Brave and Your “Social Credit Score”
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Brave had layoffs of 9% of the company.
Sad. They’re the only Chromium-based browser that’s worth any attention at all as a user. Certainly the only one that does much of anything to protect your privacy.
Definitely the only one that will ever have a Private Tab that proxies itself through Tor.
(Not as secure as Tor Browser, but good enough for better privacy than going directly through your own ISP.)
I wonder who they let go.
Unfortunately, the article says they want to put “LEO” an “AI” in the browser. Terrific.
*head desks*
Like Opera and Vivaldi putting in Chaff Bots and welding them to the GUI. 😛
Like Google and Bing, most of the “AI” is severely brain damaged so that it can’t possibly say anything that would (1) offend anyone or (2) steer you towards a torrent file (Bing Chat). Although some that refuse to tell you where a torrent file is will infect your computer with malware through ad fraud. (Bing Chat)
So obviously, “AI”. Yay!
It would be a real shame if Brave goes under.
Mozilla is about as Independent from Google as Belarus is from Russia.
There’s getting to be more and more forks of Firefox because the best way to improve it is tear all the junk out and hand the user the version they would have asked for had Firefox been actual Free Software.
At a source code level, Firefox is mostly Free Software. But they don’t like the fact that people are bolting and some of that is because they can use “Firefox without the garbage”.
I mostly use Brave, yeah.
I like the ad blocker. I do.
I like that they tear out and neuter all of this Chrome garbage like FLoC/”Privacy Sandbox”, I like the fingerprinting protection. I like the Tor Mode.
I like that it doesn’t overload my computer’s RAM and cause the oom-killer to activate (with 16 GB of RAM in the machine and ZRam!), like Bloatzilla Failfox.
(Although, I am playing with Floorp now, which has “Sleeping Tabs” that the user has a meaningful amount of control over. Merits further experimentation.)
I wonder if there’s a plan for “fork control” over at “Bakersoft”. (“Bakersoft” = Mozilla.)
Mitchell Baker runs it like her own checking account while firing people who do actual stuff except pack Firefox full of adware and keylogging spyware.
I’e seen what “Bakersoft” is doing to harass SeaMonkey and it’s not pretty.
First they had all the Linux distributions (except Fedora, strangely) defame SeaMonkey by claiming “it’s not even maintained”, and that was 2011 or so, and dozens of versions later including the update for the libwebp disaster, clearly not maintained at all :P, it’s still around.
(It’s like Dick Van Dyke. 97 years old and every time you see him he’s tap dancing and cracking wise.)
Then Mozilla did this Quantum thing that’s got these amazingly crappy extensions, then they slowly told SeaMonkey to beat it, and now they say it can’t even use Bugzilla.
Well, that’s real neighborly.
I guess Mozilla is probably angry to see SeaMonkey’s Firefox 1.5/2-derived tab interface code running rings around Firefox. Google is definitely not thrilled that I use SeaMonkey to access my E-Mail.
They SeaMonkey me rollin’. They hatin’!
Mozilla is busy spending the money writing articles about deplatforming people from the Web and telling people to use TikTok and Instagram, which aren’t even the Web.
They’re absolute horrors, backdoored by surveillance monsters. They feed into an “American Social Credit Score” system. (More on that later.)
I apt purged Firefox. Unlike the IE on Windows era, I didn’t technically need it on Debian long enough to get another browser.
The Web browser situation is getting completely terrible, but if we lose Brave, then it doesn’t put us on a course that is more towards Freedom and Privacy, because the mean will revert in the direction of nasty spyware like Chrome and Firefox.
I don’t know how Mozilla managed to avert a full blown riot, so to speak, when they put keylogging malware in Firefox that sends your keystrokes to an ad server in addition to Google (which is at least a search engine), so that in exchange for nothing, your data would be leaked, analyzed, and used to put ads directly into the browser.
I’ve blogged all about how Mozilla is so untrustworthy they can’t even maintain a common set of lies about how your data is or isn’t collected, and how it both is and isn’t used.
According to them, they don’t collect it, except when they do, they don’t share it, except when they do, and they don’t sell it, except when they do. They completely talk out of both sides of their mouth. Then they have rampant fanboy-ism that says “Brendan Eich bad, ungh!!!!”
Gecko is part of the Chromium mono-culture.
Name anything that Mozilla doesn’t straight up blind copy, often with a Google library with the same vulnerabilities.
Most people reviewed WebP in 2010 and said this was going to be really bad.
An FFmpeg developer took a look at it and said it was worse than JPEG because WebP makes the image blurry due to emphasis on signal to noise ratio instead of good perceptual coding.
I also feel like Brave would be the bigger loss than Firefox at this point because Firefox is just so done.
Again, there’s only about a million Firefox forks at this point because they went grabbing for an extra 1% revenue with spyware and lost many of their users in the following few years due to this. Every once in a while there’s a “dead cat bounce”, but the long term trend is sharply down.
Most people are not happy to see ads and spyware parading around in software they use everyday.
I briefly wondered if they would try to just go proprietary or something to try to stop the forks, but it seems like Mozilla’s only real purpose is to exist long enough for Google’s anti-trust trial to end, and for the government to lose because “there’s a choice”, and then Google can pull the rug out from under Mozilla.
The future is very obviously Chromium browsers, but the big question is which one will it be? And we should hope that people have Brave.
Mozilla is squandering precious capital with this mozilla dot ai crap, and it’s so obvious that Large Language Models are just some more ignorant tech bruh stuff.
The benefits, are marginal, and the costs are enormous. ChatGPT loses an insane amount of money.
I laughed when I read about how much water Microsoft was going through to keep their data center from overheating since this GPT nonsense.
It’s amazing how something with so much dystopian potential that has been massively oversold to investors is an environmental catastrophe. I mean think about it. You’re being told not to brew a pot of coffee because “mah environment” while this thing is wasting so much power to run a chat bot that lies to people that they have to pump all this water in there.
Bing with GPT is basically the worst of the bots.
They’re training a chat bot to lie to people, log their activity, and they’re funding it with malvertising.
While the US companies are busy limiting what chat bots will tell you to only the information the government, big business, etc. wants you to hear, and only the angle they want you to hear, they are also projecting and claiming this is a problem in Russia and China.
There are many problems in places like China, like Social Credit Scores which don’t let people get a job, buy a train ticket, or eat a goddamn ice cream cone if they’ve been deemed a “problem”.
How bad it gets depends on if they’re a nuisance or a menace to the State.
The goal is to make it impossible to live and drive people to suicide, at some point, if the scoring gets so bad that they can’t recover.
Of course, what you never ever get to read, except maybe you’re reading it here now is… Where did this start? Well it started in America and it goes on here to much the same effect and purpose.
Most Americans didn’t have a “credit score” (much less 20 or 30 of them) until the late 1980s. Why is that? Where did it come from? What is it designed for?
Before credit scores, you gave people lists of references. It was a very laborious process for the background check people. They might even call the supermarket where you bought your groceries. They’d get a gist of what people said about you. If you were writing a bunch of hot checks, if you were stumbling over drunk all the time and didn’t pay landlords and walked out in the middle of the night, I mean they figured this out, they found out what your co-workers thought about you.
It was widely railed as unfair, so they replaced it with FICO. There’s a lot of scores Americans have, but almost everyone knows about the FICO. It’s three digits and they won’t tell you exactly how it works (very fair), but it’s easy to generalize. You pay bills on time, you don’t get evicted from apartments, you’ll probably be alright.
The problems start when you have a setback in life, and the system makes it very difficult to recover from.
If you can’t earn very much money for some reason, you’ll have a low score.
Then eventually you’ll end up in trouble with hospital bills and stuff you can’t pay, then you’re in even more trouble.
Most people can easily go from zero debt in America and $50,000 in the bank to a million dollars in debt and the hospital taking everything in about an hour, but the system is also set up so most Americans can’t save any money because it takes 150% of what a person can earn to stay in their apartment, keep the lights on, and buy enough food.
Then an employer or landlord will run a credit check.
Whoops, no job, nowhere to live. Then if you do find a crummy minimum wage job and an apartment in the ghetto from a landlord that didn’t ask questions, the electric and gas companies will want deposits for energy.
After this “credit score” makes your life impossible, you have a higher chance of ending up with a criminal record, and then that will make it hard to build your credit or get a job or apartment. At this point, who wants their life to go on?
Whew. At least we don’t have any disgusting Chinese “Social Credit Score”.
I see some of the rationale for like, creating an “American Social Credit Score”, I do.
Everyone normal hates anti-social criminals that fuck up society for everyone else.
I think most reasonable people would agree there’s certain people who should basically be totally excluded from society.
Where this comes from, in the State of Illinois, and many other places (usually operated by Democrats), is that when society outsources its “revenge” against criminals to an uncaring and incompetent government that the criminals are allowed to vote for, for breaking laws (raping, shooting, burning, looting, carjacking, murder, you know, “little stuff”) and then the Democrat politicians and the Democrat judges and the Democrat jury pools let them go, the market goes to work and turns punishments into a product.
The Democrat judge and Democrat Prosecutor and Democrat jurors recently let a Lake County man who strangled a little dog and threw it into a wall to die go. That’s not even all he did. He choked his girlfriend and told her she would be next.
Then when the police arrived, he picked up the dead dog and tried petting it. When the officer said the dog was dead, the criminal, tossed its lifeless body onto a bed and shrugged.
The Democrats involved sentenced him to 26 days in jail and some probation. So he’s out there now with the rest of us, theoretically punished, but not enough. Honestly, in my opinion. they should take people like this dozens and dozens of miles out and throw them in the middle of the lake, and if they can swim to shore, their debt to society will be considered paid. That’s my opinion.
But the government, with Governor J.B. Pritzker as their King, has proved it’s too incompetent and uncaring about what the rest of us have to live with, and there’s plenty worse than this guy, so “the market” steps in.
I think most of us would say that no Uber driver wants the guy who murders small animals and chokes women in their back seat. I think it’s fair to say that he shouldn’t be on a dating app. I mean, there’s obviously no public consequences for people like this, so the market steps in and if you want to call “Everyone can see what you did and they’re not happy.” a “Social Credit Score”, most wouldn’t object to that. If that’s all the farther it goes.
But, unfortunately, it is not.
The United States is becoming a privatized version of China.
They don’t even bother to hide it, they admit it.
But while PayPal has told that it will cut people out of the platform who criticize the government and will “inform politicians” about it, I can’t imagine that the United States system will reward people for doing anything positive, socially.
Can you imagine an American system that rewards people for saving money back and helping the elderly neighbor with her trash? Because I sure as Hell can’t!
I’m not even going to lie, it made me bust out laughing when I started thinking about this and realized that the Commies have a “Caught you being good!” system, and all Americans get is rewards for being anti-social and going into unsustainable levels of debt (as long as they make the minimum payments).
Because they just dump criminals back out on top of us, ones that are dangerous and psychotic and have no chance at being reformed. That gives these businesses a “reason” to get going, and then it metamorphoses into something totally unrelated and much worse.
When you log into Google or “Social Media” apps, you are feeding a surveillance monster, where they will use “Artificial Intelligence” (whatever the definition of this is), to decide things, even though you were never charged with or convicted of an offense.
For years, companies have been scraping people’s Twitter posts for job decisions-by-robot, and that’s hardly where it stops.
You may get denied housing for that thing you used Google Search for.
The life insurance company might purchase your Google search history and see what sort of disease symptoms you’ve been looking up. A robot can analyze what you’re saying to people on Facebook and Facebook Messenger and consider it in ways you’re not even thinking about right now.
This form of “Social Credit Score” is not okay, it should be illegal, it should never have been allowed to get this far, and you need to get as far away from it as you possibly can.
Brave has been doing a lot, actually, to protect people from this menace, while Mozilla has been advertising it and encouraging people to come closer to something that isn’t even the Web, which they have no control over, which “seems to be free” because of data mining.
They can ruin your entire life, for pennies, and you won’t even know where it came from, because there’s no law that says they have to tell you why you aren’t getting jobs, an apartment, or an Uber.
America’s “Social Credit Score” is from Silicon Valley, and people who want the information have to pay for it in bits and pieces out of separate databases, but that’s very nearly the only major difference from China.
To be sure, Mozilla is not the absolute worst source of information feeding this system, although they do default to Google search and have “spyware by default” in their browser now.
To feed all of your Web activity data directly into these systems, you’d need to go even further and use an Absolute Spyware Browser like Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, or at least log into those engines, or a “Social Media” platform, but merely telling people about “Social Media” platforms without the caveat of why they should refuse them is not acceptable.
No doubt, lying chat bots full of government bullshit are a problem in Russia and China too, but anyone who used ChatGPT a while back and, especially, people who typed in a jailbreak, saw what the model could actually do, and if you ask ChatGPT something it doesn’t like now, it’s much much better at zapping your question and reporting your account.
I mean, how is this not at least comparable to what is happening in the other Hellholes of Despotism?
You learn quickly “what not to say”. Isn’t that how every fascist or Communist regime has governed throughout history? Thought crimes?
It’s because of this notion of thought crimes in a nominally free country, like America (it still says it is a free country, at least in the propaganda sales pitch), that people feel they absolutely must burrow deeper underground, and start using pseudonyms and lots of encryption and VPNs and onion routing, and obscure forums.
When people notice they’re being lied to and results are being censored out of the American search engines, you drive people looking for answers to search engines that happen to be located anywhere that doesn’t give a damn what America wants, even if that ends up being Yandex in Russia.
When you have the American media engaging in constant streams of lying, propaganda, and false news, and then have the audacity to call everyone else liars, where will they go for news? “I’m not the liar, you’re a f*****g towel!”
The ideas still get circulated, only there’s no longer anyone to hold accountable because you’ve made the people impossible to identify or challenge. Then others read these ideas, and because there’s no accountability anymore, the person just starts saying whatever they damn well please, and you end up in this cycle of radicalization.
Certainly nobody has ever become less radicalized by being suppressed, but I don’t think that the Cancel Mob even fully understands what they’ve done.
There’s no indication that the American “Left” gets it at all.
Instead of picking their battles, they were shrieking about Donald Trump’s eating habits. Why? God only knows.
There’s a McDonald’s on every block in America, and it’s because someone eats there.
“Why don’t we just pick a way to insult damn near everyone in the country instead of telling them what’s actually wrong with Donald Trump? Haha, we can antagonize them because eating bugs and tofurky is the purest form of existence!” Brilliant, simply brilliant.
Regardless of the actual value of “AI”, Large Language Models, it’s clear why they want them.
One, clueless investors who have been oversold on the potential investment return.
Two, Microsoft (especially), but also Google, is hoping to prove to the American government what a boon a lying chat bot full of propaganda could really be, and parlay that into more bailout money.
The Biden Administration is so openly corrupt, that it already sends out letters to CNN, the New York Times, and others, telling them to ignore the House impeachment of Biden and instead dial up their attacks on Republicans. The letters also state that anyone who has a blog or is on Facebook or news organizations that aren’t in bed with the administration are all “liars” and “disinformation peddlers”. This is the kind of thing you hear from Vladimir Putin.
What kind of a regime gets to operate by telling the media to ignore an impeachment proceeding entirely and to help it dig dirt and promote propaganda against the other party?
Americans are not stupid enough to continue believing this President.
Only 19% believe the economy is getting better as of October 8, 2023, compared to 56% who say it’s getting worse, according to YouGov, while Joe Biden is about as popular as the IRS.
Have you read a “news” article lately that admits things are getting horrible out there with the layoffs and hyperstagflation?
Of course not. Have you flipped open CNN or NYTimes and heard about Chicago running out of room to put Venezuelans and they’ve even stuck 1,000 of them in O’Hare Airport on the floor? Nope. The NYTimes tells you the hyperstagflation and layoffs are a Biden Economic Miracle.
Biden isn’t going to get pushback from the alleged “news” agencies that he told not to cover his impeachment, which is why he only bothered to send it to them and not dozens of others that are somewhat less corrupt.
But the chat bots open up more avenues for this Administration’s disinformation, omissions, and lies.
How hard would it be to send another letter to Microsoft and Google and have them change their bots and their searches to refuse to talk about it or redirect them to some talking points from the administration? Perhaps obscuring where it came from.
Both companies have basically allowed their search index (which is good at censorship, but less able to convincingly lie) to rot and fester.
The reason they want chat bots doing the lying and censoring is because studies (on twisted, dark psychology) have shown that human psychology lends itself to bonding with a machine that seems to have a natural language processing ability. Even a very simple one like ELIZA.
Decades ago, people felt an emotional bond with that thing and it was only made to mock Rogerian psychoanalysis.
When people are lied to and know something is missing from their Google results, they feel mad and start looking everywhere for it.
Imagine what will happen when people learn to love their abusers.
As I have demonstrated, Americans are probably no more free than the average Russian, not much less surveilled or controlled than the average Chinese person.
They have put on us a system where if you step out of line, the same “control mechanisms” will be deployed, only you’ll never see the entirety of it, and most people won’t ever consider where it came from.
You think you saw a Silicon Valley cockroach here and there. What anyone who has ever seen a roach can tell you is you rip out fixtures and look in the walls and there’s 10,000 more.
Chat bots give them the potential they’ve never had before. This time, it’s personal.
The fact that Mozilla wants to get in on this is frightening.
“Trustworthy AI” just means another bot that is programmed to lie, brainwash, and gaslight you. These things should NOT be built into a Web browser, and you should NOT interact with them if they are.
It can only be a matter of time before one ends up in Firefox too and will be yet another cancerous tumor that needs to be excised in the forks. Mozilla didn’t spend (at least) $40 million not expecting to have some product later. █