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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Sure, but the way this usually works is that the government tells you to do something and if you don’t, they’ll find someone (or a couple of someones) on that list, arrest them, and charge them with a crime.

    Doesn’t matter if they did the crime, and it doesn’t matter if they’d be convicted, but the play is to keep your friends in jail until you capitulate to what they want. This is actually something that’s happened with tech companies before, like what they did with GoDaddy’s C-level in India.

    The problem is that there’s no damn way I’d want to be arrested by the upcoming US administration, because I’d bet $100 that their playbook will portray not doing what they’re demanding as a national security or terrorism offense, and if you’ve been watching ANYTHING for the last damn near 25 years, that’s a free pass for them to basically just vanish you until they feel like doing otherwise.

    It’s fantastic leverage against organizations that have US people and are, presumably, not willing to just let their friends spend who-knows amount of time in prison, and could probably result in some cooperation.

    And I’m about to both get downvoted and WELL AKSHULLY’d about how you can’t just vanish people under the US justice system, and sure, you’re technically correct. Except we’ve passed law after law after law since 9/11 that have basically given the government the ability to do any damn thing they please if they call you a national security risk or terrorist, up to and including Gitmo, in case you’ve forgotten that existed: which you shouldn’t have, because we STILL have prisoners sitting there.

    This is doomer as fuck, and horribly unlikely, but so is a demand to stuff backdoors into everything. But, if we head down that road, the only safe software will be ones that can’t be blackmailed like this which is essentially none of the major projects.








  • underestimate how much work Mozilla does in standards and low-level shared API’s via w3c

    Oh, I didn’t mean to disparage the work they do: I know it’s important and extensive. I’ve been a Firefox user since, well, it was called Netscape. It’s a critical piece of software.

    I was mostly just rolling my eyes at the sheer panic they’re having with the only funding source they’ve bothered to cultivate going away, along with the fact that a good portion of that money is spent on things that aren’t the browser, and frankly, don’t bring a lot of value to the table or matter in the slightest.

    Dumping the Corporation baggage and making the Foundation strongly independent makes a lot more sense than begging to let Google keep paying them, which seems to be their approach, at least based on that open letter.