Notices by Jeffrey Yasskin (jyasskin@hachyderm.io)

[Thread comparing browser threat models around advertising]

Chrome: The risk of defunding the web and taking content away from people who can't afford to pay is worth the risk of websites correlating personal data (but also it's worth removing both risks when we can: https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/open-web/). The folks raging at Firefox have already left Chrome.

(Again, this is my personal take, not Chrome's official position.)
2/🧵

I'm seeing some rage about Firefox's origin trial for "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution) (largely thanks to @dmarti boosting it). I think this comes down to a difference in threat models. I'm bound to get these somewhat wrong, but roughly: ... 1/

4/🧵
Angry people: Advertising itself (or perhaps any advertising targeted better than website Nielsen ratings) is a risk, either to our personal eyeballs or to the web ecosystem, where it can fund spammy or malicious websites. Ads (or targeted ads) should just be blocked, and websites should find other funding models.

[More apologies to the angry folks whose position I've misrepresented. This is a diverse group, so I'm bound to have missed some of them.]

3/🧵
Firefox: We must prevent websites from correlating personal data, but if we can let websites maintain their revenue given that constraint, it's worth doing. Hence the attribution API that doesn't expose personal data. (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution)

[Apologies if I've misrepresented Firefox's position.]

5/5
These are all valid threat models, and browsers should exist to support them all, but people get angry when they thought their current browser had a different threat model than it actually does.

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926, on #values

"useful organizational values come in the form of tradeoffs: giving up one nice thing in order to get some other nice thing. Wishy-washy values like "respect your co-workers" aren't really values, because nobody would ever pick a value like "don't respect your co-workers." ...

"A real value is something like ... "deliver the software on schedule, even if there are bugs." In both cases, one can legitimately imagine valuing the opposite."

#TIL that a .gz file can contain multiple sub-files: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1952#page-5.