CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@jripley It reminds me of the "negative option billing" scandal.

Way back in the mid-90s, one of the big Canadian telcos launched a new cable package with a bunch of specialty channels, and just added it to all their customers' bills. Then, after the bills had already gone out, said that the customers should have called to cancel if they didn't want the extra service.

It took a few years after that but there are now laws both federally and in several provinces specifically outlawing that practice.

@davidgerard @baszoetekouw @richardgrant @liquor_american @jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @farlukar Always choices to make moving away from American big tech.

I've tried a few of the Firefox forks. I haven't tried Servo, but the ones I did try I eventually found that there were some things I do on the internet that I was just going to have to do without, with those forks. Or I would have to run two browsers, and then it's a very short road to "why bother? Just use Firefox". Firefox drinking the AI kool-aid pushed me to look at non-mozilla browsers.

Vivaldi ticks enough of the boxes that I feel are important. I use Edge at work (it's the furthest I can get away from the company force-installing Chrome) so I'm already familiar with chromium. It's not fully FOSS, but the company says things about avoiding tracking and algorithms and prioritizing privacy that I want to hear. They're employee-owned, although I don't see a lot of detail on what exactly that means. And they're not American.

Most importantly for me, almost everything I tried to do just worked out of the box. The only real issue I've had so far is that it uses extensions from the Chrome Web Store and is subject to Google's meddling there, so no uBlock Origin.

@richardgrant @liquor_american @jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard The way that I interpret this discussion with Jake, even if it was not Jake who was personally involved, is that:

- Mozilla was always going to plow ahead with AI anyway
- Mozilla knew that Mastodon represented its largest group of its most enthusiastic supporters and promoters, and that this group is traditionally against AI creep
- They sent someone into this community feigning to solicit feedback in an effort to manufacture consent
- This failed predictably and spectacularly, and that hurt the representative's fee fees
- Now that Mozilla has, through naught but their own actions, completely alienated this community, they can claim that WE don't support THEM (c.f. Jake's false victim complex) and can claim moral high ground doing the thing they were so obviously going to do anyway.

So anyway, I've been a vocal supporter of Mozilla and its predecessors since the days of Netscape Navigator. A week ago I installed Vivaldi, and don't plan to go back.