skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not what the extension did or did-not do, it's the fact that Mozilla was originally a champion of privacy, open-source, and free software. The entire purpose of this browser was to escape the corporate bullshit of Netscape/AOL.

I switched from Chrome to the latest Firefox browser due to the awesome work the team has done on bringing it into the future. Then I find out that it comes pre-loaded with Pocket and this dumb ass game extension for a TV show promotion? Are you joking?! Fool me once...at least you can expect the level of integration you get within Google/Chrome.

This was completely incongruent with the ethos of Mozilla and Firefox. That is why this is a big deal. It's a huge slap in the face to those of us who choose to use this software because we know it WON'T do things like this.
Yeah, that's a pretty big deal. Costs add up quickly on S3 even with Glacier.

But I agree, often AWS is better for your lab than a home server, particularly if what you need to test is clustering.

Also, Elastic Filestore over a VPN connection is not a particularly great experience ;)
According to Pew Research, as of 2015, ~126,000 prisoners (state & federal) were held in private prisons[1]. As best I can tell, there are/were 2.2 million prisoners in the U.S. at the time. So about 5.7% of the prison population.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...
Kaspersky Sues Trump Administration for Banning Its Software
You can get what you want with capistrano and a something like unicorn taht supports no downtime deploys
Honestly, after a couple years here, it doesn't surprise me anymore.
Yes. (well, technically it started and checked if it is turned on before not starting the part that would have done everything else)
Mozilla as an organization and Firefox displayed their reckless disregard for my privacy. It would be foolish to dismiss it as just a blip.

If Mozilla cared about people trusting them with their privacy then they shouldn't have evicerated that trust by installing an extension (even switched off) behind their back.

They did this with Looking Glass, they did this with Pocket, and they did this with non-free WebRTC support. Three strikes and you're out!
It being installed without user consent is pretty shitty, but this whole time I was under the impression that it was enabled by default, which is insane.

If it wasn't in fact enabled, it's still dumb, but to me a misstep in respecting the user and not a complete breach of trust.
Mozilla, l’internet libre et M. Robot: Une opération maladroite de la fondation
"The Bitcoin system is the best known and most widely used alternative payment scheme, but so far it was very difficult to get accurate information about how it is used in practice. In this paper we describe a large number of statistical properties of the Bitcoin transaction graph, which contains all the transactions which were carried out by all the users until May 13th 2012. We discovered that most of the minted bitcoins remain dormant in addresses which had never participated in any outgoing transactions. We found out that there is a huge number of tiny transactions which move only a small fraction of a single bit- coin, but there are also hundreds of transactions which move more than 50,000 bitcoins. We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and the way they were dispersed, and realized that almost all these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010. Finally, we noted that the subgraph which contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a sufficiently persistent way." - Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir

ref: https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf
I don't really plan on giving them a chance; I went to about:preferences#privacy and removed the permission.
> Which is silly, IMO. What did this addon actually do, besides be installed without user consent?

Should be

> Which is silly, IMO. What did this addon actually do, besides break a trust and confidence that's been hard won over many years?
Not sure if any here have tried it, but would looping a recording of isochronic delta-wave tones during sleep help sync brain rhythms?
Kubernetes 1.9 brings beta support for Windows apps
Yes, clearly this apology written by their chief marketer heralds a true change in corporate priorities and culture, and wasn’t just ass coverage.
It's almost worse they didn't make any money for it. Shows what price they put on your privacy and autonomy.
Slightly off topic but, how do they create the lithography masks with such tiny and precise features?
Just to expand, even if it does turn out to be a race-based correlation (like we controlled for class, and the discrepancy was still present), we still don't know why.

One version is that a bunch of essentially similar cases come in, then the cases for white people are prioritized over the cases for PoC, because of racism. And therefore they get solved at a disproportionate rate. That's one potential explanation, that may have some potential solutions.

There are a bunch of different potential explanations though.

Maybe white people are more likely to be raped at parties, whereas PoC live in areas with less police enforcement so they are more likely to be raped by random strangers, so the crime is harder to solve.

Maybe black people are understandably less likely to talk to the police while they investigate anything, so it's harder to get witness testimony and the like.

Maybe there was a successful awareness effort targeted at black people, so they are now more likely to report when they are raped, whereas white people only report it when the case is especially egregious and egregious cases have more physical evidence.

I'm just making all these up to demonstrate that there are all kinds of potential explanations of why there's a difference between races even if the individual investigators try just as hard on these cases and the cases are assigned without bias. In basically all these cases the answer about how to improve this situation is different, so it's worth knowing the details. I think it deserves further study.
"We didn't think hard enough" is the 2017 version of "we thought we could get away with it"
It was activated, but not activated-activated (in that the addon gracefully decided to not do anything). But obviously we can't delegate that decision to the addons, that's why the addons pane exists after all.

Which begs the question: if you had to do something to activate it anyway, why abuse the "studies" sidechannel to install something that is deactivated, when you could just as well prompt to install it when it's meant to be activated?
My point is that if you were a parent, you'd probably realize that for many parents, a large part of the reason they strive to earn is to be able to leave their children in the best possible position in life. It's not something we should be trying to "correct" by removing that ability from parents, and it's uncomfortable to have the government trying to get in between that relationship, beyond the normal inheritance taxes.

Also, parental wealth doesn't "determine their future" any more than the quality of the parents does. It's certainly a leg up, all else being equal, but it's very possible to live an enjoyable and fulfilling life without much wealth if you're willing to get outside of the focus on consumption, and personally, I'd generally take poor, loving parents over rich, uncaring/selfish/narcissistic parents.

Who you're born to will always be a lottery that leaves winners and losers, even if everyone is equally wealthy. You'll get variable quality genetics, if nothing else, at least until we completely master human genetic engineering.
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff should be fired. Marketing shouldn't be allowed to modify the shipping bits at all, even if the Chief Marketing Officer tells them to. Any and all product changes should go through engineering and tracked in bugzilla. The CMO can file a ticket in the open just like anybody else can.
Don't iceweasle and friends do that?
Not to say you should doubt the Safari team, but I remember the auto-push of U2 albums to users without an opt-in being comically similar.
I use https://github.com/Strider-CD/strider
Why does Mozilla have a relationship with a television show?, does the show promote Firefox?.

"..Firefox has enjoyed a growing relationship with the Mr. Robot television show.."
Assuming that they don't have or can't patch in the ability to push extensions hidden and already activated would be naive at this point.
Digital art
Exactly. The photos in the article even show this. The modern glasses shown in the article clearly aren't filled with 7x1700-size servings each, otherwise they'd be drinking literally thimbles worth of wine in the 1700's.

Restaurants do tend to pour only part of a glass, usually 100-175 mL, depending on location, quality of wine, and country. However, I've seen plenty of people in a home environment pour to the top, or at least 2/3 of the glass, they're usually counting their drinks by the bottle though, rather than the glass.
Did Firefox perhaps get screen time in Mr. Robot?
> removed .. telemetry

We want our browsers to work. Without telemetry, they simply won't be able to find and solve bugs and crashes effectively.

Without crash reporting and other basic telemetry, it's basically impossible to know how prevalent certain bugs and configurations... which is of the utmost important for making a browser which actually works.
> Switching to their embedded DNS service pushes your whois information to the whole web

Whois and DNS are two different things; whois information comes from the registrar; DNS providers have no control over whois records.
The exclusivity period is intended to incentivize developing old drugs for new indications. What would you suggest instead of the exclusivity window?
I just downloaded Contexts.app -- I am using hyperswitch right now, but Contexts has some interesting tricks. I never have too many windows open, so I don't know if window search is necessary for me, but I like the CMD-Tab implementation on Contexts.
i worked at a startup for 6 months (fintech) whose entire value prop was built on the back of scraping.
There's a few different revocation options:

* `grant-computer` creates a KMS grant as per http://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/grants.... .
`revoke-computer` removes the grant without touching the keys.

* The AWS access keys for the IAM user the tool uses, which can be rotated, revoked, recreated, etc...

* The per-disk encryption key, which can be deleted from DynamoDB

* The KMS CMK, which can be deleted, disabled, etc...

I mainly wanted to solve having to plug in a keyboard and type something in, or having a key on a USB stick and be diligent enough to take it out of the home.
> You wouldn't have trouble googling it if it were true and known

I disagree, or maybe Im just poor at searching but terms like "NY Times, government, paying, publish, stories, CIA" I get so much non-relevant search returns its impossible to separate the whet from the chafe. It was also many years ago, so Im sure search bubbles these days will tend to return stories that are newer as a default. The story I am remembering is definitely different from the one you recommended. I wish I could find it, it was a fascinating read at the time.
They should have given the same treatment to Pocket and Hello: optional, manifests as an add-on, and possibly off-by-default for certain kinds of users. Instead we get value-adds baked directly into the broswer itself. I HATE this new age of corporate-oriented thinking, especially from a company that claims to reject those values.

I suppose Looking Glass is progress....
i don't understand? your insuperable bottleneck was always network then
I’ve never really done it but I’ve always thought that adding some randomness to my choices would make my life much more balanced. In a way, also experiments can be biased.
Nothing says free software like a joint promotion between NBC/Universal/General Electric/Comcast and Mozilla!

I mean, I already don't trust them with my privacy anymore. Clearly I need to re-evaluate their actual actions in Net Neutrality after this action.
None of those violated your privacy by any reasonable definition. Those three things did not provide any additional information about you to any third party (unless you opted in to using pocket).

WebRTC did violate your fundamental freedoms as defined by the FSF, but that's not a privacy violation.

Please explain how your privacy was actually meaningfully violated.
But an apology is much better than no apology, right?
>Add-on was also closed source.

What made you think it was closed source? The source for the add-on: https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr
Not very different from Pocket nor Hello?
I have said for years that the first truly general-level AI will not be robots or purely digital ghosts but will instead be...US.

Human cognition bolstered by direct, physical integration with increasingly sophisticated computing devices will, I believe, be the next real leap forward toward AI.
> unpaid collaboration

Even worse if this wasn't a google-like revenue deal.
I just wanna know what kind of idiot thought this was a good idea from the beginning.

I mean, I'm just a cybersecurity guy and a software engineer. I'm no PR person. But it doesn't take a PR expert to know that the world would eventually find out about an addon getting installed without permission and it would be a disaster.
Go back a few years and trade a ream of paper for the 10k pizza bitcoins.
What it did is that it broke user trust, something that Mozilla used to be quite big on. Very bad mistake imo.
Ok, so are you going to be using Edge or Chrome, and which of those respects your privacy more than Firefox.

No organisation is perfect and you have a right to be angry, but you're being a bit extreme IMO. It's much more nuanced than three strikes and you're out, and it's a shame to reduce it to that level.
the limitation is usually rate throttling on the page

>but these can be solved using multiple proxies and ssh tunnels. Colly has built in support for switching proxies

interesting

>your server has limited resources.

possibly.
If you had confidence that those ideas are slam dunk, you would mortgage your house, take a loan, hire developers and have them build the idea. Then you would profit immensely and retire in Bali.

You're not doing that because you can't estimate the risk vs. profit potential of your own ideas.

Neither can anyone else and that's why there is no "eBay for ideas". It's a perfect example of market for lemons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons).

Consequently, there is no market for "daily 3 startup ideas".
Let it go: the Arctic will never be frozen again
Who cares if it did?
I don't think this is the full story. They claim the add-on was disabled by default, and needed to be manually activated.

Note that the description of the Looking Glass addon was "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS."

Note also that I have never activated such add-on.

Now, If I go to about:studies (for those not familiar with SHIELD studies https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield) I see the following 'study':

pug-experience
Complete • My reality is different than yours

So, there was a Mozilla study, with almost the shame shady description, which DID run by default, at least for some users.

Are the Looking Glass add-on and this SHIELD study completely unrelated? Why do they share the same description? Why is Mozilla using these shady descriptions in the first place?

Probably I am just being paranoid, but Mozilla has done nothing to gain my trust, lately.
This counts as a personal attack. Those aren't ok on HN and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again. You may not owe better to whoever installed an extension in your browser but you do owe better to this community, if you want to comment here.

I'd appreciate it if you'd (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.

p.s. Your comment without the first sentence would be fine.
As much as I like kubernetes, I find the whole ecosystem to be frustratingly immature and unreliable. I'm sure it's trending in the right direction with respect to reliability, but it just doesn't feel like it's there yet. Minikube seems especially buggy and is missing some obvious features.
If you want some dynamic comments why not just use hypothes.is, which is about as minimal as you can get?
That's fairly typical corp speak and it's a surefire way to discredit everything else you're about to say. I really don't get why companies keep doing this, it's not as if their audience is entirely dumb.
> We absolutely, 100%, will flyby this object, and likely do a rendezvous mission as well

That's a lot of confidence. This is the first interstellar object passing through imaged. However, we believe several of these objects pass through the solar system per year. Why haven't they been detected until now? We didn't have sensitive telescopes doing whole sky surveys like Pan-STARRS until recently. As more projects like LSST come online, we will undoubtedly discover more interstellar objects. And we will learn a lot more about them from Earth-based observations. Perhaps we will get to the point with telescope sensitivity where we can detect them years away so they intercept is simpler. But I do not share your confidence that we will send our first probe to explore interstellar objects to Oumuamua just because it was the first one discovered.
Cut with lasers or electron beams as far as I know, and the masks are bigger by some multiple. Also have really weird patterns, since they have to correct for how the light-waves interact due to the small size.
Oh, I know there are very niche cases of companies making money out of it (one of the two jobs in my life that required web scraping was a freelance job for a company doing sector-specific news aggregation) I just find the stream of new libraries for doing this kind of fascinating.
I feel what you are going through. I wrote this last week trying to help: http://blog.cloud66.com/8-components-you-need-to-run-contain...
Mr Robot is a very activist show. It's entertainment, sure, but it's also attempting to send a message to it's viewers. Mozilla is attempting to push the same message. Aside from this misstep, what's wrong with that?
That's a large wine though. A standard is 175ml, large 250ml. However many places nowadays just serve large by default.
I thought the whole advantage of Disqus was that you can keep your static blog static w/o hosting the server machinery for handling comments a la Wordpress?

Schnack takes you back to square one? At that point why not throw up a wordpress install?
The outrage to significance ratio is off the charts on this one.
What's the non-free WebRTC support? I missed that.
None of this is necessary if you have JavaScript to control the error handling exactly the way you want. If it's a critical problem, you can display an error message. You can retry behind the scenes and succeed without even having to inform the user of a failure.

Again, I make the point that a pure declarative solution only works if you know every possible use-case. You can add all kinds of new tags and attributes that could possibly exist to solve the one problem you imagine right now and that still won't be enough.
Is Ancient History Completely Made Up by 'The Man'?
Wine was probably vastly more expensive as a proportion of income in the 1700s compared to today. Makes sense that glasses would be that much smaller.
You're right, but it started a few years ago. At least.
One gotsta make them dollars, right? I am not aware of their financial status but I'm fairly certain that Quantum development would have burnt a substantial hole in their Pocket.
I hope your dog need reduced in parallel. Skating dogs are surprisingly destructive.
Couldn't agree more. UK here as well and there is a rather idiotic culture of social and binge drinking which I got into in the mid 1990s driven by "the pub" and "the club". I quit alcohol entirely in 2002 (15 years ago as well!) after getting married and decided to replace it with the magical elixir that cures all ills: water.

The revelation of water came from having a saline drip after an accident. I felt fantastic afterwards. Full of energy, drive and able to actually process things in my brain. Turned out I'd spent the few years before this point entirely shrivelled up with dehydration caused by drinking only tea and alcohol.

Trying to shake the caffeine monkey of my back now. That's just as bad. Drinking lots of water does help however.
Pushed out silently as part of a mechanism designed to beta-test new browser features. Per their own documentation the extension is supposed to target 1-2% of the install base and pop up asking permission to continue.

This is basically Microsoft using Windows Update to install a desktop icon promoting the latest season of The Voice.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies
Yeh, bet sensationalist.

Study actually refers to "wine is increasingly served in 250 mL servings" and "usually a 175 mL measure".
I don't think you should leave your rice in a warm cooker overnight because it could develop bacteria.
You can get sherry glasses.
Optimizing for benchmarks only gets you so far, and often a change that benchmarks well can actually hurt performance in the real world, so telemetry is vitally important for judging real-world performance. Since Google is pretty comfortable with adding telemetry, they have excellent data and deep insights into the performance (and hardware compatibility, and network reliability, etc.) problems that occur in the real world, and can design Chrome to meet those needs. Mozilla is unwilling to telemetrize All The Things, but in order to stay competitive they need to understand the problem-space at least as well as their competition, and so you see them tying themselves in knots trying to walk the line between privacy and useful telemetry.
> Without telemetry, they simply won't be able to find and solve bugs and crashes effectively.

Users can be prompted to report bugs with some facility to provide telemetry (e.g. after a crash), but the browser must ask permission first.

On-by-default telemetry is tantamount to malware exfiltrating information about your computing activity to a third party.
What really bugs me is that I had a perfectly good Firefox until a few scant weeks ago when Mozilla decided to force-feed me an upgrade to new browser tech that I didn't ask for, screwed me six different ways at once in the middle of a project where I fairly critically depended on an extension that suddenly stopped working that had just about half the notes of a project in it and then, to add insult to injury push their own add-ons down my throat that I didn't ask for.

For someone who has stood by Mozilla over the last decade or so and who never switched to Chrome you can't begin to imagine how pissed off I am. User trust is earned bit-by-bit, you can lose it all in a day. Ask Lenovo how that sort of thing works.