Notices by Sarah Jamie Lewis (sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social)

A reminder to donate directly to all the crucial projects building and maintaining privacy preserving tech, monitoring censorship, and working with people on the ground.

It was clear funding was going to be tight over the next few years, but the reality may be much worse.

I imagine public discussion is pending some kind of official statement (or its happening on bluesky?), but the private conversations that are taking place regarding the future of digital rights/privacy tech funding are pretty damn dire.

I also think there is a general trend of moving stuff off, and no longer publishing, information openly - both because it's increasingly expensive to do so outside of centralized silos (try spotting the difference between a ddos and a web crawl these days) and because of the general sense that the primary consumer of such information will be the same AI models that make up concepts and spew them at you during search.

So more and more public information is silo'd and unsearchable.

A lot of older personal sites of academics are rotting, or simply gone - as people retire, and departments get renamed and rotated, many of those sites don't make it back online (or they do but all the links are broken), and all the old references no longer work.

And there is also a period where everyone in certain domains just uploaded postscript tarballs of slides/notes/etc. - good luck finding archived versions of those.

In the context of research, searching for anything on the internet is terrible now - especially with the willingness of search engines to simply make up, ad the run with, a concept from the query.

And if the thing you need was created more than a few years ago - especially if it was more ephemeral than a published paper (e.g. workshop slides, a blog post, uploaded seminar slides etc.) - you will almost certainly need to access an archived version of it because the original is long gone.

The current vibe in Canada is that every conversation thread that even remotely touches on future planning now contains the phrase "on the assumption that we're not at war with the US by then..."

A subtractive approach to browser development will always be, at best, a temporary reprieve. And no sane firefox fork is going to be able to ignore the contributions of Mozilla in the near term.

For any open, independent browser ecosystem to keep pace is going to require a radical restructuring of how we build and fund the work to keep it going.

It's going to require multiple groups to come together to collaberate, and a way to even do that.

I've been playing around with using "base browser" as a stopgap and it's really all I want in a web browser - no branding, no labs, no telemetry, a few sensible safety defaults, but nothing that degrades general experience (and with the ability to go hyper restrictive if desired)

The one downside is that you have to compile this browser from source, and its not a standalone project - its the firefox fork that serves as the pseudo-base of the Tor and Mullvad browser.

There is a big gap between the ~100M being spent on firefox per year v.s. the ~1M being spent on tor browser v.s. 0-100K that many community firefox forks are bringing in.

Even if everyone got together, pooled their resources, partook in a mass fundraising drive, I don't think that 100M is possible.

To have an independent browser, we need to move towards a world where the cost to maintain a web browser is lower, or to one where more people are willing to support that work - or both.

Another update from Mozilla, well less of an update more of a statement that reaffirms the previous discussion:

- they really want you to understand that while they are not selling your data, they are legally not not selling your data
- they affirm they definitely still need that license for reasons otherwise how could firefox possibly work

This is just getting sad.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/

For those asking what my current plan is, I've outlined it here: https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/114072460080871754

I'll extend it to say:

- I'm only considering applications that are open source and non-electron based.
- I don't really use a phone, so I can't comment on mobile browsers
- I have a browser engine that I've written, oriented for basic browsing/RSS, I have a plan to extend that for some usecases (but will unlikely be of use generally without additional interest/planning)

And that is why I've held on as long as I could have, beyond what I rationally consider the breaking point.

Over the last few years I've been publicly critical of Mozilla while still urging people to use Firefox, but to make their voices heard.

That time is over. I can't agree to these terms, I can no longer condone the destructive path that Mozilla has chosen. This is the point where after more than 2 decades, I had to say enough.

And I need you to understand what that decision means to me. I started using Firefox in the early 2000s - I honestly can't remember when but probably sometime in 2003.

I was one of the few people that had an actual Firefox phone in the early 2010s.

I donated time and money to Firefox and Mozfest and Thunderbird over the last two decades because I really believed in all of those projects.

I think Firefox has been incredibly important to what the web is and could be.

Over my career I've been involved in hundreds of contract negotiations, many of them including stuff like software licensing. I've done this work for governments, and corporations, for myself, and for non-profits.

Which is to say, I know what words mean. I know what the legal norms are in multiple jurisdictions, and I know when someone is trying to bullshit me.

I have no doubt that Mozilla think they need this license and privacy policy. I'm concerened enough by the "why" to ditch firefox.

The language is clear, it is being criticised because it is clear. No one is confused about anything. Except maybe Mozilla regarding how this will play out over the long term.

>> Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice

This part is entirely correct. And I really want you to understand that it is only so because of the end of that statement i.e. "other than what is described in the Privacy Notice"

The Privacy Notice, as outlined in my previous thread is incredibly broad.

>> "We've seem a little confusion"

There is no confusion, the usage and privacy policy are both incredibly clear and broad in what they say.

>> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible.

They do not. This is incredibly condescending. Nothing about the "basic functionality" of a browser demands a "royalty-free, worldwide license". That is absurd.

Mozilla have published an update to this:
> "UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice."

I want to break this down.

https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/114072293410465140

For those asking what my current plan is:

I'm going to push forward on migrating my use of more complex web apps to a standalone equivs where available (e.g. mastodon / rss readers)

In the short term, probably tor browser to do more general browsing. I trust that team to be able to strip out most of the bad, and keep the rest generally locked down.

Long term: It's time to really commit to building something better.

There is a tendency in all these conversations for people to make excuses. "Oh well they need to do it because <lawyers>", "Every other company does this" etc.

Be mature enough to take into account the entirity of a situation, to see the patterns of behaviour, to see the recent history, to believe that people will do what they say they will do.

Or to put it another way, to the apologists: "don't piss on my boots and tell me it's raining"