Good to see development effort going towards actual Firefox and not those random Mozilla products that I can't keep track of
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
-- Ken Thompson
Probably not; userChrome.css
just modifies the local user interface of Firefox, right? I don't think any of this information is ever transmitted to servers, nor is it available from Javascript.
Custom user styles however could probably be used for fingerprinting.
Related interesting article from Mozilla: Privacy and the :visited selector
I would never use anything like this. But I want it to exist. Wobbly windows got me into Linux back in 2006. Compiz, Beryl… so cool, so stupid… keep us updated!
You can be polite about it and not confrontational.
Really important. Coming from a place of mutual respect is a really nice - even underrated - way to make progress in the privacy space!
I never expected that they'd put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???
it doesn't really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.
A lot of this is for WhatsApp Business. Meta are monetising WhatsApp. The idea is that businesses will use WhatsApp Business and the shitty AI features to (direct from their website): "Engage audiences, accelerate sales and drive better customer support outcomes on the platform with more than 2 billion users around the world."
What a cringe :(
Cut from 6(!) years to 2 years. I had no idea the support stretched as far back as 6 years. 2 still seems totally reasonable, especially given all the work put into backwards compatibility in the kernel already.
For me, that feeling of needing to learn new things I think comes not from new tech or tooling, but from needing to solve different problems all the time. I would say there is definitely a fast-moving, hype-driven churn in web development (particularly frontend development!). This really does wear me down. But outside of this, in IT you're almost always interacting with stuff that has been the same for decades.
Off the top of my head...
Networking. From ethernet and wifi, up to TCP/IP, packet switching, and protocols like HTTP.
Operating systems. Vastly dominated by Windows and Linux. UNIX dates back to the 70s, and Windows on the NT kernel is no spring chicken either.
Hardware. There have been amazing developments over the years. But incredibly this has been mostly transparent to IT workers.
Programming. Check The Top Programming Languages 2023. Python, Java, C: decades old.
User interfaces. Desktop GUI principles are unchanged. iOS and Android are almost 15 years old now.
Dealing with public cloud infrastructure, for example, you're still dealing with datacentres and servers. Instead of connecting to stuff over serial console, you're getting the same data to you over VNC over HTTP. When you ask for 50 database servers, you make some HTTP request to some service. You wait, and you get a cluster of MySQL or Postgresql (written in C!) running on UNIX-like OS (written in C!) and we interact with it with SQL (almost 50 years old now?) over TCP/IP.
As I spend more time in the industry I am constantly learning. But this comes more from me wanting to, or needing to, dig deeper.
I remember installing XFCE on an old Pentium 3 tower some office had stored under the stairs. It was like magic - the system just... worked again?! It was the first time I successfully installed Linux and it felt so fast. With Windows the thing barely worked.
That became my younger sister's first computer. The tower and monitor etc. all just stayed on the ground and we played games on it together. Eventually I found an ethernet card and learned how to plug it in. I ran an ethernet cable from our modem through the house along the floor. Then we could go on Myspace and send email to each other.
Can't believe my parents were ok with tripping over all that stuff, ha!
Sadly the impression I get, from when I've spoken with Iranians, is that the establishment don't see those things as issues to move past at all.
The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(