partial_accumen

Netscape went bankrupt when Microsoft started giving out Internet Explorer for free. So, today, would you prefer to use a free Microsoft Edge or would you prefer to pay for Firefox that is telemetry and ad free?

Paying for privacy should not be necessary though, its a right

This is an incredibly myopic statement in this context. In the case of Firefox here, you have total power over your privacy. Don’t use the software.

The money to actually create and maintain the product has to come from somewhere. Expecting the software developers at Mozilla to work totally for free is greedy on your part. One way they can pay for the development of Firefox is through selling advertising to users. As long as these advertisements are able to be turned off, I don’t have a problem with that (historically they were). Its not my preference, but another way is to sell your activity in some capacity which is what the Telemetry since 2017 has been doing apparently. I don’t like that at all. Finally the last way is for the users to pay for it.

Pick one. I pick the one that maintains my privacy and my eyeballs, paying for the product myself. That is why I want that as an option.

Back when they were “Netscape” you could buy a box off a shelf with the current version for a flat fee. I’d be okay with a paid version with zero ad inserts, and zero leaky telemetry. I’d even be okay if it was $X for the base product and $Y for $Z years of security updates.

As long as they’ve got the Point of Sale going for the purchase, if they also want to include addons that I could select to donate to in the same transaction where they pass through those funds to the addon developer, I’d be good with that too.

One mention I didn’t see was any reference to Sodium Ion batteries. While these aren’t great for EV cars (even though you can buy at least one Chinese EV with one right now), as they are physically larger and less energy dense than any Lithium chemistries. However, they have the potential to be REALLY CHEAP because they use zero of the limited supply of Lithium and instead use the very abundant Sodium…as in table salt Sodium (NaCl).

If they are developed and end up being as cheap as though possible, the positive implications for grid storage are huge! You’ve heard of all that extra wasted solar power in places like California, Texas, and even western China? A very small amount of that energy is already being captured and used on the grid with today’s expensive Lithium batteries and its a game changer. Sodium batteries (if they deliver as hoped) could be an order of magnitude higher in value because of how cheap they could be were we don’t really care they are larger and heavier.

Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.

Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.

I had already downloaded and installed Ironfox (FF Android fork) on my phone and have been using it for a week or so. It works identically to FF for android. Ublock Origin is working in Ironfox too.

It certainly opens up lost of “evil maid” attacks.

Initially makes me wonder how the employer could be so dumb as to give one employee so much access.

The amount of access he had doesn’t surprise me. He’d been there for 11 years already likely working on many things as he interacted with systems in the course of his legitimate work. While its possible to set up access and permissions in an organization utilizing the “least privilege principle”, its expensive, difficult to maintain, and adds lots of slowdowns in velocity to business operations. Its worth it to prevent this exact case from the article, but lots of companies don’t have the patience or can’t afford it.

A 55-year-old software developer

… and…

Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for about 11 years when he apparently became disgruntled by a corporate “realignment” in 2018 that “reduced his responsibilities,” the DOJ said.

So he was 48 at the time he started this. Was he planning on retiring from all work at 48? I can’t imagine any other employer would want to touch him with a 10ft (3.048 meters) pole after he actively sabotaged his prior employer’s codebase causing global outages.

Nobody can seriously believe that the USA colonizes Canada.

Nobody could seriously believe a US President would allow an unelected billionaire into the halls of power and society to tear it down from the inside, but here were are.

India is no really a challenge.

And Canada is?

I appreciate alternate methods of business, but some of your statements here are worrying.

there is the temporary furlough route,

but you also said earlier…

and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire at “the top” needing a second yacht.

Furlough sounds like another name for layoff here.

but ideally there is savings for such eventualities. savings and / or loans can be used to ride out dry spells.

Ideally sounds like wishful thinking. They’re already limiting their work because they only work with NGOs or non-profits, which are usually cash strapped. Further, the lower pay to tech workers mean that the workers have less of a financial cushion should the work dry up for a time. This goes back to my first post that tech workers that don’t live a country with strong social safety nets may find tech co-ops a risky employer.

more stable than typical corporate businesses simply due to the lack of a billionaire class extracting profits and making big decisions on their whims

Yeah yeah fuck the rich, but billionaires are a small fraction of the owners of IT consulting companies. The majority of them are small boutique firms rather than giant fortune 500 companies.

One answer could be that the organization maintains a large fund to act as a buffer to maintain salaries between contracts instead of operating “paycheck-to-paycheck.”

Thats great in concept, but keep in mind they’re already taking customers that likely have small or limited budgets. Where does this extra buffer come from? The only income stream is delivering on limited contracts to cash strapped NGOs and non-profits. Remember, they took corporate work at one point, but hated it. Corporate work is where the bigger bill rates for delivery of contract service come from.

An even simpler answer could be that the co-op chooses to take on a large number of small contracts instead of a small number of large ones, such that the revenue is relatively consistent to begin with.

Its amazing if your org can get so much contract work that there’s jobs available to turn down. This usually requires a dedicated sales and marketing staff, which don’t generate any revenue for the co-op, only delivery of services to. So the sales and marketing arm are yet another drain on the already meager amounts earned from contract awards.

If there was surplus money to be made large for-profit contracting companies would be in here already doing some or all of this work.

the difference in salary they’re talking about is more along the lines of small business vs venture capital-backed startup or established huge corporation.

That would make sense if the organization is revenue generating with its own business efforts instead of enabling other organizations, which is what it sounds like is the case for this tech co-op. The co-op doesn’t seem to generate anything of their own. It sounds like they get contract work from NGOs and non-profits. If there is no work, or not enough, what happens to the co-op workers?

and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire

So when the NGO and non-profit contract work declines or dries up entirely for a time and there is less or no money coming in, how do salaries get paid at 100%? Does each tech co-op worker simply get a small percentage of the remaining income? How long do workers actively working contracts for NGOs/non-profits in the co-op continue to subsidize those that don’t/can’t get placed on work?

Certainly, but this is a different animal. What you’re describing is non-profit organization that retains employees doing IT. Like a for-profit, the employee has the expectation of a job irrespective of the level of project work the organization has. The non-profit will have a similar reporting structure and expectations on the IT worker, with the upside that the IT worker is deriving not only benefit from their salary, but from the good the non-profit is doing.

Contrast that with the IT contracting world were rates for IT work are much higher than a standard retained IT worker. The reason the pay is higher is because of the risk to the worker they may be unemployed with the work dries up. So from what I gather from the article this tech co-op is the worst of both worlds: low pay, low job security.

I’d love to be corrected if anyone has IT co-op knowledge/experience.

You also don’t have to make redundancies once the contract’s finished. It’s a universal fact that being a co-op is a tick in your favor.

I’m interested in specifics on this. If the co-op is purely doing contract work and the contract ends, how are they able to continue to pay workers on the bench? How long are workers allowed to be on the bench if they can’t be place on contract work?

We did some work with a couple of corporates and our developers hated it. So, we said we’d focus on charities and NGOs, the public sector and education.

There are a limited number of charities and NGOs, and many times these customers are the most squeezed for budget, meaning lower amounts of income to the co-op.

Another significant hurdle is salary competitiveness. Generally, programmers can secure higher wages outside the tech worker co-operative sector in both countries.

I think this is the buried lede. How much is income reduced to tech workers vs traditional employers? Without strong social safety nets in the country a co-op with a much lower salary may not be a viable option because unemployment would leave the former workers without resources to live on.

If anyone has any experience with tech co-ops and can fill in the gaps of my understanding, I’d be interested to hear it.

Remember 2015? A Tesla parked in your driveway told your neighbours that you valued innovation, that you possessed an environmental conscience, that you had a stake in the future of the planet. The cars weren’t perfect, but they meant something. They represented hope - for clean energy, EVs, and a world beyond fossil fuels.

This was me years go. I knew climate change was real and an imminent threat. I wanted to vote with my wallet for a cleaner future. I also wanted to strike a blow against the National Automotive Dealers Association for their regressive practices that hurt consumers and drive prices for cars higher for everyone. Buying a Tesla did those things. I charge the car on sunlight from my house. I don’t have to support the petroleum industry’s damage to environment and people around the world. I was proud to be doing something rather than just talking about needs for changes against climate change.

Musk doesn’t get any of my money from this car. I don’t pay for any of the Tesla monthly services. I’m don’t want to be seen driving with a Tesla logo on the car. I’m ashamed that my good intentions funded a fascist.

I’m getting that now too. I don’t know the players in Mozilla. The quote without context made me think this was one of those Mozilla execs.

Really? I would think most would consider them for what they are: evasive and probably deceptive

Pornhub now remembers what sort of porn you like while browsing incognito.

Are you sure? All incognito windows run in the same memory space. If you open one window and do something in it, that session data is available to any other open incognito window open. To clear this ALL incognito windows need to be closed. Once they are all closed, you should be able to open a single new one and have no remnants of the previous sessions left over for the website to know you. The exceptions to this are if they are tracking activity from your IP address or if they are using Browser Fingerprinting on your session so they know even if you come from a different IP they know its your computer.

I run into the IP tracking sometimes. The wife will be doing searches for some specific thing, and I’ll see youtube recommendations show up on those topics even though I’m running youtube via incognito on completely different hardware (but we’re both using the same public IP).