privacy first.

free julian assange

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  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Thanks, but I worry it may have been a little too assholish on my part. Again, I wasn’t trying to bring OP down and definitely don’t want to be one of those smug “I know better than you and will jump on every mistake of yours” types. I know what it’s like to have those kind of people jumping on your throat for a relatively minor thing, because I’ve made this kind of mistake before. Just want to state again that my intent isn’t to dogpile on OP but to remind everyone to be cautious before assuming.

    I edited the comment to remove the unnecessary snarky chromium bit. !@elltee@lemmy.one I’m sorry if this comment made you feel shitty. It isn’t what I intended to do.


  • These are literally default search extensions from Mozilla that come with every vanilla Firefox install - some basic digging would’ve told you that (in fact, your very screenshot shows that the extension IDs come from Mozilla). They’re what allows the search options for those sites in Firefox. If you go to search settings and turn those search engines off, they have zero effect on you. Or better yet, simply hit “remove” in those settings to completely get rid of them, which makes them no longer show up anywhere, even about:debugging.

    You’re welcome to move away from Garuda; it just wouldn’t change anything. You could also fork the code to remove the extensions by default, but at that point ask yourself why neither LibreWolf nor the Garuda team found it necessary to remove these extensions by default if they were actually a privacy threat (and again, you could just remove them yourself in 5 seconds through search settings).

    Honestly, these default search providers could potentially be removed simply because more privacy-focused users have no reason to use such search engines, but that’s something you should take up with the LibreWolf/Garuda team in a polite discussion.

    Here, this post could potentially affect Garuda’s reputation for something that’s completely harmless and is 2 layers upstream from them (FF > LibreWolf > FireDragon). It also makes privacy enthusiasts look silly and paranoid.

    I understand why seeing these would make you suspicious, but the next step would be to look it up somewhere rather than jumping to a conclusion.

    OP, I’m not trying to scold you (and I’m sorry this comment feels that way) . Rather, this is a reminder to everyone here: please do some due diligence before posting stuff.

    (P.S. As someone who once also used this distro and browser, I would also recommend to just setup FF or even LibreWolf the way you want instead of using this specialized distro fork. Not for any malicious reason, but simply because important security updates are bound to come late to a fork of a fork.)










  • fuck this, man. i hope someone sues their ass and wins; though i’m not sure how or even if it’s possible. the GPL does have this:

    You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License.

    but i don’t know if legally speaking, that really extends to them selectively choosing to terminate relationships with customers who exercise their GPL rights. what’s certain is that it’s an incredible asshole move and violates the spirit of the GPL and FOSS in general.

    i have to admit i don’t always agree with the stallman position on things, but shit like this really makes me see the value of copyleft licenses and the arguments of the hardcore free software camp. software freedom is so easily lost :(

    stallman was right.





  • there is no “lemmy TOS”. lemmy is only a piece of software that can be ran on a server. it is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL, a copyleft free software license.

    this means that pretty much the only legal “terms” you need to abide to run the software on a server is that if you modify it in any way, you have to publish the source code so that others can freely read and modify your version, the way you read and modified the original (this is what copyleft means; it’s the exact opposite of copyright).

    the instance owner is the only one providing any “service” here, and as such they decide their terms (the site-wide rules for an instance). if you run your own instance on your own server, you are the only one who can dictate any “terms of service”.

    all of this is by design; the fediverse would be pretty useless if anyone could impose a global “terms of service” over it.