This is one of the reasons news companies attempted to take action against Google a few years ago. I think a search engine should provide some useful utilities, but not try to replace the sites they’re ostensibly attempting to connect users to. Not all search engines are like this, but Google is.
Server providers threatening to terminate business with Mullvad because some of its users used port forwarding to host contents that meant legal trouble.
Mullvad chose to terminate support for port forwarding in a transparent way and gave clear dates to prepare. This was done instead of selling off their users or collaborating with whatever legal threats they were facing.
I don’t like it, but at least I understand their business decision. Even if I took my business elsewhere, they have a solid point on transparency.
Since bitwarden is a VC funded company, I'm wary of the enshittification that might take place in the future. Even though technically speaking, you can self-host the server via Vaultwarden, it is largely possible because the project has blessing of official devs. That can change dramatically in future.
For something as important as your passwords, trusting a for-profit company might not be the best idea.
Would love to know what the community thinks about this.
DISCLAIMER: I love Bitwarden and use it daily, both for personal use and at work.
The VC money has gone to good though, like audits and open source code. A lot of the money they get is from company deals with bitwarden buisness anyway. As long as that works out, I can’t see them screwing over anyone while they have a money stream. If they do screw up, exporting to KeyPassXC is super easy anyway.
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