Former Mozilla CEO Launches Security-Centric Browser Brave 223
rudy_wayne writes: Former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich has launched a new Chromium-based browser called Brave. "Brave blocks everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising 'dirty pipe', impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals," Eich wrote on the Brave site. Former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal said in a blog post that "the web is broken," with current browser vendors unwilling to tackle the dilemma of blocking ads, while looking at alternative mechanisms for funding content. Gal said it was ironic Brave was a for-profit operation that can make money from reducing advertising.
Good on Brendan (Score:4, Insightful)
I've looked at his offering, and it's a step in the right direction. It's not as aggressive as what I currently do using Mozilla, but again, it's better than the default.
Whenever I visit people at home, they inevitably ask me to look at their computers and I'm always horrified by the shear amount of dreck online compared to my own laptop. I leave them with no tracking, no ads, you name it. Another happy "customer".
The Web has become too much about money. Not everything needs to be about money. The last several years has seen me not trusting bloggers as much as I would if they were not in it for the money. There are still a few good tech blogs with no ads, no flogging this or that. Old school BBS, Usenet-style information trading. Always the best.
Were I a billionaire, I would give away services with no ads, no tracking, no analytics, just to undercut the monsters like Google and Microsoft to show that it doesn't have to be about the money. Apple has more money in the bank than most countries and they smile, all along letting little girls slave away in the tech sweatshops of China and elsewhere, making their wares for pennies on the dollar, yet expecting Americans to pay highway robbery prices for a device that costs less than 1/4 of the asking price to bring to market. There's a difference between making a living and making a killing. Shareholders are the moral death to any company.
Important to note he's not using Gecko or Servo! (Score:5, Informative)
The most important thing I see out of all of this is that he isn't using Gecko, despite his very long history with that technology.
He's also not using Servo, the browser engine Mozilla is working on to eventually replace Gecko.
I think this says a huge amount about the sorry state of Mozilla's offerings today.
Users of Firefox already know what I'm talking about. They know how much slower Firefox feels than Chrome, Edge, Safari, and browsers using other engines. They know how Firefox uses more memory. They know how Firefox suffers from bugs that haven't been fixed even after many years.
It's truly sad what has happened to Mozilla's products. They've shot themselves in the foot by going off on stupid tangents like Firefox OS, Persona, and especially Rust and Servo.
Rust and Servo are leading Mozilla down a dead end trail. They're a twin example of software rewrites gone bad.
Rust is basically trying to rewrite C++, but hasn't done a very good job. The syntax is no better, and sometimes much worse. Its approach to resource management is harder to understand and use practically than C++'s. There's only one Rust implementation, and it's buggy and slow. The Rust community is way too focused on social justice and censorship. They even have a moderation squad [rust-lang.org], for crying out loud! It took them ages to get a 1.0 release out, and it isn't good at all. Then there's the fact that C++ has continued to evolve and get better, along with having multiple excellent implementations.
Servo is written in Rust, so that helps explain why it's a failure so far, too. When I tried it recently, it gave me what I'd consider an experience similar to IE 3, which dates back to 1996. Servo has a huge amount of catching up to do. The entire situation is not encouraging at all.
Mozilla should end the Rust and Servo projects now, along with Firefox OS and their other failed initiatives. They need to get back to focusing on Gecko and Firefox. They need to restore Firefox's UI to the usable Firefox 3.6 approach. They need to migrate Gecko to C++14, and prepare for the use of C++17 instead of switching to Rust. They need to fix Gecko's performance issues. They need to fix the longstanding bugs.
Right now there are at least a few remaining users of Firefox and Gecko, although their number is dropping. There are basically no users of Servo. Mozilla's only hope for salvation is to win back the Firefox users they've alienated over the past few years. I fear that if they don't do that, then they will slide into irrelevancy. That won't be good for them, and it won't be good for the web either.
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I largely agree with you, except
Rust is basically trying to rewrite C++, but hasn't done a very good job. The syntax is no better, and sometimes much worse.
Rust's goal isn't to re-write C++, it's to create a safe language with strict guarantees about resources and memory use. They chose to use a syntax and keywords very similar to C++ as design choice, just as Java and C# did.
Its approach to resource management is harder to understand and use practically than C++'s. There's only one Rust implementation, and it's buggy and slow.
Correctness is usually harder than playing fast and loose. Look at const-correctness in C++ and how "difficult" that was prior to some of the C++11 changes. Rusts performance is also not that bad (especially when you compare apples/apples with C++ code t
Re:Good on Brendan (Score:5, Insightful)
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Interesting team (Score:3, Interesting)
So, Elissa Shevinski [twitter.com], noted self-proclaimed feminist and author of the anti-SFBay-discrimination book Lean Out, is working as the Head of Product for a browser startup by Brendan Eich [wikipedia.org], most famous for being forced out of Mozilla for funding anti-LGBTQ views through funding efforts against CA Prop 8. This is weird.
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Politics makes for strange bedfellows and it wouldn't surprise me if Elissa was another one of those feminists who has more in common with someone like Benny Hinn [wikipedia.org] than they do with supporting the actual ideals of the movement. I'
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Politics makes for strange bedfellows and it wouldn't surprise me if Elissa was another one of those feminists who has more in common with someone like Benny Hinn [wikipedia.org] than they do with supporting the actual ideals of the movement.
You most mean Benny Hill [wikipedia.org]. There, fixed that for you.
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She has written and spoken about this at length. She says she doesn't want to only work with people who share her views, and also hopes to effect change by engaging with such people.
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There are any number of simple explanations.
1) Just because Eich hates gay people doesn't necessarily mean he hates women too. Just because both groups are traditionally crapped upon by the conservative mainstream doesn't mean every member of said mainstream thinks identically. No such thing as a collective hive mind yet, after all.
2) Some factions of feminism (Not all, mind you.) are fairly hostile towards gay people, especially gay men. To this faction, just having the Y-chromosome automatically makes
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1) Just because Eich hates gay people doesn't necessarily mean he hates women too. Just because both groups are traditionally crapped upon by the conservative mainstream doesn't mean every member of said mainstream thinks identically. No such thing as a collective hive mind yet, after all.
Just because he doesn't think the state should subsidize gay marriage doesn't mean he hates gays. I don't think the state should subsidize tobacco but I don't hate smokers.
3) Some people are simply happy to compromise and throw out any principle if they think there's money to be made.
Or maybe they're actually just practicing tolerance.
And will insert its own ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, the main selling point of this browser is that it will block ads, right?
The summary fails to mention that the plan is to start inserting its own ads. [engadget.com]
You know, I hate ads as much as everybody else. But that just feels dirty to me.
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It's actually the only sane approach to the modern web. The web can't be "free". Someone's got to pay the bills. It either has to be ad-supported or subscription-based. Think about it: if you go subscription-based for everything you are MUCH more trackable than an ad-based web.
The current ad-based web is an absolute nightmare. The average person who doesn't know the magical combination of browser add-ons ends up with a frozen browser several times a day. Try to even have 6-7 tabs open in Chrome or Firefox a
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The network was designed on open standards and anyone is free to make their own network (eg: LAN, wireless mesh/community networking).
It can still be free it's just corporate greed has come in to milk it for money just like they did TV, newspapers and radio.
Seriously join a community wireless network, if there isnt one near you create one!
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I absolutely agree anyone is free to set up a free website and pay for it with their own money... and many do. I also agree that anyone is free to go to a website that supports itself with ads. And any website that uses an *honest* ad system (I.E. serving them from their own server) can't even be subverted by Brave.
And, anyone is free to keep on supporting the current web, disaster that it is. We all have choice, at this stage of the game. I'm saying Brave is the only sane choice for the greater commercial
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It's actually the only sane approach to the modern web. The web can't be "free". Someone's got to pay the bills.
No no no, I'm a self-entitled millennial! Gimme gimme gimme!!
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Bullshit. The only ones who will die off are the sites that don't actually offer anything of value or real products to sell. The rest of the internet will route around them and fill in any gaps.
I was on the internet for years before all of the advertising douchebags came along and it worked just fine.
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The web can't be "free". Someone's got to pay the bills.
The red site seems to be doing fine.
magical combination of browser add-ons
Ghostery and either AdBlockPlus or uBlock. I haven't used uBlock so I can't offer an endorsement there.
He is protecting your privacy.
Here's where I've probably got my tinfoil on too tight. We know that feminism is involved in this browser. So I have to ask: is this browser really going to protect my privacy?
I've probably dropped enough hints that it would be trivial to dox me (feminism is holding me accountable for things that have happened in real life, not online as far as I know), but wouldn't i
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It's not a sane approach because advertising is a bubble.
The only sane approach is direct monetization of services. Could you imagine Facebook with a $1/year subscription?
I have actually considered this a lot. I've been working, conceptually, on something like Craigslist, but more modernized. A system to categorize and find things. Meetings, landmarks, objects for sale; it's more abstract in design. I started sketching out a basic reputation system so people can mark and comment on listings, then
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Clever plan. Create an ad-blocking browser, but then create your own advertising network that works with it. Site owners have a simple choice: join your network or get $0 in advertising revenue from that user.
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> It's actually the only sane approach to the modern web. The web can't be "free"
Let me disagree with both of those.
First, more fucking ads is not particularly sane. Ads suck. They hurt people.
Second, the web can be free. It would be a much smaller web, but it could absolutely exist. Plenty of people run websites that aren't profitable, and that's always been the case. What you can't have is a giant industry built on something without a way to monetize (literally: "turn into money") that thing.
But a
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It's actually the only sane approach to the modern web. The web can't be "free". Someone's got to pay the bills. It either has to be ad-supported or subscription-based. Think about it: if you go subscription-based for everything you are MUCH more trackable than an ad-based web.
I'm already paying my ISP for the privilege of accessing the Internet (including the web), so why should I be expected to pay more for its content? Either by watching ads, subscribing to services, or whatever?
I already pay for my car and gas and roads (via taxes). I have to spend even more money once I get to the store? They should give me their products for free.
I run a few small-time websites that I give access to for free, and I couldn't care less about tracking, ads, or whatever (mostly because my sites are low-traffic enough that I can afford the out of pocket expenses myself).
Sure that works for low traffic websites, or if you're rich to be able to bleed money...
For bigger sites that cost more to run, ads are one way to generate revenue, so are subscriptions, but those are not the only ways to cover costs. They could also sell standard stuff like tee shirts or other tchotchkes, they could take microdonations, they could go the patreon route, and so on.
lol you expect people to voluntarily pay for a thing! Ugh, there's that stupid Wikipedia banner again. I can't wait until they leave me alone about it again (when other people, that aren't me fund it)
Ad revenue is propping up a lot of sites that have awful content (or frequently no original content at all), but inexplicably lots of traffic, and it wouldn't hurt my feelings if there were less of those around.
If the sites are so bad, why are you (or other people) visiting the
Re:And will insert its own ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, it is not a new browser, It is a new ad company that has a browser.
Re:And will insert its own ads... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lol.. it doesn't claim to remove ads, it claims to remove tracking and malware inserted by ads. It stops ad networks from knowing that you visited dirtylittlewhores.com a short while before checking toysrus.com for the yoda doll (that you can put up you ass) and stops drive by downloading.
Let's get a grip on reality here and at least read the site before jumping to conclusions.
Re:And will insert its own ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, dude, seriously, read closer ... he's going to block the ads already there, and then put in his own ads:
The ad newtwork can't track you because it doesn't serve ads to you.
And then he charges someone else to sell you ads.
The now mysteriously missing engadget [engadget.com] link is the source of that quote.
Oh, do lets.
Because the business model is replacing existing ads with new ads under the guise of giving us less tracking and more security.
This is about creating his own ad network, and telling us it's for our benefit.
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This is about creating his own ad network, and telling us it's for our benefit.
So, just like Opera and Vivaldi then. Seems to be about what you get when you start with Chromium.
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Because the business model is replacing existing ads with new ads under the guise of giving us less tracking and more security.
Didn't some ISPs attempt this before having their own legal teams shout ABORT in their face?
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But he never says he is going to remove or stop advertising,. He says there is a subscription model if you want no ads but his entire contention is about tracking and privacy.
I assume he is going to compensate the sites for the lost ad revenue but I'm guessing on that.
As for starting his own ad service or network. I don't care about that. I don't like the tracking and links to gay bars because i read a story about lgbq or what the hell ever it referred to now.
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You should practice what you preach. There will be ads just like i said. What is being removed completely is the tracking and infections just like i said. Your quoted line even says as much
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What did I say that was incorrect. Ads will be there. The claim is not to remove all ads but to remove the tracking as i said.
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I took their claims right off their website. I seriously doubt you work for brave unless you are the janitorial services or something. You couldn't even point to what was incorrect or correct it. Your laughable at best. Otherwise pathetic.
How is this not slashvertisment? (Score:1)
From TFA: "By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces."
Brave is an Ad Funnel (Score:5, Interesting)
The first mention I saw of Brave was this morning on a site, I think linked from another Slashdot article, run by the advertising industry. The insiders on that page were touting Brave to one another as a new platform that will send ads only from servers it controls. "More importantly", they said, everybody will get a share of the proceeds—Mozilla and advertisers both. It's clear that users of Brave will have no option to block the ads that appear in any way. So if you're ready to let someone else decide that certain ads are okay and you ought to see them, this is your browser. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot fucking pole.
Re:Brave is an Ad Funnel (Score:4, Funny)
Had I wanted someone else to administrate my computer I would have installed WIndows 10.
Lawyers are Going to Love This! (Score:3, Insightful)
So let me get this straight - Brave strips ads off of websites, replaces them with those of Eich's choosing? Ha ha, fuck no.
Aren't the advertisers going to be a little bit pissed about this? This is like renting a billboard to put up your advertising, then some other guy comes down, tears down your ads and replaces them without paying.
Brave is a dumb, dumb idea. Hard to believe, but anybody looking to block advertising is not willing to replace it with other advertising. And advertisers would just need to count hits from Brave browsers to assess legal damages.
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Except it's not a billboard, or if it is, it belongs to Eich right? Whatever he puts on it is his business. If you don't like looking at "his billboard" don't use his browser. I'm a researcher and programmer, like many others on here. How many of you want to know that you're legally restricted from "some kinds of code that might hurt some random advertiser's bottom line?" Especially since what kind that is would be totally up to debate, but as you know... Debates in courtrooms are not the place anyone wants
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Ah, but business models are magical things, comprised of wishful thinking and unicorn farts. They make the world go around, without business models we'd all be stuck to live in dismal reality.
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This sounds like the 1990s "make money while you buy" applications that showed ads and gave you 10 cents per hour.
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Hard to believe, but anybody looking to block advertising is not willing to replace it with other advertising.
I'm not so sure about that. A lot of people who block ads are doing it due to the malware threat. If Brave can establish itself as a browser that only serves safe ads (and perhaps even non-obnoxious ones) then I can see a lot of users going for this.
It's not much different from the way AdBlock is pushing with their acceptable ads programme (or whatever it's called).
And advertisers would just need to count hits from Brave browsers to assess legal damages.
This is probably more of an issue but it seems like a tangled legal territory to try and get damages from, if it's the users themselves who are
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I'm pretty sure Brave does not function by using a proxy operated by the comapny. It's a tool that users use once the data has, as you say, "gone through the pipes and made it to their machine", to choose how they wish to view it. It's basically a re-hashed browser with an AdBlock Plus clone built in, and less transparency on what will be considered "acceptable" ads.
AdBlock Plus has, by the way, already been attacked in the courts by the advertising industry, and been found to be 100% a-ok kosher.
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Not to mention the website operators as well. If someone has ads on their site, the purpose is to help pay for the site operations. A program that removes the ads and replaces them with its own ads is just harmful to the website operators.
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Not really. A better "real-world" analogy is a person wearing augmented-reality goggles... MS hololens, some future evolution of Google Glass, or an Oculus + GoPro hack... as they walk around town. Said person then runs software on his own goggles that blocks out the billboard from his vision and overlays some other content. The original billboard is still intact and there to see for anyone who wants to do so.
I fail to see any problem. (Other than the involvement of Brendan Eich.) How I choose to see t
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> So let me get this straight - Brave strips ads off of websites, replaces them with those of Eich's choosing? Ha ha, fuck no.
I get that you are irate about this, but ...
- these are my eyes ... and unless I am contractually obligated otherwise... ... websites can't sue me (or my agents) for choosing what to see
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> Brave is a dumb, dumb idea.
Sort of ... it doesn't go far enough and just ends up moving ad content from one platform to another. Unless Brave transforms into some sort-of hyper-personal Siri
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And it's not Adds that most want to block.
It's the abusive Adds, tracking, and that kind of stuff people want to block the most.
And it's the blanket blocking all Adds that comes back to bite us. So it irks me quite a bit when I see that being pushed.
Great, another Chrome-clone... (Score:2)
Okay, we have how fucking many Chrome clones out there?
And Mozilla has essentially given up, begun slobbing the Google knob, and is in the process of mutating from an independent browser with some of the widest plugin support extant into a Chromezilla?
So, we're down to Edge and Chrome now. Both with shitty, mickey-mouse plugin support.
Fucking great...
sounds good (Score:1)
I'll have to give it a try.
Just as long as he's not making money off my web activity that will wind up supporting this thing where blacks can marry white women. I demand traditional marriage! Next thing you know, goats will want to marry white women!
What am I missing? (Score:2)
I don't get this. Why would anyone willingly use a browser that is designed to serve you targeted advertising, when you can simply block all ads with a hosts file + adblock + noscript + etc? You're simply replacing one nuisance and security risk with another.
I have no guilt about blocking all forms of advertisement on the web, because content providers cannot assure me that such advertising does not pose a threat to my computer's security or to my personal privacy. End of argument. They're welcome to no
Brave? (Score:2)
If it was "brave" it would *allow* everything and deal with it.
Unless he called it Brave [wikipedia.org] for other reasons, like: he consulted a witch for help, used a spell to transform Firefox into a bear. Now he must act to undo the spell before its effects become permanent.
Oh the irony... (Score:2)
That in order to sign up for the beta I had to disable Ghostery and uBlock for the pop-up to display properly.
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Not only is Eich a bigot, but he doesn't even know how to display text without requiring JavaScript. How good can his little me too browser project be if he's that incompetent?
Equally bigoted are the people who couldn't handle his views.
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Equally bigoted are the people who couldn't handle his views.
It wasn't his views that drew ire, it was his actions. You have to intentionally mislead people to make your point, that's not very solid footing for you.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Good thing he is not, nor ever was, intolerant.
"There is not a scintilla of evidence that he has ever discriminated against a single gay person at Mozilla" - Dissents Of The Day. The Dish.
The only bigotry here is the bigotry you and your ilk seem so willing to project on others.
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And if he had problems with the nascent statute because he felt that it would be successful fully struck down via legal challenge due to poor construction/wording, and a desire to put something more concrete in its place?
Would that have made a difference?
Of course not. It's always about "He hates gays."
Note: I'm not saying that IS the reason. Just saying that people have raged on this guy with nothing more than a mere data point and a couple metric assloads (because imperial assloads are so passe) of supp
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
Eich: "OK I'm going to take some of my own personal money and put it towards a cause I believe in"
LGBT: "What? It's against us? He's not fit to be a CEO!"
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You misrepresent the position, making a straw man.
LGBT people should be able to express themselves at work, just like everyone else. Photos of partners on their desks, time off to care for them when they are ill, being open in the same way straight people are free to be in so many little ways.
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Fuck you. I don't give a fuck about the man's politics. This is America, you have the fucking right to be a bigot, a racist, whatever the fuck you want to be. If his product is better than the rest, I'll use it. I don't care how he feels about gays or whatever other protected class we've decided is being slighted today.
"Intolerance won't be tolerated." Great, fucking beautiful. At least you have the gall to come right out and say only your views deserve to be heard, and everyone else can go fuck thems
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Equally bigoted are the people who couldn't handle Adolf Hitler's views.
Adolf Hitler had every right to his views, and every right to express them, to participate in the political process. He did not have the right to use force to impose those views on others when those avenues didn't work out.
Eich was not the one that used force on others in his story. He participated in the political process to support views he had every right to hold, and every right to express. There's no evidence he ever discriminated against a gay person at Mozilla.
"Tolerance" means to accept the right of people you disagree with to exist in society, and to not try to kill them or force them out. Eich was tolerant - not accepting, which is a higher bar, but tolerant. His opponents were intolerant, and forced him out.
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Actually, yes, he was.
He directly contributed to a cause that took away the rights of other people, for no other reason than that he didn't think they should be allowed to have them.
So no, he wasn't some innocent party just "expressing his opinion". He did a direct action, which had a negative effect on an entire class of people, for no other reason than his own intolerance.
So what if he didn't discriminate (directly) against gay people at Mozilla? He discriminated against gays in an entire *state*, which
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He participated in the political process. That's how adults who cannot agree settle disputes. You fight the metaphorical good fight in the campaign, and you accept the result of the election. You're only argument is that you disagree with him.
You won, get over it.
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No, my argument is that he wanted to strip citizens of their rights, for no other reason than that he doesn't like them.
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand. Arguing topics and policies among equal people is politics. Stripping people of their rights for no other reason than "because you can", is oppression.
I'm starting to believe that you're a psychopath or something. This issue isn't about "winning". It's about equal rights. If you don't believe all people deserve the same rights equa
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No, my argument is that he wanted to strip citizens of their rights, for no other reason than that he doesn't like them
That's your opinion. Do you understand that other people may have other values, and thus form differing opinions? Can you at least entertain the concept that someone who disagrees with you isn't evil? Can you imagine, even hypothetically, that someone who takes the other side on this issue intends the best for the community, because by their values they are maximizing the good?
Being unable to understand where someone else is coming from, thinking that they can only be evil or stupid, is something I had e
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That's your opinion.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but did he not give money to an advocacy group whose sole purpose was to take partnership rights, which are granted to all other citizens of the state, from gay people?
This is either factually correct, or factually incorrect. If I am wrong, then I take it back. But if that fact is true, then he provided a material contribution to a group that would be considered a hate group by pretty much every country in the world whose society isn't clouded by medieval religious doctrine
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
Hitler tried to exterminate an entire people, citing the dangers of the International Jewish Conspiracy and siding with Italian Fascism for its success in defeating International Jewery.
Slave owners restricted people from education. They also supported a legal system allowing the murder of an entire race of people, so long as another race of people did the murdering. They disenfranchised this group, restricting their civil rights as a whole not just by eliminating the burden of due process, but also by allowing atrocities against them ranging from cruel and unusual punishment to simply rendering judgment (with or without due process) for free speech if that speech offended another race of people.
Rapists physically brutalize people and force them into sexual submission.
Eich funded a campaign seeking to prevent State legal recognition of a social union.
Have you fought for legal polygamy? Have you demanded the IRS allow men to marry multiple women, and women to marry multiple men, and each to marry each other? Have you lobbied Congress to make marriage to animals legal, or are the Welsh beneath your morals?
Society makes two types of delineations: the concrete and the arbitrary. Our concrete delineations show a real victim, real harm, and real reasoning: we stop threats such as murder, assault, and theft, because a person carrying these actions out brings harm to others. We make other, arbitrary delineations, like age-of-consent (why does it range from 14-18 depending on state?), legal drinking age, drug laws, and alcohol laws.
If you think Eich is a terrible person for not supporting the state recognition of a legal union between two people, then you are a terrible person for not supporting the rights of parents to give their teenagers liquor, or for people with weird sexual deviant behavior to own horses.
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Re:No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm outside the system because I don't have any social biases. I have my own internal responses and subsequent avoidance behavior; but avoidance just means keeping myself out of meaningful contact with things I avoid. I don't smoke (anything), but I don't lobby for banning cigarettes and marijuana because it's not particularly my problem if someone else is smoking.
I also don't fuck animals, but it's not particularly my problem if some dude 5 miles away is keeping horses because his wife likes sucking them off. That's their business, as long as the horse isn't being emotionally tormented by the activity.
I don't form social attachments. I don't have an impulse to cling to a group view of how the world needs to operate and then attack others for offending my morality. Things are disgusting, but not inherently wrong; other things are harmful to others, create unwilling victims, and thus are inherently wrong. If someone dragged me into their obscene farm sex orgy, that would be a problem.
You're inside the system. You try to associate with others, think from their perspective, and protect them from ideals which distress them. To do this, you take those ideals into yourself, and become distressed by them. Other ideals are meaningless to you. You look at polygamy in Utah and claim there's something wrong with *those* people, and they shouldn't be allowed to do that, or at least that it's not important and there's no civil rights crisis because marrying 6 people is against the law and they should know better. They're not *your* social group, and nobody in your social group really has any emotional investment in the cause for polygamy.
Who is the victim, but the man arrested for doing what only affects him and his willing participants?
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And I would submit that intolerance of intolerance is also intolerance. People have a right to their views, even if they are moronic, stupid, dangerous, whatever. Society has become far too obsessed with fairness, everyone on a level playing field, whatever. It's a sickness. As long as people don't harm others physically, steal, kill, or maim, let people be. If enough people can swing a vote one way, hey, the mob rules. It will swing the other way -- that's what pendulums do.
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And I would submit that intolerance of intolerance is also intolerance. People have a right to their views, even if they are moronic, stupid, dangerous, whatever. Society has become far too obsessed with fairness, everyone on a level playing field, whatever. It's a sickness. As long as people don't harm others physically, steal, kill, or maim, let people be. If enough people can swing a vote one way, hey, the mob rules. It will swing the other way -- that's what pendulums do.
Yeah, to just say "hey, the mob rules" as justification for violating basic human rights (these votes have consequences for people) explains to me why we have a different view on this.
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By supporting anti-gay laws, Eich HAS harmed others. You can't really be so short sighted that you didn't know that, right?
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy only works if people are allowed to have an opinion, speak freely, and not fear losing their job because of a donation to a cause that even Obama supported at the time.
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Ahh, so if someone were to donate to drug cartels or terrorist organizations, you'd be OK with that and wouldn't want them losing their jobs.
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A CEO job is a special kind. The CEO serves as the public face of a company, and as such needs to reflect the values of that company - at least to the extent that the customers of the company don't revolt. That's what happened here. Mozilla fans didn't like his bigotry and, since Mozilla is as much a political movement as a product, that mattered to its survival. He didn't get fired for his views, he got fired for alienating his customers, and in turn, losing the confidence of his board.
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IMO, there was more outrage over what happened to Eich than there was in support of the social justice crowd. Mozilla surrendered to the vocal minority. I believe part of their decline has been due to distrust. As you said, Mozilla thinks that it's part of a social movement. For many, that means they can't be trusted. Considering that browsers see everything we do online, having a malicious organization behind the browser is far too risky.
I don't like this crossing of social issues with business, it's
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His actions are not those of a bigot. Also, Mozilla perhaps alienated its customers more meaningfully by firing Eich.
Would Congress impeach Obama and Clinton for similar bigotry? The only difference is they've been more fleet-footed with their ethics than has Eich.
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Can you think of an instance where Obama or Clinton tried to deny a group of people some pretty basic right based on who they were? I doubt it. The closest you'll get is the twisted-ass pretzel logic that making an official stamp a marriage license amounts to denying her right to discriminate based on her 'religious values'. This is a pluralistic nation, and I'm sorry, but your religious values do not extend to my rights. You can think what you want, but you can't make me live according to your religio
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There's far more to the issue than religion. But that's not really relevant here. The problem is that someone was targeted for a political contribution. It could be a progressive cause, could be a conservative cause, could be something else. I prefer a strong boundary between personal life and work life, they should cross paths as little as possible. You ought to be able to leave work when you leave work.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
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Democracy only works if people are allowed to have an opinion, speak freely, and not fear losing their job
No. That's what anonymous speech is for. Freedom speech is not freedom from consequences, hence the necessity of anonymity.
In any case, political views are granted no special protection. While you can't change your sexuality, you certainly can change your bigoted views.
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I seem to recall that the donor list to the PAC could not be disclosed legally and taking action against an employee for such donations was in fact illegal in California. So yes, there was a special protection.
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Eich's opinion was irrelevant for the position he was in. He's a person, he's entitled to his beliefs. There's no evidence that he brought that into the workplace, and it's disgusting that others would.
As for who won, how is Mozilla doing today? Not very well.
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That had nothing to do with his role as CEO. If the workers are against it, they can donate to their cause or volunteer. Of course in your mind, they could then be fired. You would never stand for this behavior if the sides were reversed.
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The uphill battle is in justifying why he wouldn't act on his beliefs in that position. Let's stop kidding around about this, there's no way any other CEO would be given as much credit as you're giving Eich.
There is no battle to be had. His performance as CEO should be judged on what he did as CEO. He shouldn't be taken out by a character assassination over something he did years prior. If anything, the furor should have been pointed atthe board that brought him in. He was already vetted. Mozilla should have a company-wide vote if they want their workers to have a say in the selection process. This was an attack by a special interest to take someone out in a way that would be newsworthy. It had nothing
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And I would submit that intolerance of intolerance is also intolerance.
Depends upon the degree of intolerance. If the degree is "I don't think that someone doing that should get a tax break", I agree. If the degree is "We should go round anyone like that up, and publicly execute them" I disagree.
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
And I would submit that intolerance of intolerance is also intolerance.
That's just doublespeak. If someone attacks you and you are forced to defend yourself with violence, then yeah, it's violence. Violence in defence of violence is also violence. Doesn't mean it is necessary the wrong reaction or immoral in any way.
As long as people don't harm others
Eich gave money to a fund that was trying to deny basic rights to gay people, doing them harm. Naturally, this upset many people, and is the textbook definition of bigotry. In reaction, people who were upset decided they would no longer be willing to do business with this person. That's fine, his views are not a protected attribute over which he has no control, they are something he decided upon and can freely change at will.
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Eich gave money to a fund that was trying to deny basic rights to gay people, doing them harm.
There is no right to have your marriage recognized by the state or by society.
In reaction, people who were upset decided they would no longer be willing to do business with this person. That's fine, his views are not a protected attribute over which he has no control, they are something he decided upon and can freely change at will.
There is no justification for the thought policing you wish to impose on Eich.
But that is the way of Social Justice. Point, Shriek, Persecute.
Re: No thanks (Score:2)
It would be nice if we were all sitting around so we could fight.
Marriage has a purpose. It is a bargain society makes with fertile couples to subsidize the creation and nurturing of the next generation of mankind. It's not a human right, and it imposes an obligation on the people getting married to be loyal partners and good parents.
If it's not that, then it shouldn't exist. I reject the idea that any two people qualify for special treatment under the law just because they sleep in the same bed, and so
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First off, you may want to read the universal declaration of human rights. It mentions the right to marry and for that right to be respected. You can also read Loving v. Virginia and Turner v. Saffley if you want US jurisprudence.
The right to marry is a different thing than a duty for others to recognize your marriage.
To exercise your right to marry, find your marriage partner and marry them. No outside parties are involved in this process.
But fundamentally what you are doing is removing people's freedom to form contracts.
Liar. A contract can exist without government recognition and enforcement. Eich did not campaign to interfere with homosexual marriage contracts. He donated to the cause of conserving the traditional legal definition of marriage, which does not prevent homosexual marriage contracts from
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he doesn't even know how to display text without requiring JavaScript.
That must be why he invented it.
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He invented JavaScript, because he couldn't figure out how to make text display otherwise.
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he doesn't even know how to display text without requiring JavaScript. How good can his little me too browser project be if he's that incompetent?
It's not surprising that Mr. Eich has a strong bias toward Javascript, since he invented it. The bigger problem is his proven track record of incompetence as the leader of an organization. Everything that made Firefox popular in the first place has been stripped out and thrown away.
Given his complete disdain for a decent UI, I doubt that his new browser, Yet-Another-Chrome-Clone, is going to get any traction.
What we really have here is just another rich guy with nothing to do. And I'm sure the choice of
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But the Firefox for iOS code is open sourced so he could've used it. It's not as if Chromium as is will work on iOS either.
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And Chrome on iOS doesn't use Blink. So mentioning iOS is a red herring to being able to use Firefox for desktop OSes.
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New engine? That's bad because it means more testing
Existing engine? That's bad because monoculture.