Thank you for clarifying, and with a reference, too. That’s pretty much what I thought. It’s great to have confirmation, though.

I don’t think that’s the kind of watermark being talked about here, Kol.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology would be called upon to, quoted from the COPIED ACT Summary, facilitate development of guidelines for voluntary, consensus-based standards and for detection of synthetic content, watermarking and content provenance information, including evaluation, testing and cybersecurity protection. I believe we’re talking about the unseen, math-y, certification and (I imagine) cryptography kind of digital watermark, not the crappy visual edits made by iFunny and co.

In fact, since it also says:

Prohibits removing, altering, tampering with, or disabling content provenance information, with a limited exception for security research purposes.

The content in question might reach e.g. iFunny already “signed” and they wouldn’t be able to remove that.

Of course, I’m saying this without actually fully understanding what fits under covered content (digital representations of copyrighted works). Does my OC on deviantart count as covered content? I think so, but I couldn’t tell you for certain. If anyone can help me understand this, please, that’d be really nice.

And finally, as was already said by others, I think this does nothing about all the crap companies already did to artists, since the law can’t affect them retroactively. It’s not that cool for small artists, since they’ll still be abused, except big tech would have the legal monopoly on abuse.

I mean no disrespect by this: did you read the article? I’m genuinely curious how you got the iFunny idea.

You know that it’s not a new concept, right? Just a new word for a specific type of rent seeking that has plagued capitalism forever.

Any pre-existing name for this specific type of rent seeking you’d rather people used instead? For what it’s worth, I believe enshittification has its own benefits.

It’s nice to see people learning economics from YA fiction authors, but read some books man

There are better ways to express yourself than this.

Being a YA fiction author does not diminish the worth of one’s ideas or their other works. Cory also worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is absolutely a position that, coupled with his many years of studying the digital landscape, gives him a level of insight into it that makes people interested in what he has to say about it, and for good reason. It’s not merely about economics.

If you think people could do the subject, themselves, or others better in this regard by consuming better material, you could point a better direction than “read some books”

Yeah, I think you could say that :^)

The most important things to remember about enshittification are the reasons why it happens in the first place and the particular manner in which it does, time and time again. To anyone interested in this topic, consider giving Doctorow’s talk a watch. It’s great, and explains all of this really well.

Enshittification will often involve doing things like this, yes. But as the link itself states, the actual meaning—per Doctorow’s original definition—is an entire process, and a little more descriptive. These things are not the same, one is just frequently a symptom of the other.

Sorry if this comes across as pedantic, I’m in a personal quest, of sorts, to protect the original meaning because I think it’s too important to lose. To anyone else reading this: please, don’t use enshittification when you really only mean “the platform is doing something bad.”

For the quoted behavior, I’m a big proponent of “asshole design.”

I can’t imagine any way this is possible without crowdsourced information, and at that point you’re just interacting with a community (likely the same one as you already are) through a different interface.

But if such an interface existed, it could be a cool project.

We would be happy to connect with your technical team to help them make sure your paywalled content isn’t served to people using Poe.

What a joke, Quora needs to reevaluate whose responsibility that is.

Basic reasoning time: was it an accident?

• If not, then it was at least immoral.
• If so, then it was incompetence.

What a surprise, both possibilities seem to point towards the project being a pile of crap.

We need to get our politicians to do a lot more, a lot faster.

So we’re still doomed, then? I’m sorry, I’m sure lots of this is meant to be incredibly uplifting, but it reads an awful lot like “green is cheaper, trust the market! Numbers go up, up, up!” when you consider that:

• Climate change is impacting countless people in horrible ways
• Climate change is still getting worse

The important thing to note here being that, even if a brighter future awaits beyond, the worst is yet to come. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

Yes, that the science to save the human race exists is nice. Really nice. There was a period in which I genuinely wondered if there was any chance humans wouldn’t extinct themselves. But that was years ago. I’ve since learned that “saving the human species” is a terrible, disgusting metric. The future of what I consider humanity remains grim.

Now, if the worst is yet to come, and we can’t yet even accurately predict how much worse the worst really will be, take a moment to reflect on this: which part of humanity is better prepared to weather the incoming changes, and which part is more likely to be labeled “climate change refugees?”

Humanity isn’t only the richest. It’s not merely the wealthiest and most developed nations. Humanity is also a lot of people who will suffer, people who I’m unconvinced will receive the aid and support they need and deserve.

Because the root cause of these issues, the systems that govern our society, have led us here and are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Because these systems have shown incredible prowess at protecting select groups of people from certain issues, while failing at completely fixing them, despite not struggling due to a lack of resources and continuous technological advances. If the pattern holds…

Then humans will survive. Many will live well.

Humanity is still pretty screwed.

TL;DR:

“The tools are here, we’ll be alright, just need political will!”

Who’s we? And if getting politicians to do what’s right was that simple, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

P.S. I’m not advocating for doom here, I just wish more people understood that Americans buying cheap Chinese electric cars won’t save the people living nearby the mine in Africa where the cobalt for those batteries was extracted.

“The elephant in the room – and the opportunity – is how to solve for the industry-created problem that people don’t like and don’t trust advertising,” said Garcia. “Privacy-enhancing tech doesn’t make creepy and disruptive ads less creepy or disruptive in the eyes of the average user.”

Emphasis mine.

Betting on your reputation that users will trust you to adequately handle an issue that really seems like it’d end up with a conflict of interest seems like a fancier manner of saying you’re risking taking a dump on your reputation.

No way through but forwards now, eh. Not feeling particularly optimistic, but I’m cheering for them all the same. Their concerns and observations about the direction the industry is headed in are valid.

Am I missing something?

Firefox is Mozilla’s most profitable product. Its millions of users enable Mozilla to make deals for sponsored content (e.g. shortcuts), integrations, and biggest of all: the default search option with Google.

Didn’t think I had to say it explicitly. As far as influencing Mozilla’s course, I don’t believe those to be very helpful methods. A fork may be helpful, but it highly depends on the developer(s). I argue against the second one all the time. Third is laughably counterproductive.

Mozilla is capable of responding to (esp. proper) feedback. For example, regardless of what you think about the subject, the community sent a pretty clear message when they started accepting cryptocurrency donations, which I’m sure they’re still keeping in mind to this day.

Point being, engaging with them is one thing that helps and I can do just fine. No need for “endless doom screeching.”

Re: positive news. Yes, on paper it can. We’ll see how it turns out in reality. I’ve explained why I’m not immediately into it, though your comment seems to ignore that part of mine. I do want it to work out though, if for no other reason than because what’s done is done and ultimately, I just want Firefox to thrive.

Oh, we’re fully in agreement. I’m not arguing in favor of abandoning Firefox or Mozilla at all. I’m just saying frustration and anxiety are to be expected sometimes. Note that I’m not excusing rudeness or the like.

Re: the burden of developing a modern browser, I wonder what librewolf evangelists think would happen to the project, if Firefox development by Mozilla were to fall due to any reason. To my view, the forks only exist because Firefox still does. After all, if managing an entire browser was possible with their resources, they wouldn’t need to fork one.

I try my best to keep calm and judge things fairly and rationally but, truth is, you get kinda tired of seeing so many iffy-maybe-alright news about Mozilla.

Inline edit: not even a week later, Teixeira v. Moz. Why, Mozilla? Liking you shouldn’t be this complicated.

My fear is that by the time “something happens” to Firefox, it’ll be something that was entirely avoidable if only we had acted sooner. I’m always wondering if I’m at the point I should be acting.

• I’m still salty about their previous CEO, Mitchell Baker, I believe, getting bigger bonuses while Firefox market share fell (and layoffs happened, but we lack details to understand those properly).
• I’m unconvinced that, in a world where the percentage of people using an adblocker is rising, they’ll find a way to change people’s minds and look at ads, even if they are perfectly, technomagically privacy preserving.
• I’m unconvinced that owning Firefox, which puts uBlock as a front-and-center extension, and Anonym, an adtech company, will not create a conflict of interest—just like what happened to Google.

For the record, this is my first time commenting on this and I’m also deeply bothered by “reactionary nerds” (everyone switch to librewolf!!), but I understand the sentiment. Hope that added some perspective.

I stand corrected, I see your argument about the comparative difficulty and effect of banning a browser vs an extension. The discoverability of the extension alone is a big point.

Not sure I agree with how you seemingly downplay the damage banning the browser could cause and fail to consider consider other ways people could organize to distribute extensions (even as you mention various ways to get Firefox, I’m a bit confused on this one). Others have already talked about this in the thread, so I won’t repeat it here.

With all that said, it appears we were both fools. Mozilla has returned the extensions already. It was neither about protecting Firefox in Russia, nor a case of “Fuck Mozilla.”

Oh bummer, forgot about that. Assuming it needn’t be my only/main account, I could create a p.dev one, if it helps.

No modding experience, but Linux & tech news remain a strong hyperfixation interest of mine. If that’s enough, I could give it a shot.

Anyone know if Mozilla ever made a statement on the state of MS’s LLM training on Github data? I’m curious if they don’t care about having Firefox be part of the dataset or if they just think the benefits of the platform outweigh that.

If you have a bit of time to spare, see this great article for a some history on Mozilla and version control.

Would you be happier if they ignored the demands and possibly got Firefox banned in Russia? Because if so, it’s not that we disagree over our views of the Russian government. Probably neither do Mozilla.

We have different priorities. I want the average Russian to be easily able to use Firefox, even if it takes more work to load some extensions. From where I’m sitting, you seem to want to cut off your nose to spite your face.

I’m genuinely curious why.

Wrong Conway.