I have seen discussions of this sort of wording so many times over the years. My understanding is as follows (and I could be wrong, but this is my understanding of why that wording is used). If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file. Because of Draconian laws in many countries, to publish a file you have to have a legal right to the file, therefore Mozilla have to establish that if you use them to upload a file that you are granting them the legal right to publish that file. It has to be worldwide because you may be uploading to anywhere in the world.
So why doesn't my backpack come with a mandatory TOS that I won't e.g. put illegal drugs in it and bring it across the border? Why is Firefox any more liable if I used it to publish illegal content on the web than the backpack manufacturer would be if I used it to smuggle illegal content across a border?
Because the legal system around backpacks are better understood. The more common something is the less legal paperwork there is. Judges understand backpacks and have for hundreds of years. Many judges don't understand technology. As a result when selling a backpack you can rely on the court's understanding and thus not have to account for every possibility. Meanwhile because the court might not understand technology you have to account for every possible trivial thing.
Pretty sure this isn’t a legal thing, this is Google going “we got a takedown notice from this company and aren’t about to read it or hear your opinion, in order to protect ourselves legally”
Perhaps the legal situation is different somewhere, but I would think the browser isn't acting at all. It has no agency; it's just software running on my computer, following instructions I give it. Mozilla has no agency in that situation either; the software is running on my computer, not theirs.
The new terms grant Mozilla, the corporation a license to do things with my data.
My comments above are based on precedence when sites like Facebook added these clauses and people got all panicked thinking the company was going to start selling their content (rather than selling their souls /s). The mundane truth was that they needed the wording to make sure they were legally given the right to publish the content onto the web in the way they did. So people were assuming nefarious reasons when they were just legally protecting themselves.
Now, it does seem strange that Mozilla have suddenly added this when they haven't had it previously. Personally, I deem it highly unlikely that they are planning on monetizing our content in some way; whilst they have made some strange decisions sometimes I don't think they are completely stupid. Mozilla is in a precarious position right now, they are only managing to scape by on user trust and if that disappears they are finished. I'd like to think they are not foolish enough to do something that would catastrophically erode that trust, and selling user data to advertisers would kill them.
Having thought about it a bit more now, I have to wonder if they have dreamt up some other mad scheme, like Mozilla Cloud Storage, or something that would require such wording in the terms. Hopefully, it's just a wording update to protect themselves. I guess we will find out in due course.
I think it's likely they're planning to more deeply integrate some sort of cloud services, perhaps with a paid tier. I don't want that either; stuff like that is fine as an optional extra, but problematic when joined at the hip to a browser.
I mean, Facebook did this so they could run research studies and AI on the data, not so they could publish it. You can give yourself the rights to publish something online for the purpose of running the service and give others the right to view it for personal use without giving yourself a full copyright license to do whatever you want with it.
But the more important question then is: what else will the courts think this language allows? Probably Mozilla could argue they need to store those uploads and analyze them under those conditions.
> If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file.
If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.
The "publisher" in this case would be the website the file is uploaded to. If the website doesn't make the file public, then they're not a "publisher".
The browser is merely acting as a tool to do the uploading. Firefox shouldn't be held liable for the contents of the file any more than any other web client. If it did, tools like cURL should be liable in the same way.
Somewhere along the way web browser authors forgot that they're merely building a web user _agent_. It's a tool that acts _on behalf of_ the user, in order to help them access the web in a friendly way. It should in no way be aware of the content the user sends and receives, have a say in matters regarding this content, and let alone share that information with 3rd parties. It's an outrageous invasion of privacy to do otherwise.
>If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.
It's hard to tell from your comment who exactly is the target of your complaint. You're not wrong that this interpretation might be silly, but that's not out of the ordinary in carefully using terms of art to insulate from legal liability.
And the issue of peculiar terms of art is leagues different from the issue that everyone else seems to be raising that it represents an intent to abuse private data. Those are two completely different conversations, but you're talking about them here like they're the same thing.
> the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file
If that's all is required to be a publisher then ftp, scp, rsync and hundreds of similar tools are also publishers of the files they transfer. However they don't have Terms of Service like the one Mozilla is giving to Firefox.
That’s interesting, do you know of any cases that were decided on that basis? It seems downright ridiculous but then the legal system is pretty dumb, so…
Interesting. This goes some way to addressing an issue I had been wondering about recently. I am a UK citizen, not US, so have little familiarity with US military. With the recent news on Trump declaring that Greenland should belong to the US I was wondering what the US military would do if ordered to carry out an unprovoked attack on an allied nation. This does seem to suggest that there is a very real possibility that they could refuse.
> This does seem to suggest that there is a very real possibility that they could refuse.
Not at all, on a societal level the US has been increasingly constructed as a huge, intricate, Prisoner's Dilemma where everyone, allegedly, has all to lose and noone, allegedly, has a say in the matter, therefore everyone complies with whatever the system, or media, asks of them.
Everyone thinks they're the victim, everyone thinks civic duty is something the oppressor is responsible for, not them personally, therefore everyone is free to be an oppressor themselves.
This problem will be intensified whenever, as we've seen elsewhere, the military starts being transformed from within and sycophants are put in positions of power.
There is freedom of speech or freedom to disobey on paper. But most people cannot use these, because the system is set up so that they'll be fired, disgraced and probably barred from future jobs.
It is fine and encouraged to say "Trump is an idiot" or "Harris is an idiot", but better think twice before engaging with actual issues like whistleblowing or disobeying an unlawful order.
Just watch how topics of poor white MAGA voters who are being sold out are avoided and flagged on all sides. No one wants to hear about that. People like Bannon (a millionaire) can make some performative speeches, but nothing will happen.
I think you need to better define the order. It is unlikely to simply be to "attack" Greenland. If they were ordered to make landfall and establish a base of operations, that is very different from bombing military or civilian targets.
> No, congress would have to declare war first. Article I, Section 8.
Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the sole power to declare war, it does not, on its own, prohibit any other action than "declaring war" to any other actor.
The War Powers Act (or Resolution) attempts to put some additional rules around this (note that it is widely seen as being either an unconstitutional intrusion on Presidential authority or an unconstitutional delegation of Congressional authority, and courts have so far failed to resolve it, having found lack of standing in the few cases that have been brought under it.)
But even the War Powers Act doesn't purport to prohibit the President from using force in advance of Congressional authorization.
Only in the second gulf war did the US become an occupying force, and this action was permitted by congress. The others may have been “invasions” but certainly not occupations or annexations. I could be wrong, but I don’t see congress allowing Trump to destroy NATO.
It would still require congressional approval after 60 days, unless Al Qaida suddenly showed up in Greenland. Despite congress being majority R, I just don’t see them playing along with this.
Trump says these things to get a rise out of people. He’s fueled by reaction. You can’t tell if he’s ever being serious, and I doubt even he knows if he’s being serious most of the time. Getting enraged by his actions is his goal, and he’s very good at playing his opponents into blunders this way. Best to not play along.
> It would still require congressional approval after 60 days
"After 60 days" is very different from "first".
And, since the President can unilaterally extend the timeline by 30 days, its actually 90 days, even if the War Powers Act is valid (an unresolved Constitutional question.)
And, in practice, it doesn't even require that if you don't have active majorities in Congress opposing the action; see the NATO-Yugoslavia war and the failure of legal challenges by members of Congress against it predicated on the War Powers Act limitations, because of lack of standing.
If invading Greenland was an actual real goal, something like this would definitely "happen", to manufacture the necessary pretext. Way cheaper than the alternatives.
I've now checked, and it was originally a form of Henry, but can now also be a diminutive form of any name beginning with Har... So we're both right : - )
I used to know a female comedian who hosted a comedy night once a month. She and her partner lived in Morden for the sole reason that she has fallen asleep on the tube and got stuck there so many times that they figured it was easier just to move there lol
Wow! That's crazy. Here in the UK, the most expensive eggs in my local supermarket - which are Clarence Court Burdord Brown eggs - are only the equivalent of $5.08 per dozen. Those are the posh, expensive, eggs that only those with a bit of extra cash in their pocket, and a desire to eat more healthily, would buy.
Food additive manufacturers sell farmers aditives to produce yolks with specific hues[1]. There are regional/cultural variations in color preferences, so regional farmers will target different sades.
It's slightly disingenuous to call carotenoids "additives". Although it might technically be true, carotenoids are naturally present in tons of vegetables (hence carrots) and are a good antioxidant with other known health benefits.
So hens don't usually have to be force-fed. Some of that color can come from having a diverse source of proteins--like the bugs and insects that pasture-raised hens get access to--but farmers "in the know" will also add paprika and marigold to the usual soy-and-grain supplemental feed, to try to encourage it to come out a bit more.
A few years back I briefly thought that a rich yolk color was a quality signal, until I found that additives could produce that color cheaply. The color comes from dietary carotenoids [1]. Companies like BASF sell carotenoid feed additives that producers can employ to get a yolk color as rich as desired:
Same for me. I get the following messages in the console:
Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://streets.gl/js/index.js”. streets.gl:1:940
A resource is blocked by OpaqueResponseBlocking, please check browser console for details. script.js
Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://analytics.streets.gl/js/script.js”. streets.gl:1:815
Don't know if they mandate it, but I know a few people who use either names that are a slight modification of their real name, or completely made up names.
I spent years designing interfaces for Windows Forms applications. There is no neccessity for sharing to be a dialog - it should be a wizard; and could even open in a new tab in a web application. Then the user can cancel either by pressing the cancel button (which would close the tab) or by just closing the tab. Selecting who to add, or adding a new person then just become pages in the wizard.
Yeah everything theoretically could be done without dialogs, but the beauty of dialogs is that they can keep you from losing your place in what you're doing "behind" them, before they opened. Modal dialogs are less disorienting to users than just taking to some other "page", because they can tell what they're currently working on is still there behind the dialog.
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