Check out this latest bullshit from Mozilla.
If something is being displayed on my computer — that I paid for in full — over my internet connection that I paid for, in my house that I’m paying rent for, then I will block whatever the fuck I want to whenever the fuck I want to.
If you make it illegal, I will still do it.
Where this is going is that Mozilla will eventually ban/remove/eliminate all ad-blocking software and add-ons, etc. from the ecosystem.
This was in part why the requirement for add-on signing was recently instated, to please corporate entities in the lead-up to this.
Next will be not signing any ad-blocking add-ons so they won’t run on the browser.
Think that won’t happen? Oh, but it will. Their moves have been obvious and telegraphed for years now. As easy to predict as the sun rising.
Also, realize that what Denelle Dixon-Thayer is paid a lot of money to produce finely-honed corporate legalese. One must read between the lines, behind the lines, and through the lines. What she appears to be saying isn’t actually what she’s saying. The BS about centering the user is a distraction.
Summed up, the post is actually saying, “Blocking ads is harming corporate entities and we must do something about that to ‘protect’ the user from not seeing ads that companies who pay us very want the user to see. We will ‘center the user’ by allowing corporate entities to center ads on the web page her or she is viewing — ads that cannot be blocked (if they pay us).”
I suppose it’s an object lesson in be careful what you ask for, and more importantly, how specific you are in what you ask for. Instead of (just) open source software we should have been asking for non-monetized software, for example.
Especially the most important software that everyone uses — browsers, things like Twitter (which as someone said, should have been an RFC not a billion dollar plus company) — I don’t really know what the limits should be.
But at some point, some areas of life are too important or too necessary to leave to the whims and avarice of private enterprise.
Where to draw that line, as I am basically a capitalist in most ways? I don’t know.
But the ad-supported internet is really good for no one, I do know that.
Howzabout being a capitalist in mosbunall (most but not all) ways? Enough mixed economy in your capitalism for there to be public universities. I know, you chose the military over college, but the military isn’t exactly a capitalist enterprise, either, is it? Anyway, hear me out: Back when open source software was practically synonymous with noncommercial software (1985-1995, maybe?), universities in America (and even moreso in Europe, which was open source central) had scores of employees, mostly staff-not-faculty, who maybe worked administrative IT for the campus, or technical support for the student computer labs, or whatever. Being university employees, they had at least some of the features of civil service employment. Being in a hurry-up-and-wait kind of work that also involved access to computers, they do what creative people neturally do when bored; they craft intellectual puzzles for themselves. Add to that that while private employment is all about “non-disclosure agreement,” academic employment, at faculty level at least, is “publish or perish” (and a lot of these staffers were also graduate students).
You typical neoliberal will chant that Twitter is a billion dollar plus company and not an RFC is because talent will follow the money, because incentive, whatever. But that hardly explains why NNTP, HTTP, IRC, FTP, Archie, etc. are RFC’s and not multibillion dollar companies. Thing is, if the year is 2007, and you’ve got the gist of Twitter in your head, or even coded and debugged, you will have zero chance of implementing it without monetizing it. Sure I suppose if you’ve got any discretionary income above the hand-to-mouth tier of hierarchy of needs, you could get a $5.99 a month hosting account. But if your concept goes viral and attracts a lot of visitors, you’ll blow the traffic ceiling of that account and you’re in grow-or-die territory and it’s then about the financiers. It’s like all the noncommercial venues in which to pursue creative pursuits have been udderly and systematically closed off, and now the Internet has degraded to the IQ level, not of television, but of non-cable TV, minus PBS. Supposedly, based on what people have told me, cable TV, the premium channels at least, wouldn’t insult my intelligence, but I wouldn’t know, as I don’t have anywhere near that amount of discretionary income. And of course the Internet access industry is basically a subsidiary of the cable TV industry. Of course.
Maybe the real reason twitter is a doc-com instead of a dot-edu is because the creators couldn’t have done that even if they wanned to… What you’ve revealed about yourself in your blog sez you were a netizen at a time when (Usenet, etc.) traffic from .edu domains handily outnumbered .com. This was easily true as recently is 1995. Kind of weird that as early as 1999, “dot com companies” was literally synonymous with “the Internet.” Now it’s gotten to where dot-com is synonymous with technology itself (“careers in tech”=”careers in software development” etc.)
I posted the present comment on a tethered prepaid phone (from MetroPCS, a company I recommend highly, even though it’s true what they say about what PCS stands for). It’s enough bandwidth for blogging, which as luck would have it, is the only online activity that interests me, even though blogging is “so 2006.”