yakult

Alternative hypothesis: most 'secret family recipes' are in fact original. However, the average SFR never get passed around, because it produces average-tasting stuff.

The recipe on food labels come from companies that know the product inside-out, have incentive to help you optimize the taste/effort tradeoff, and maybe have spent time and money on research. They tastes better, so they're the ones people remember.

tl;dr: people remember a disproportionately high number of plagiarized recipes because those are the good ones.

New Atlassian logo is better than the old logo. Old one always looked more like an unimportant decorative element than logo.

I totally agree about the hate on rich markup replacing plaintext, though. Entirely counterproductive and stinks of excess engineers syndrome.

They're probably going for native advertising.

Sure, we CAN contribute. But what's in it for us?

Are we going to get a browser that caters to our own needs? No, evidently power users are no longer the target demographic.

Are we going to make a browser that we can recommend to our nontechie friends? No, I don't trust them to navigate all the opt-outs and dark patterns around your telemetry. I don't even trust myself to never misclick.

Is contributing going to win us goodwill from our collegues? No, you've alienated them too.

Is this about ideology, then? Are we building a browser for a better world? ..it would be much more convincing if you guys didn't fire your CEO over political speech.

And that's where we're at right now. Maybe the 97% or whatever non-addon-using demographic in your telemetry data will make up the shortfall in contributions.

The telemetry probably shows that all the power users opted out of telemetry.

Quite a dangerous tool.

What happens if I copypaste some random text into the file and press save, by mistake? Are there mechanisms to limit the damage?

Also, when I remove a hash and save, the file is gone permanently, even if I paste it elsewhere, right?

...or you could just scrap the whole idea and not bother with it.

This is true for the user, too. If the only viable choices are 'verify claims at great cost and no gain every few months', or 'use some other privacy-respecting browser', I am going to recommend the second.

what percentage of FF users on the planet do you expect could read a paper on differential privacy and actually verify those points, while understanding all the ifs and gotchas, and be able to tell if any of the arguments are wrong? What percentage of that elite group would actually be willing to devote the time and energy, for free, for every one of the thousands of softwares they use?

So, what are the odds that we'll have an AI that writes at GoT quality before George finishes the last book?

Look at it from a security-conscious user's perspective: I would have to verify that:

1. The concept is sound. 2. It is implemented as described. 3. It is implemented with no bugs. 4. Mozilla is trustworthy 5. Any third-parties Mozilla involves in this process are also trustworthy. 6. All of the above will remain true.

Doing this would take a tremendous amount of both time and expertise, if even possible. If every piece of software I use makes me do this every year or so, I would get nothing else done.

In practical terms, your argument is no better than just saying, 'trust us, we're good for it', regardless of the merits of your tech. And we know Mozilla baked Google Analytics into FF's addon page, so trust is in short supply.

1. Any data collection at all deanonymizes the user, cf panopticlick.

2. Frankly even opt-out is not acceptable. I can't recommend any software that peridically asks users for data access, since there exist non-technical users who have a nonzero chance of clicking yes to everything. If they are related to me in some way this compromises my privacy also.

Look at it this way: whenever you are running a program you didn't write yourself, you're running a bunch of commands you never checked. This is no different to, say, downloading a precompiled executable and running it, with all the same problems and tradeoffs.

>what nefarious things can one do knowing that some anonymous user happens to e.g. refresh pages a lot (or even, how can that data be sold)?

Page refresh pattern data would go a long way in deanonymizing the user panopticlick style.

Generalized version:

"Only <low status> people get <common condition that I do not have, or would like to signal I do not have>".

Once you see the pattern you'll see it everywhere.