I don’t know if it’s accurate to describe Qwant as “private.” There is a bit to be desired with their privacy policy, such as them apparently sending your IP address to Microsoft

https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/

There’s also this bizarre section

If you have not consented or are not subject to the Services offered, we automatically collect technical data… Salted hash of the IP address…, market segment of a query, date and time of the visit, information about the country and chosen language…

Anonymized by Microsoft after 6 months.

CEO: Why would we take your data, you directly fund us so obviously we will only focus on providing the best search experience

CEO: dumps money into AI and a T-shirt factory

Okay, so for those of us using third party apps like Thunderbird, everything is done using app specific passwords, which is great

The new feature for Email App Passwords for external email programmes

But if this is a new feature, how did third party apps work before? Could people just not use them if they enabled 2FA?

Edit: …a decentralized Monero exchange

There’s the Monero shilling I expect in every comment

Until the lawsuit between Steve Teixeira and Mozilla reveals the truth, I’m going to withhold my judgment about how fascistic Mozilla was internally.

Teixeira claimed Mozilla conducted an audit that found them pretty lacking in the equality department IIRC, and Mozilla’s own lawyers disputed many things but not that.

You can close a group and reopen it later.

I thought tab groups on the desktop were neat but ignorable… Until browser vendors started implementing stuff like this. Now it’s basically a halfway point between an open tab and a bookmark. Excellent for organization.

My YouTube alternative: still YouTube, but I screw them out of ad revenue with a dedicated account

You said you were done responding, so at least have the dignity of demonstrating a little bit of honesty where it is most apparent.

It seems

Any “privacy” improvements from random instances are not part of the core code structure

The privacy improvements are from the ActivityPub protocol. The author cites them.

Edit: …and the spammer who keeps copy-pasting the same irrelevant spam from thread to thread is back

Don’t be a jackass and don’t spam.

The trouble with the thing you quoted twice in a row - unnecessarily padding out your post - is that saying “Mastodon may not be perfect” does not cancel out Pixelfed’s massive security issue.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Non-malicious servers aren’t supposed to do what Pixelfed did.

Search that specification for “private.” You’ll find precisely one reference to it…

It might be better to look for what the article mentions: “manuallyApprovesFollowers”, and it is explicit about what to do when that value is set to true. I don’t understand how you’re confused by it.

Mastodon, in general, is regarded as careless with safety.

Regardless, two wrongs don’t make a right, and I found the description of how to properly handle a security issue as discussed in the article to be appropriate. For example, collaborating with administrators of large instances.

The “security issue” is created on Mastodon’s side

Are we reading the same article? I realize this isn’t the first time you implied this, but I thought I must have been mistaken.

From the original post: “Importantly, your Mastodon or GoToSocial instance isn’t handing your private posts to any random server, just because it asks.”

Mastodon is behaving. Pixelfed was not. Pixelfed fixed the security issue because it was their issue…

I looked at your comment before reading this article, and you make several bold statements that the article dispels

A fork of Mastodon created a new abstraction for “private posts”

The author of the article links to the official specification which was made for ActivityPub. This does not appear to simply be “some fork of Mastodon”, but if it is, please provide a citation.

they’re trying to blame Pixelfed for not adopting their homemade standard

See previous comment

It’s fixed in 1.12.5

The article also goes into great lengths about how the security update was handled poorly, with inappropriate communication along the way. It contrasts this with a correct update.

I miss those old images that would show you your IP address and ISP name, which were generated dynamically based on the request. They were designed just to be a bit frightening. But, because they were rendered on the server side, there was definitely nothing stopping them from recording your IP address too.

https://imgur.com/aYxadwg

Back when Samsung saw Android as a legitimate threat to their business model, and they made alternate apps to every Google offering, I think they did have a better ecosystem. I think that has waned in recent years, though.

And I say that as someone who loved Samsung phones at least until 2020, when they gave up on the SD card and started giving up on camera quality. I still think they make the best devices out of the box (between screen and camera output, and not overheating) but they’ve been lazy at the top

Samsung has retired their messaging app. Google Messages is the only option on Android.

(cc @[email protected])

Kagi doesn’t just add optional AI features, they are an AI-first company that wants to turn search into an AI agent. They wrote a manifesto about it.

Maybe manifestos aren’t worth much anymore, what’s with Mozilla abandoning theirs, but I tend to believe a company when they tell me what they are.

I agree, but I’ve seen so many arguments that “you need to pay the CEO millions, otherwise you’ll lose a CEO that’s definitely worth millions.” Not a great argument, but I think it’s somewhat laid bare by breaking down their actual salary versus their bonus, which is… Over nine times their salary.

It’s almost unfair that JWZ has to be grouped in with the same historical figures around Firefox as Netscape ghoul Marc Andreessen and JavaScript ghoul Brendan Eich. Firefox (and predecessors) aren’t managed by the best people.

FWIW, the Mozilla CEO salary actually went down in the last year we have records. From about $6.9 million to $6.2. (The base salary is still around $600,000, and the rest is a bonus.)