More on the corruption of Firefox, along with a social commentary regarding the assault on the Internet Archive and American Decline.
16 years ago, Robert Strong “They/Them”, proposed removing the Gopher protocol from Mozilla Firefox.
This is a form of vandalism and the start of giving Google total control of the company.
The Gopher protocol is very simple and contained no known security holes. It was implemented in Gecko with code inherited from Netscape, which was not huge.
The “proposal” was more outrageous than their removal of File Transfer Protocol support, which could have been beaten into better shape by dropping support for old and weird server implementations that nobody used.
It was surprisingly low maintenance as evidenced by how few iterations of the code there needed to be despite the fact that it was over a decade and a half old and ported from another browser at the time it was deleted.
In fact, Mozilla basically ignored community offers to help refactor it to be even smaller.
Interesting that they call something a security hazard when they merge entire systems to run proprietary binaries (WebAssemblies) into Firefox now because that’s what Google told them to do.
WebAssembly code is not well-written and it’s not a well-written specification, and it is impossible to properly secure without turning it off in about:config.
I still use Gopher protocol, many of the times I use it it’s to cut bloat out of Reddit or even Wikipedia and just read the text.
We all know why Google and Mozilla drop things like Gopher and FTP. It’s a power grab. If you can drop something from a Web browser, to many people it simply doesn’t exist.
They have been conditioned to think of the Internet not as a suite of protocols, dozens of which are not the Web, but “whatever some stupid Web site wants to run on my computer” which is normally a very insecure and bloated “Web App”.
I wish I could report that Mozilla and Google’s vandalism of Gecko stopped with Firefox, but I can’t. Rust modules and the deletion of Gopher have even made it into SeaMonkey. ChatZilla still recognizes gopher:// as a link, but when you click it, it says it can’t open them and to try the extension, which is OverBiteFF, which is broken, replaced by a “WebExtension” *barf* which does not work.
Lagrange (a Gemini and Gopher browser) is fantastic.
It is beyond the reach of Mozilla and Google. (Like Belarus and Russia, respectively.)
For a while, you could put Gopher back into Firefox yourself with “OverBiteFF”, but eventually Mozilla threw out powerful XUL extensions and replaced them with trash modeled on Google Chrome’s, and most of the good extensions simply were impossible to replace correctly and have never re-appeared. So now you need a special “browser” for Gopher, and Gemini protocols. Sure there’s a WebExtension, with no helper app for Linux of course, so that’s just swell.
It’s so much easier to read Wikipedia and other Web sites through a proxy to a simpler protocol, where you can get at the text and optionally load images (usually stock images you didn’t want) without all the hassle.
Though I usually use the newer Gemini protocol. There’s a Gemini proxy of Reddit at Gemi.dev along with the weather and a News site proxy.
That way I can keep an eye on the propaganda. It’s amazing that people actually pay to read propaganda.
There are times now, where I have three Web browsers open. SeaMonkey (which I use mainly), NetSurf without images or JavaScript (so I can view text-only in a graphical application), and LibreWolf (a Firefox fork minus the malware and mountain of trash from Mozilla). Three. This is not reasonable. I wish Mozilla would go back to making a good Internet application like they had prior to “Quantum”.
I (only) want to read the New York Times because it’s amazingly corrupt to the point where it’s a never ending source of amusement.
And there’s really no easy way to stop me, even over the Web, because I can always use a browser that simply couldn’t run their paywall code if I wanted to, like Links or Netsurf.
Mozilla not only removed Bypass Paywalls, but they also removed support for turning off JavaScript, even to just certain Web sites in the site permissions menu.
Why? They’ve always taken the side of people who want to tell your computer to work against you, the user. “Take back the Web?” Hardly. JavaScript is almost always there to do something harmful. (WASM too.)
It doesn’t surprise me at all that Google and Mozilla have killed alternatives to the Web as far as their browsers go, and are turning them into an operating system (and a really bad one).
The New York Times is functioning as an arm of the Biden Campaign. Parroting mindlessly, happy happy thoughts about a very sick American economy and running the KrugmanBot3000 for more “Doom Porn” articles about China.
Today, I read a new funny that I simply have to share. They said that “China has made all the easy gains it will get by moving workers from farms into factories.”
The American government moved factory workers to unemployment checks, and then varyingly dying of drugs (while blaming the Chinese, naturally), living in a tent and begging for change, or living with their parents, who might have had some savings or at least a check from Social Security, and who are now nearly dead.
Where is the “news”? Last I could stomach it, they were saying youth unemployment and living with parents was “The Charm of Multi-Generational Housing.”
Other “news” sites aren’t much better. The oligarchs have warred against the Open Internet for years, and won major victories through courts and corruption of Web browser companies.
This is coinciding with the assault on archive.org, which actually has nothing to do with a copyright lawsuit.
The propagandists must first wipe out all traces of any information they’ve said previously which is no longer convenient.
Then they can go ahead and deploy the new revisions and nobody will ever be able to prove it was ever different.
It’s exactly the same as Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Burning the old documents so The Party could retroactively change what it said.
It happened so often that they needed people incinerating their prior statements, full time.
Biden’s Ministry of Disinformation within the Department of Homeland Security laid it on very thick, too thick even, to pass muster, even in this Brave New World of iPhone zombies who barely know how to read and write, but have college debts, but they accomplish the same thing without official Disinformation Ministers now.
Very quickly, nobody was talking about the Disinformation Ministry, like COVID. Like all of the illegal and unconstitutional things they used COVID as an excuse to do, and it all vanished. The government courts standing there, fecklessly watching and and stalling, and aiding and abetting places like Illinois turning into a dictatorship where rule of law collapsed. It’s like it never happened.
The same people who have made the Illinois Constitution and the American one effectively cease to exist, most recently with their assault on the Right to Bear Arms, are now trying to pass a huge amendment to give the thing that no longer restrains the State government anyway “gender neutral language”. I won’t vote for it. Hopefully there are enough other people who haven’t lost their minds, who wish to preserve the majesty of the document, even though it doesn’t give them any rights anymore.
Back to censorship…Ah yes, when they’re finished with us, they can just delete the articles, neuter Wikipedia (Wikipedia Neutering is something government and PR firms do a lot of.), and plug the “Internet Archive” so that the former revisions and deleted whole articles will no longer ever prove there were such things, or at least such revisions as the initial ones.
The lawsuit against the Internet Archive is better to think of in the terms of billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel’s attack on Gawker using Hulk Hogan’s sex tape as the nominal focus of the lawsuit. The powerful and wealthy wanted to remove an embarrassment, and they did.
But the Internet Archive will obviously be a much greater loss. A tragedy.
The commons is being narrowed out of existence, because the propagandists don’t want a well-informed educated public. You can’t rule them if there are too many.
The Internet Archive’s fair use argument was very strong, and the oligarch-owned American courts smacked them down anyway.
It’s not as-if there was some sort of rampant piracy happening at the Internet Archive, although piracy is certainly less objectionable from a moral standard than Digital Restrictions Malware.
But even using a form of DRM to control how many copies of a digitized work could be used, to remain compliant with copyright law did not satisfy the courts, so far.
Considering how corrupt American courts are, I don’t expect their appeal to get much consideration. Hollywood backs the Democrat Party, and in return they give the major copyright interests whatever they want.
At various times, they’ve gotten close to copyright bills passing that said everything was copyrighted “forever” minus one day.
Their DRM systems have always failed, so their counter to that was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a felony to try to evade DRM.
In the America the corporations and the government propagandists built, drugs are plentiful, homelessness abounds, and information is cracked down upon.
Many years ago, most people had VCRs. Video Cassette Recorders.
If you had one that was older than the law requiring it to recognize Macrovision (copy restriction technique for analog tapes), or bought a “Macrovision remover” device, you could just take one movie and copy it to a blank tape.
Blank tapes were cheaper than a movie, so practically everyone I knew growing up had a house full of movies on blank tapes. You went to the rental store, rented a movie overnight, copied it to the other VCR with a blank cassette, made sure the copy worked, and then returned the rented tape.
Did Hollywood go under? No. They made a fortune in the video tape industry. They just always want more. So they arrange to get more, and for software and legal enforcement to that end.
Today, the nasty schemes from Google, Apple, and Microsoft, which include DRM, are meant to enslave people, take their access to information and culture away and dole it out only to people who can pay, and then get them to agree to be a jerk to everyone on the planet by saying “I can’t give you a copy.” as well as themselves, are marketed as “desirable goods”.
This is what Richard Stallman meant when he called Apple a “crystal prison”.
When I get new statistics showing Microsoft laying off, Windows usage eroding, and iPhone shipments down double digits, I feel great. More, please!
Their products are such overbearing tyrants that they even disable taking screenshots while a DVD is playing.
You may not be able to take pictures of windows in some apps, such as DVD Player.
-Apple
The manufacturer of brainwashing devices, the iPhones, don’t deserve success. Apple will continue to be praised in the media regardless of what’s really happening in there, because we know what the “news” is.
The iPhone may be very pretty, and it’s very bad.
At least few people really like their jailers at Microsoft…
The clocks are striking Thirteen in America, and a few large “tech” companies, useful enough to be bailed out as much as necessary with government indebtedness, will control everything you see and hear.
Everything that you see around you now is unreliable and must be questioned.
They have all day, all night, all the time in the world, to keep coming up with more garbage. Your sanity will be broken eventually. ⬆