"Seeing HiCloud request while having HiCloud app enabled" -> and so ... ? The question "if I refuse all their services, do they still collect my data". No surprise your phone makes request if you are using their services.
"Third Party apps are not privacy respecting and sending data to Google" -> yes nothing new, we're not talking about the spyware you can install from the playstore yourself, you have a lot of choice there too indeed, we're talking about pre-installed apps.
The social score in China is even worse than in Black Mirror, it defines everything you can access from bank, education, job, health, transport , social relationships, etc.
It is not a legal score, it is a social score (both in theory and in practice)
I completely agree that it is stupid to send non-dangerous people to jail, but we should punish them with fines and possibly specific job restrictions decided on a per-case basis by a tribunal if there is a clear danger, but not by restricting their every aspect of their private, public, social and professional life.
I'm not sure to understand are you basically saying " it's okay to do human testing because we can save million of others " ?
The whole point of "civilized" countries is to guarantee some basic individual rights by not fall into this pure utilitarian vision. Otherwise you can justify all the most dystopian-dictatorish-nazish horrors you want.
If you or your children were dying because some scientists did non-consenting & non-needed test on them to make sure "we build the technology to save million others" you wouldn't find this fair.
"He said his goal was not to cure or prevent an inherited disease, but to try to bestow a trait that few people naturally have -- an ability to resist possible future infection with HIV"
Hasn't it been clear that the goal was from beginning to build a stronger race ? They never said it was to save baby from a inherited disease but to make them more resistant to potential future infection
"You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation."
So it seems that not everything can be disabled in the settings ?
Maybe in practice they're not collecting too much sensitive data, but they could just distribute the FLOSS binary with a "Do you want to send telemetry data to Microsoft -Yes ? -No ?" at 1st lunch and if we say no then we have the guarantee nothing will be ever sent to them.
As far as I now this is what is done in Atom and I find it more clear and honest than a special license where "you can opt out but we still send data anyway".
I'm sure there no necessarily evil intentions, but still there this feeling that for once Microsoft is doing a great & successful Open Source software, they must find a way to put their own terms on it and collect user data.
If Mozilla can't reach enough user now, why would they do with a fork of Blink ? It's not a web engine problem, it's just that Google is too powerful and Chrome is everywhere, so they decide.
And actually it is better for innovation not to use to Blink. WebRender is potentially much more performant than any other engine and it would never had existed if Mozilla were just aligning with Blink
I really don't find this insightful, just repeating what everyone thinks : "people don't care about privacy", "Chrome is successful because it is installed by default", etc. thx captain obvious
I really can't agree more with you. WebVR is not a good investment, when you are not even on par in terms of performance for displaying a web page, the last thing you look into is WebVR. This is one of the main problem at Mozilla, they often get influenced by the trend or they spread funds over many different projects ( that range from VR to Museum Arts, grants for LGBT, harassment prevention, Bioinformatics, etc. those are very noble/interesting causes too but you cannot save the whole world at once ). But I don't know maybe this is good for marketing and it allows them to get even more donation / sponsoring? But I'm really not convinced... I think what can really save Mozilla is WebRender/Servo. The best thing that happened to FF is surely not Pocket (once again, huge investment and most people don't use it) but Quantum and this comes from the Servo project.
As you said, they could also make a killer electron alternative and it would be very fitted to Servo as you can start with a subset of the spec and focus on performance/footprint, but their lastest attempt is from what I know this :
https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell/blob/master/README.... which is almost 1 year old
You mean everyone uses Blink/V8 and everyone does research as forks and merge it to master if they have something interesting to commit ? I would see a few issues :
- The 1st problem I see is that open source is often meritocracy and so Google will always be deciding because there will be much more engineer from Google on the project than from other companies joining the project. And anyway Google has no interest to try to align with MS/Mozilla interests.
- The other problem I see is that you need some independence to make fundamemtal changes. WebRender would never exist if Mozilla tried to fork an existing engine. They wrote everything from scratch and now they are doing fundamental changes to Gecko to be able to merge Webrender in it. If they add to agree with Google, MS, and other companies they would still be arguing and trying to convince them, and Google would refuse because they think their solution is better (or more suited to their own personal needs) and Rust would not even exist
The VS code you download is not Open Source, it has a special Microsoft license and includes close source Microsoft Telemetry ( which could be considered as spyware) which you cannot opt-out completely.
You seems very certain that Firefox will switch to Chromium but the recent trend is going in the exact opposite direction :
- Firefox Focus is switching from Chromium Engine to Gecko Engine.
- Huge amount of work in WebRender, they're starting to test it. If it lives up its promise Chromium Engine might fall far behind in terms of performance.
So maybe you're right but from what we can tell right now, the current trend for Mozilla is to remove the last pieces of Chromium and bet everything on a new generation engine which is not Chromium.
You made the generalization that people will always vote for shiny and expensive stuff, I gave you an example it is not always the case. I never said direct-democracy is a bullet proof system that always ends up deciding reasonable laws. Taking the case of surveillance law as a failure of direct democracy is not relevant as a majority of non-direct democracies countries passed far more privacy invasive surveillance laws around the same period
Especially when Google itself is promoting Flutter which in a way is a non-native UI framework. I think as long as a framework is performant and implements well the design guidelines of the OS this is what really matters
Switzerland is very heterogeneous in terms of language and mentality. The Röstigraben is clearly not a myth. However people accept those very high differences because it's economically going really great in Switzerland. (But of the day the economy is down, I think tensions might really explode, French vs German speaking have really different mentalities)
Switzerland is the exact proof that what you say about masses voting for the expensive things is not always true. For e.g they had a "votation" on minimum wage, and people refused because the proposed minimum wage was too high. They had the maturity/long-term vision of refusing such a proposal. But in other countries/context I agree with you, try to do that for e.g in France and I'm pretty sure people would instantly vote yes to such a proposition without caring about the consequences.
Maybe when you ask people often what they want they become responsible (like in Switzerland) while if you never ask people what they think, the rare times where you'll ask them through referendum, they'll go for the extreme/expensive because they want to express how frustrated of not being listened to they are.
"Third Party apps are not privacy respecting and sending data to Google" -> yes nothing new, we're not talking about the spyware you can install from the playstore yourself, you have a lot of choice there too indeed, we're talking about pre-installed apps.