this isn’t what i normally post here but firefox just switched ceos and this “anthony” dumbass is trying to put more “ai” slopware into it, meaning more bloat and privacy loss
if you use this browser you should go to their support forums and complain about it
And if you READ said source, all that it sounds like he's suggesting is that there will be integration of some AI models into the browser which you can turn on and off, the same way you can currently set different search engines and turn then on and off. In fact, FF already does this with AI chatbots. While I wish they were off by default it took two seconds to go into the settings and disable them.
He's also been promoted to Mozilla CEO from WITHIN Firefox, he's not an external dude. So I think (hope) its safe to say that he realises people like Firefox because of it's flexibility and privacy options.
I know people hate the creeping inclusion of AI everywhere! I do too! But you only have to step outside tumblr to realise that we are in a growing minority, and if browsers don't have the option to use AI, people won't use them.
And the good thing about Firefox being so open and customisable is that there are lots of forks. So if you really hate whatever unspecified things change, you can use one of those that doesn't have the AI. This is why the open web (which by the way is one of Mozilla's founding principles) is so important.
I think you're spot on about why they're incorporating "AI" into it, same as everyone else (even DuckDuckGo, for Pete's sake; thankfully it remembers that I've turned off all that crap)
if you haven't seen the posts about how to disable all "AI" in Firefox, here's one: X
the point is, Firefox is still better than any of the big spyware tools browsers, because we can configure it to best suit or needs
3 separate companies have called tumblr a failure that costs more than it's worth. And while I'm glad this place is around, at some point you gotta wonder why they keep the lights on if there's legitimately no benefit to it.
Sunk cost fallacy, same thing that keeps most money pits going.
They've already put so much money into it that if it fails, the ripple effects on their reputations with investors have a chance of utterly ruining them. If they shut tumblr down then it will lose all of its value and that black mark will stick to their record.
So if they can't make it profitable then it's better to find someone else to sell the site to. Tumblr looks good on paper, there is a thriving userbase, loads of content, networking, plenty of seeming opportunities to monetize it. If they can sell it off for more than they paid for it, then their own reputation as a savvy corporate type remains steadfast whether or not the site folds later on (even if they've actually thrown more money at it than they made back on the sale in the long run). But even if they sell it at a loss, it's still better than shutting it down and getting nothing, at least in terms of reputation and credibility with investors.
So, tumblr persists. Nobody wants to have the failure of it land at their feet, to be the guy who got the website with so many $$$ put into it over the years and just, closed it, evaporated all that "investment" into zero.
The thing with Tumblr is that its social structure is a bridge between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Its closest antecedent is LiveJournal, which launched in the last fucking millennium. LJ was (I use past tense despite the platform still existing, because Strikethrough and Boldthrough in 2007 sent fandom seeking greener pastures like Dreamwidth, and its sale to a Russian company later that year effectively put it in the ground for much of the Western world) also notoriously difficult to monetize; they tried hosting ads starting in 2006, after promising to stay ad-free, and everyond hated it. The paid subscription to remove the ads was popular but -- as Tumblr has clearly discovered -- pure ad-hosting and subscriptions alone isn't sufficient to keep the servers running.
Microblogging platforms do not appeal to the same kinds of audiences that pure social platforms like Facebook and Twitter do, and the user base is so resistent to change that if Tumblr tried to restructure to function more like Twitter, the user base will demand options to change it back; and if those options are not provided, the users will legitimately shrug and quit, turning it into a ghost town of porn bots that is still unprofitable.
The irony is that they shot themselves in the foot back in 2018 with the Porn Ban. The people who don't mind how Twitter functions, who might consider moving to Tumblr to get away from Musk's nazi hole, won't try Tumblr because word spread way back then that the platform is "dead" and won't let them post porn.
Yes, you can laugh. I am
A big part of the problem is systemic rather than a consequence of Tumblr being Tumblr: economic legislation that has made it an offense for companies to not generate consistently increasing revenue is responsible for the rise of the advertising industry. A company can only sell so much product before they've flooded their own market, so they place value on concept exposure and users' attention and data trails. Facebook and Twitter lend themselves well to that sort of structure, but Tumblr does not; and if they changed it to the point that it did work, the core user base -- their "product" -- would leave. It's a fascinating catch-22.
Honestly, they'd be better off looking at how Reddit stays afloat and trying to adapt that system, than trying to monetize in the style of Twitter.
if you want to avoid AI, stop engaging with uncredited art!
so I've been running my blog @creditednature for years and this isn't a self promotion, stay with me here
the reason I initially started it is because as an artist I was simply sick and tired of seeing beautiful photos, paintings, makeup looks, etc. divorced of their context and the artists robbed of recognition and potential opportunities when their works went viral without credit.
now crediting works is crucial in the battle against generative AI. I have seen so many people reblog that possum eating Halloween candy video this week because the AI giveaways were subtle. Now that there's a post going around that it's AI, people are remarking in fear that soon even the most subtle AI tells will be perfected until AI is virtually indistinguishable from reality. I agree that very soon it will be nigh impossible to always recognize AI.
Wildlife is an especially popular AI subject, because videos of animals doing unusual, funny, cute, or even scary things are universally popular—receiving major engagement across platforms and diverse audiences.
It's why nature & wildlife photography is so often reposted uncredited already—even before AI. It's why I started a blog dedicated to credited nature works in the first place.
If you start refusing to engage with photography, videos, and art in general that's been reposted without credit to the original creators, you'll be far more successful avoiding gen AI than you will be relying on examining videos by the second for out of place blades of grass.
You should already refuse to engage with uncredited works, but this is one more reason to stop now and set a strict boundary.
No matter how beautiful the painting, no matter how funny the video, no matter how incredible the shot—if there's no credit, don't reblog! Don't share or like or comment. Reserve your engagement. Use reverse image search to find the credit and add it.
For all the harm to artists I see people decrying in the context of gen AI, so many people are still willing to share photography (especially genres like nature and fashion and makeup) with no credit whatsoever. That harms artists too. Take a stand.
This is a good question! Yes, if I see art on Tumblr that appears to be uncredited, I do check OP's blog to see whether they're the artist. I'm not Sherlock Holmes about it. I generally open their blog and see if they mention being an artist in their bio or pinned post. If not, I scroll a few posts and see if they've posted any other work. I usually spend 60 seconds tops "vetting" a blog before reblogging art that appears uncredited.
It's not perfect, and I've been fooled before, but it is better than nothing and I think 60 seconds is a reasonable ask of everyone's participation considering what artists stand to lose if we don't try at all.
So, official support for Windows 10 ends on October 14th 2025. But Microsoft apparently lost a court case and now they have to offer an extra year of security updates--which was an option previously only available to their Business customers--to everyone. But you have to manually enroll. If you want to know how to do it, go to the link below
As the end of official support for Windows 10 approaches on October 14, 2025, many users are seeking ways to maintain their system's securit
You've got to do it before October 14th if you want the extra year. Otherwise support will end for you and you'll probably have to "upgrade" to Windows 11.
In other news, this is the worst year for US rabies deaths in years. One factor is anti-vaxxers refusing the rabies vaccine, not just for themselves, but for their pets.
Because they're afraid it will give their dogs autism
Every time this comes around I like to chime in with my FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE of getting rabies shots because he media has made them sounds terrifying and super painful and stuff and I'm worried people will avoid getting treated because of that.
TL;DR, it's NOT THAT BAD. Please for the love of *fuck* if you even think you maybe might have encountered a rabid animal, go get the fucking prophylactic.
Because that's the first thing - there's is not a rabies vaccine for humans. There's a pre-exposure prophylactic and a post-exposure prophylactic, and you'd be getting the post-exposure prophylactic. That means the SOONER YOU DO THAT the BETTER IT WILL WORK. This is NOT like the flu where if you get the shot after you've been exposed to the flu it's not gonna help. Totally different thing.
Second, the media likes to show that these shots have to be given in the stomach which I think used to be a thing but is NOT A THING ANYMORE. Your first shot will be straight into the bite wound, wherever that happens to be (mine was my ankle right on a bone which was pretty painful but honestly not that much worse than the bite? So like, it hurt sure but it hurt *already* so I don't know how much of that was the shot. If they can't give you all the shot there, you get the rest somewhere else – my bony ankle could only absorb so much so the rest went in my thigh (not painful at all). I assume it's thigh meat or arm meat depending on where the bite is.
After that you have to get boosters over the next few weeks. I think there were 3 or 4 of those and other than the weird part of "having to be administered in an ER" they were basically the same as flu shots. Upper arm, just felt like a regular shot. Nothing bad. If anything it wasn't as bad as a flu shot, because my arm didn't even hurt the rest of the day like when I get flu shots.
Additionally, my insurance did not fight with me on this AT ALL. I assume that's pretty standard, some things you DO NOT fuck around with on waiting periods and pre-auths and whateverthefuck and rabies is one. Also that "has to be administered in a ER" thing did *not* mean I had to pay an ER visit fee every time. I had an appointment, and that appointment just happened to be in the ER.
So please please please please please for the love of whatever you hold dear, get the damn shots. If you get them and didn't need them, awesome! If you don't get them and do need them, you are going to die, and it's going to suck the whole time. Two people have survived rabies in the history of people and they got so unreasonably lucky. Do not count on being rabies georg. You. WILL. DIE.
2. 'I didn't account for the rotation of the planet and how that affects the constalations while my characters stargazed at different times of year, I have failed as a writer, and this entire thing is trash'
As someone who recently picked up birding, and have been super casual about it. I second this. I've just been enjoying looking at the birds around me and learning how to notice them more. Even if I can't identify anything, or I'm unsure because two or more species look similar, I still enjoy just.... Watching nature come and go (including while I'm working at my day job on the 4th floor in a downtown office. So many birds on the windowsills and I don't have time to identify them. Just noticed and appreciate them!)
Fun tips for anyone who wants to get started with identification!
1. Download this guy:
It can identify bird calls and there's a step by step visual identification thingie
2. Do NOT listen to snooty old white man birders who will expect you to know everything about birds, and who care more about getting a good picture than enjoying the experience. I saw a whooping crane a few months ago (!!!!!!!) and I was SO excited, and when I mentioned it to some snooty old white man birders they were like "Yeah I've seen one." I was literally in tears when I saw this bird, and they were such spoilsports about it.
3. Birding has become a lot more popular with both young people and people of color, so if it's something you'd like to do with other people try to track a group down in your area. I personally like to go out alone, but you can learn a lot from other people (who aren't snooty old white men).
And 4. Even if you don't get serious about it it's a great way to appreciate the world around you! You can't tell a chickadee from a blue jay? That's fine! But just noticing the wildlife around you absolutely makes the world feel just a little more magical.
The trick with old white guy birders is to ignore the snooty ones and find the ones who will consensually kidnap you and take you to see cool birds.
A guy I worked with told me about the time he was an incredibly awkward teenager living in the middle of nowhere with no friends back in the late 90s. He liked being outside, so his parents forced him to join the local birding club for birding walks every Saturday. He was the only person under 60 so the whole group ADORED him and were super excited to show him all the ropes. He ends up getting really into it and joined the club for real.
Fast forward a few months and he's called to the principal's office where he's informed that there has been a family emergency and Grandpa Ron is coming to pick him up. He's thoroughly confused and worried because he doesn't have a Grandpa Ron.
He's just about to saying something to the principal when up pulls Ron from the birding club along with several other members. Apparently there was an incredibly rare bird seen several hours away and Ron had gotten permission from my coworker's mom to break him out of school and drive halfway across the state to go see it. His mom had called it in as a family emergency because she didn't want his attendance impacted.
My coworker ended up seeing the rare bird as well as watching a batch of the snooty birding types nearly come to blows over descriptions of the wing bars on said rare bird.
Comets from The Augsburg Book of Miracles, 16th century. 💫 More in our post “Flowers of the Sky”, of depictions spanning almost a whole millennium of comets, meteors, meteorites and shooting stars: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/flowers-of-the-sky #comets #meteors #shootingstars #meteorshower
The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.
Well, fuck.
Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of the market.
In other words, the company that controls 90% of search attained that control by illegal means, and, having thus illegitimately become the first port of call for the information-seeking world, had deliberately worsened its product to make more money:
That Google lost that case was a minor miracle. First, because for 40 years, the richest, most terrible people in the world have been running a literal re-education camp for judges where they get luxe rooms and fancy meals and lectures about how monopolies are good, actually:
But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway:
This is really important. The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment." Bill Gates was so personally humiliated by his catastrophic performance at his deposition for the Microsoft antitrust trial that he elected not to force-choke the nascent Google, lest he be put back in the deposition chair:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1
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But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge. That meant that the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yesterday, he handed down that remedy and it is as bad as it could be. In fact, it is likely the worst possible remedy for this case:
Let's start with what's not in this remedy. Google will not be forced to sell off any of its divisions – not Chrome, not Android. Despite the fact that the judge found that Google's vertical integration with the world's dominant mobile operating system and browser were a key factor in its monopolization, Mehta decided to leave the Google octopus with all its limbs intact:
Nor will Google be prevented from bribing competitors to stay out of the search market. One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine. This exposed every Safari and iOS user to Google surveillance, while insulating Google from the threat of an Apple competitor.
And then there's Google's data. Google is the world's most prolific surveiller, and the company boasts to investors about the advantage that its 24/7 spying confers on it in the search market, because Google knows so much about us and can therefore tailor our results. Even if this is true – a big if – it's nevertheless a fucking nightmare. Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too. Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete ("disgorge," in law-speak) all that data:
Some people in the antitrust world didn't see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to share the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist's population-scale privacy violations.
And that is what the court has ordered.
As punishment for being convinced of obtaining and maintaining a monopoly, Google will be forced to share sensitive data with lots of other search engines. This will not secure competition for search, but it will certainly democratize human rights violations at scale.
Doubtless there will be loopholes in this data-sharing order. Google will have the right to hold back some of its data (that is, our data) if it is deemed "sensitive." This isn't so much a loophole as is a loopchasm. I'll bet you a testicleâą‹ that Google will slap a "sensitive" label on any data that might be the least bit useful to its competitors.
âą‹not one of mine
This means that even if you like data-sharing as a remedy, you won't actually get the benefit you were hoping for. Instead, Google competitors will spend the next decade in court, fighting to get Google to comply with this order.
That's the main reason that we force monopolists to break up after they lose antitrust cases. We could put a bunch of conditions on how they operate, but figuring out whether they're adhering to those conditions and punishing them when they don't is expensive, labor-intensive and time consuming. This data-sharing wheeze is easy to do malicious compliance for, and hard to enforce. It is not an "administrable" policy:
This is all downside. If Google complies with the order, it will constitute a privacy breach on a scale never before seen. If they don't comply with the order, it will starve competitors of the one tiny drop of hope that Judge Mehta squeezed out of his pen. It's a catastrophe. An utter, total catastrophe. It has zero redeeming qualities. Hope you like enshittification, folks, because Judge Mehta just handed Google an eternal licence to enshittify the entire fucking internet.
It's impossible to overstate how fucking terrible Mehta's reasoning in this decision is. The Economic Liberties project calls it "judicial cowardice" and compared the ruling to "finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note":
Dayen points out the many ways in which Mehta ignored his own findings, ignored the Supreme Court. Mehta wrote:
This court, however, need not decide this issue, because there are independent reasons that remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case.
Which, as Dayen points out is literally a federal judge deciding to ignore the law "because reasons."
Dayen says that he doesn't see why Google would even bother appealing this ruling: "since it won on almost every point." But the DoJ could appeal. If MAGA's promises about holding Big Tech to account mean anything at all, the DoJ would appeal.
I'll bet you a testicleâą‹ that the DoJ will not appeal. After all, Trump's DoJ now has a cash register at the reception desk, and if you write a check for a million bucks to some random MAGA influencer, they can make all charges disappear:
And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry:
Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist – and he's also a remarkably cheap date.
Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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