I was wondering if my account for university from 15+ years ago is still in their system.

Neither the personal email address or the university email address have McGraw Hill listed as breach source in HIBP. I wonder if HIBP has added this breach to their systems…

It’s too much of a low hanging fruit for governmental overreach.

I would argue this framing is at the root cause of the such initiatives.

The government even in flawed democracies (and not only in democracies) is generally a representation of the attitude of the people. Governmental overreach stems from the behaviour and beliefs of the adult population.

If a median representation of the population supports oligarchs, you’ll get oligarch programs under the guise of “think about the children” initiatives. Polemics about “small government” aren’t going to help.

I stand by what I said. I will let people read my comment in this thread and our comments in this post (there are multiple threads that are relevant):

https://piefed.social/c/opensource/p/1952631/waterfox-to-integrate-brave-adblock-engine-with-search-ads-enabled-by-default

Let people make up their own minds.

Just curious, what exactly do you mean by SRA in context of this thread?

I don’t necessarily think joining some sort of community/mutual aid organization is a bad thing. Based on research of global protest movements (disclaimer: I am not well versed on this topic outside of my region, albeit there is a lot to cover in our region), generally the highest success rates are for mass scale movements where the regime starts to feel they are losing control. Security services rank and file start to wonder if the leadership are going to bail on them and whether it is worth it to risk their lives fighting their own fellow citizens.

One way to get to that point is a strong network of community organizations that are not subject to the regime political structures (I would include the US Democratic party in this category) or malign business community influence (definitely almost all large US corporations who are part of the oligarchic regime and also giant list of wannabe oligarch types).

The often cited number is 10% of the population engaging in regular protests (with the implication being that a much larger % of the working age population supports the goals of the protest movement). Although from memory, the researchers did say that a single % doesn’t really account for a given “situation on the ground”, more of a general trend. Which makes a lot of sense.

Violent resistance was cited as having mixed results for a variety of reasons and tended to have much more unpredictable and drawn out dynamics.

From my time living the US, I also didn’t find the local polemics around gun ownership to be convincing or productive (i.e. irrespective of your position on gun ownership, a reasonable argument can be made that in the US context there are other factors at play with respect to the perceptions around gun ownership).

Then there is the practical consideration. What has the US implementation of gun ownership achieved in terms of specifics?

At last a useful comment thread about the actual functionality in question.

While I am not moving back to reddit, Threadiverse is just terrible on any nuanced conversations on modern ML tools and approaches.

The tech is not the issue here. It has legitimate use cases and it is here to stay (this is not a blockchain pump and dump scheme ala Web 3.0). The issue here are American tech companies and broader support for crime/corruption in US society (as of today, doesn’t mean that this can’t/won’t change in 20-30 years). We need truly independent open source systems and tools.

I am aware OpenWebUI is based in San Francisco and Mozilla Foundation is based in the US. I am always on the lookout for alternatives.

Keep in mind that that there is a strong likelihood that XLE is a demagogue and is dedicated to shitting up any mozilla/Firefox/TB thread with lies and gross exaggerations that function as lies. XLE almost certainly does not use Firefox or Thunderbird (it wouldn’t make sense considering their posting history).

XLE claimed that “Firefox is bursting at the seams with ads.” This is clearly not true.

As an example they cited “sponsored search suggestions”, which to my mind isn’t a big deal and can easily be disabled. For the sake of transparency, I will note that I’ve never got them and it seems I can’t enable them even if I wanted to (likely due to my region?)

XLE also claimed that the on-hover sponsorship notice for the Firefox weather widget as an example of “Firefox bursting at the seam with ads.” I haven’t used the default new tab page in a decade plus, so maybe this impacts how I see things. From my perspective, an on-hover sponsorship notice for optional widgets is a misleading example for their claims.

You can make up your own mind and read our conversation here: https://piefed.social/comment/10831188

P.S. I am not saying you shouldn’t cancel your donation. I’ve donated to Mozilla Foundation before and cancelled, so I would be a hypocrite for defending donations to MF.

I also have a more hard-line position on MF; they’ve turned into a shitty, corrupt American tech company imitation. All open source foundations based in the US are suspect by definition (including Linux foundation, Debian foundation etc.) as US society is in a state where it is extremely unlikely that crime and corruption will be addressed in the next 20 years (I’ve lived in the US for several years, as well as other countries across NA, Europe and Asia).

But that doesn’t mean you should trust an individual like XLE, who muddies the water with bombastic BS, while at the same time defending Brave; an American criminal gang that was caught re-writing referral URLs for their own financial benefit.

I outlined my thoughts around Waterfox’s decision to work with StartPage and whitelist their adds further down in this thread. I don’t see an issue with this.

You keep making bombastic statements, but when anyone calls you out and asks for specifics, you either ignore or try and change the subject.

How do search suggestions in Firefox integrate advertising? Is it tied to a specific search script and what is advertisement display logic?

The on-hover provider sponsorship notice is indeed an ad. That’s fair. Definitely not an example of “Firefox is bursting at the seams with ads.” and you know it.

As I said in another post, Mozilla has massive issues, there is no question about that. But you clearly have some sort of weird agenda and have no qualms with being deceptive and promoting misinformation.

I am done here.

Search engine placement isn’t that big of a deal as long as you can change the search engine list. If anything as a user you would want this to be leveraged to provide stability for something as critical as a browser as it doesn’t undermine privacy or user flexibility (it can lead to undesirable incentives as with Mozilla, but that’s the true of almost everything that concerns money).

I have a heavily customized Firefox, so I may have missed new developments in the baseline profile (I see none of the things you mention on Windows and Android), but how are search suggestions ad?

Wouldn’t this feature depend on which search script you are using? And isn’t the search suggestion logic for paid placement search engines still explicitly tied to their search systems? Can you explain how this works in terms of specifics?

Or are you saying that one of the default paid placement search engines places an ad on the first row of the search suggestion list?

I was curious about the weather widget (as I said, I often miss certain baseline profile features), I actually thought they decided to add a Android widget for weather which seemed strange. Are you sure this is an ad? It may well be, I’ve never seen it or used it, but a quick search suggests this isn’t true. Happy to be corrected.

Mozilla has a lot of issues, but I don’t think it is helpful to muddy the water in this way.

Some thing that I think should be more widely adopted (de facto mostly a list of features that Lemmy lacks relative to Piefed):

• Instance URL redirection; not only a Piefed thing, also done by Voyager
• Merged comments for the same post URL
• Post flair and to a lesser extent tags, Post flair is really helpful for if you manage a community

It’s not that bad.

Some very general space communities communities:

https://mander.xyz/c/space
https://sh.itjust.works/c/spaceflight

They are both pretty active by Threadi standard.