With the most recent changes in Firefox, it is definitionally malware.

That it sends a list of all files downloaded to Google is nothing but pure malware behavior.

It forces updates even when you tell it not to by installing some outside-the-browser update service, just as other malware does.

It hides vital features necessary for controlling it and preventing its privacy violations, just as other malware does.

While perhaps not as bad as other malware out there, if it fits the definition, that’s what it is.

Note that Firefox used to be my favorite software; I’d evangelize it to anyone who’d listen, and probably got several dozen if not several hundred people to switch to it.

No longer.

People in power tend to underestimate how much time it’ll take to complete a task.

Yup. I’ve learned when an IT manager (which I have been one!), especially if they are an MBA type, avers how long something will take, multiply that by four. You’ll still often be wrong, but it is better than nothing.

Why Has This Really Common Virus Only Just Been Discovered?

crAssphage? Who named that virus, Beavis and Butthead?

Note that about the below post, I also don’t like street photography when it’s aimed at me. I’d rather it not happen.

But I can ignore my own personal feelings about it to realize that historically speaking, street photography is one of the rare art forms that over time represents the world that is not often seen in art, and those considered plebeian, and that is has both artistic and historical value.

But in some ways I am of my times. I don’t like it when someone points a camera at me in public, even from afar, even incidentally.

Ah, we contradictory ever-multichotomous humans full of conflicts with no logic and no resolution in a world that is both a prism and a laser, with neither correct and none of us possessing true guidebook at all.

Something interesting to me and that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how people exempt corporations and larger and/or similar entities from proscriptions that they happily apply and mis-apply (IMO) to individuals.

For instance, among most falling-in-line type liberals, the vaunted practice of street photography is these days seen as borderline harassment, if not outright harassment, no matter its intent.

However, even most liberal types will either do nothing about pervasive CCTV monitoring in cities, or even outright support it if it assists in their gentrification of a neighborhood or removal of undesirables and the like.

The two are not different. Arguably, the CCTV tracking is a far worse infraction of basic rights.

My thoughts on this aren’t fully-formed, and it is a collective action problem I realize, but I am more interested in the psychological oddness around being tacitly ok with a far-worse infringement of rights that one feels one can’t do anything about. Meanwhile, surveillance by corporations and the government even after Snowden is not-much-discussed outside small corners of the internet.

About my post below, that is an example of gentrification of sorts – the gentrification of cuisine.

My partner actually thought of that idea, and it’s a good one. Real barbecue is cooked for a long time on an open air smoker using (usually) real oak or similar wood.

I guarantee none of those restaurants are doing that. They just could not afford to keep the doors open and do it that way.

What they are selling is yuppie barbecue that is designed to replicate the experience of authentic barbecue in acceptably posh surroundings without having any of the real flavor or essence that makes great barbecue great.

Most yuppies who can afford to eat at those places will have no idea that they’ve been conned, that they aren’t eating anything like real barbecue and might not even like it if they did.

Anyway, here’s what real barbecue made in a real smoker looks like. Notice how the ribs and barbecue in the yuppie restaurants’ photos look absolutely nothing like this, because many of them haven’t actually been smoked and if they were, it was for far too short a time.

Now that’s falling off the bone properly cooked and smoked barbecue. From here.

Ha, what?

Barbecue is like sweet tea in that it’s almost never good outside of the South.

I bet there are 30 better barbecue places in and around Chattanooga alone than the 30 in this entire list.

And any barbecue place that requires or even accepts reservations ain’t no kind of barbecue place I’d ever set foot in.

This list is a damn joke, in other words.

The best barbecue I’ve ever eaten I bought from some dude with a smoker in a parking lot next to a K-Mart in North Carolina that was technically still open but had descended into complete decrepitude and near-desuetude.

I guarantee that none of those listed places are anywhere near that good, since most people primarily “taste” on ambiance and not actual flavor.

For the K-Mart bbq guy, and as it is for most people who make really good barbecue, it’s almost a religion to them. They really care about it. Smoking it for only two hours? Hell no. It’s got to be eight, or it’s not barbecue. They won’t even sell it.

I bet none of those restaurants cook it like it’s really supposed to be cooked. They couldn’t and sell it affordably with all the other overhead they have.

The best barbecue places invariably in my experience are either like that dude on the side of the road, or some place where décor is completely secondary or utterly forgotten. In other words, complete holes-in-the-wall with likely slightly-surly staff who care about the food and little else.

I’ve been doing cross-browser comparison of font rendering, and Firefox now has the worst font rendering of any of the major browsers in Windows.

It used to to be the best. What a travesty that is, too.

QupZilla mentioned below has the best. Side-by-side below, Firefox on the left and QupZilla on the right.

Look at those horribly-rendered glyphs. Just terrible.

I have been looking for alternatives to Firefox and Chrome/Chromium, and though this also used Webkit it seems pretty polished and stable.

It’s not perfect. I really dislike how it used the middle mouse button for mouse gestures. But at least it has mouse gestures.

As Firefox goes completely nuts and other browsers are already privacy-violating nightmares, viable alternatives are worth exploring.

A vision of America’s possible future.

If you think that could not happen here, well, I welcome you to history. Enjoy the ride.

Why I always laugh when clueless folks – usually utterly dopey Northerners –  say “no one needs an air conditioner anywhere ever.”

That’s almost 5AM. Eighty degrees with 94 percent humidity at the “coolest” part of the day in St. Petersburg, FL.

That’s not even as hot as it gets at 5AM there. Sometimes the daily low is 83-85 degrees at nearly 100 percent humidity.

I guess you can debate the definition of “need,” but I do a lot of work at night. There’s no way I can work with hot computers running indoors when it’s 85 degrees plus.

That’s at night, of course. During the day it’s 90+ at similar humidity. Do think you can work in an office that’s 90+ degrees with around 100% humidity?

Most people – most Westerners at least – haven’t done that, but I have. And I know how shitty it is and how unproductive. US Army, five years, will put you in situations like that.

About 10% as productive that way.

And oh yeah, elderly and sick people start dying when it gets that hot, but who cares about them when we have to prove our liberal bona fides. Fuck them, right?

“Thought” is really a misnomer and giving them too much credit.

But here is the Mozilla thought process on Firefox.

1) Covertly decide to remove a feature because, well, who knows? All the data analysis of theirs I’ve seen would be laughed out of a fucking fourth-grade science fair.

2) To placate power users and to give themselves more justification, first hide the feature by burying it or moving it into about:config.

3) Then run shoddy “analysis” and conclude that no one is using the now very-well-hidden feature. Of course usage decreases. You’ve hidden the damn thing.

4) Remove the feature completely with the above claim that it is not being used.

5) When an uproar occurs among the hundreds of thousands of people actually using the feature or who are mourning its disappearance, claim that people “just hate change” and that “the data analysis show only 4 dead people in Mongolia were using this feature, one of whom was actually a marmot. Also dead.”

6) Repeat as needed until Firefox is only suitable to run on phones and/or whatever asinine, unadvertised goal that they are actually trying to achieve occurs.

Here is the evidence.

If you decide to upgrade to Firefox 31 be aware that it is beset with some huge privacy issues, like this one.

The short summary is that nearly every file you download is sent to Google (and thus the NSA &c.) by Firefox.

If that doesn’t worry you – which it should on principle – then I guess go on right ahead with that. But if it does worry you, instructions on how to turn it off are in the link.

How can you write a piece with a sentence like this and not mention Orphan Black and Tatiana Maslany?

Movies once provided all the drama, intelligence and adult entertainment that TV lacked; now that situation has almost completely flipped. Not only do Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, True Detective and Game of Thrones provide characters and storytelling depth that Hollywood movies seem to have lost, but they’ve become the best place to watch that most old-school of theatrical movie attractions: acting.

Maslany makes Bryan Cranston look like Rob Schneider.

I even agree with most of the article, but that is a huge, huge oversight. Maslany is better than all the CGI in the universe.

However, for a well-integrated use of CGI that really added to the movie rather than detracted, the defense of Hogwarts in the final Harry Potter movie was exceptionally well-done and just as thrilling as those practical effects moments mentioned in Pevere’s piece.