I feel like startups is just a way to do money laundering nowadays. You can say what you want but there is NO way this startup is worth a billion dollars and that this money is actually clean.
Seriously, look at their website: https://www.island.io/
There is not even a SINGLE image of the browser itself, it's just 3D renders, there is no way to test it. At least BREX, Slack and the others are product you can see, it's something that you can know it exists. Even in the use cases for the browser they don't show anything about the browser itself.
This is REALLY disappointing for any entrepreneur working on a REAL product and receiving NO from every single investor they talk to.
I mean: i, a nobody, has a solid product, has paying clients. But because i am not friend of a VC or somebody else i need to listen that my product is not good enough, that it will never scale, that i don't have the right revenue to justify an investment. You can see my product, you can test it if you want. But then a guy comes with something that doesn't even have a proper website and is valuated a billion dollars out of the gate.
It's just sad to see what the startup ecosystem has become.
Most of the world runs on relationships and not necessarily merit. That’s just the reality.
Most people aren’t pointing out that one of this startup’s co-founders was the former President of Symantec and CTO of McAfee [1], two cybersecurity giants.
A resume like that coupled with VCs having too much money chasing few deals, it’s easy to see why this startup is emerging from stealth with hundreds of millions in funding. It’s not “fair”, just what it is…
That is the way the world has always worked. It’s about relationships, not industrial merit.
Sometimes those relationships are sound and the ambitions more honest, and other times they are flaky, dishonest or downright fraudulent. And very dimensional gradient between.
You’ll (almost) never get a leading role in a Hollywood blockbuster off the street after an audition. You will maybe get a smaller part. Why? Relationships.
you might get one, when you are a cheap talent sleeping with the producer. cost cutting. when you don't get an A lister, you can try a talent. happens in most blockbusters
Just because you’re a nobody doesn't mean that somebodies are money laundering.
To expand on that, although being a limited partner is a great way to clean money there is no difference between a small round or a big round in that regard. There is just unlimited money for a limited amount of things.
Look at the highest comment on that thread from car_analogy, he lays out a plausible scenario at what the consequences of Mozilla tracking downloads could be.
Why would you be downloading a network installer only to move it with USB to another supposedly "secure" machine just so THAT machine can then do the downloading part instead of just downloading the binary on that machine in the first place?
Secondly who is downloading Firefox binaries off of Mozzilla website for a "secure" machine? That only happens if you are running Windows and at that point your pants are already soiled.
Most plausible is that some IT department would have same installer on all the machines and then Mozzilla would know that all these machines belong to same organization, but if your IT department is running network installer for every instance for Firefox they install then please fire your IT department.
Literally all this info does is to tell Mozzilla that you installed a Firefox or if you are some kind of weirdo who moves some 10kb web installer from friend to friend to install Firefox they might know that all these people at some level know each other, but again this only applies to Windows users.
I just don't understand why HN is making this out to be some Firefox killer.
Thank you. I am done with Firefox. I switched to Chrome on Windows and Safari on IOS. There is no point of using Firefox when they do all kinds of shady and bullshit things.
Firefox's default settings are optimized for usability and not breaking websites. For privacy and security some of that must be sacrificed. The Tor Browser, LibreWolf and arkenfox user.js all make Firefox less usable, or not usable at all in some cases.
If I can't use site X using a secure browser, it's site X that's broken, not the browser. There's billions of websites, and only a few browsers. If a site doesn't want me to visit it, I'll just find another site.
Default config of Firefox include advertisement and "participate in studies". That means intense tracking. You can disable all of that garbage, but most do not even know, that it exists and is enabled by default (along with telemetry).
You have to ask yourself what is more important to you having to do couple option changes, but keeping the browser up to date and secure or having sane(r) defaults, but lacking behind in security updates.
Yes, I'm sure the author does their best, but I doubt this is their day job. Meaning if there is an update during working hours he might not get to update his fork until several hours later or if he is on vacation it might be days or weeks. What happens when he abandons the project? Usually the fork projects wind down after some time and there is no indication for the users that they are using abandonware with God knows how many missing security patches.
Of course there is ideal world where we wouldn't have to make these choices, but at least I am going to stick with Firefox until something actually bad happens.
libreWolf seems to be built regularly using the latest version of Firefox. If it ends up using the nightly build of of firefox nightly or dev edition in the future it could release security updates even faster then firefox "mainstream" itself. LibreWolf does not appear to be maintained by a single person like you implied. Its a relatively new project it can either go one of two ways: become popular and gain lots of supports + maintainers, die a slow death. After having actually used it for a few days it seems good to me. I'll continue to evaluate it as my daily browser.
I am not convinced that is better. Firstly important security fixes will be pushed as hotfixes past nightly into main instead of waiting for a regular patch cycle. Otherwise you are just announcing bugs to the world.
Secondly there is a reason why nightly channel exists. It is because it is not stable. Yeah, back in the day I ran nightly for years without seeing an issue, but also I'm not really sure if there was any benefits.
As far as I am aware the dev channel is just main Firefox with better webdev console/tools. So I don't know if that has anything going for it security wise compared to the main.
"There is also a "Studies" option which I had not seen before."
Yup. This sort of behavior, of where stuff like this just creeps in with an update, is why I would never consider donating to mozilla at its current shape.
(along with the fact, that they continue to reduce engineers, but increase the CEO salary, despite marketshare is falling)
I switched to Chrome on Windows today. Mozilla is a trainwreck. They reportedly get $350M-450$ million per year from Google. Is that not enough to make a fucking browser and stop firing engineers every year?
Mozilla does only their bullshit outreachy and woke bullshit instead of focusing on their only product that matter. I don't really care if their engineers are women, trans, non-binary, black, hispanic, indian etc. All I wanted a top notch browser that's not based on chromium, but that was too much to ask.
I miss the old Mozilla when they made the New York Times ad with their donors names on there.
Mozilla lost another user...I guess is time to increase their CEOs salary!
It's because USA knows the nuclear power of Russia that both countries doesn't go in conflict directly.
It seems strange, but because you can nuke me, and i can nuke you, we need to live peacefully for good or for worse.
I know that Ukraine is in a bad situation, but you think this would happen if Ukraine had nuclear power? Actually, the United States wanted Ukraine to give up on their nuclear weapons.
Actually because nations have the power to destroy humanity multiple times with their arsenal we live in a more peaceful world (although there are multiple wars, none of them compare to WW2 or WW1, there's a good video from Kurzgesagt on that topic.)
No, they promised to respect it. That's a very significant difference.
Nothing in that document obliges the US or UK to intervene. It obliges them to go to the Security Council (done; Russia vetoed). They've gone beyond their obligations by providing arms and sanctions.
AFAIK, Ukraine never had nuclear weapons as a practical matter. They were always under the control of the Russian military.
Edit: More specifically, under the control of the Kremlin. Assuming they have properly implemented nuclear codes that are non-trivial to circumvent. Given the US's track record on that, I'd be nervous.
There wasn't really any clear legal status to them; the unit of the USSR military that was responsible for them wound up in the Ukranian armed forces after the split, as did quite a bit of other material. Thus, the agreement.
They could have, at the very least, used them as raw disasembled nuclear material for their own program, if they had wanted. As the recording industry discovered, once your stuff is in someone else's physical posession, it's hard to stop them from figuring out how it works.
The counterpoint of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is that nuclear-armed countries are more free to start minor wars with non nuclear-armed countries, confident that there won't be direct intervention by other nuclear-armed countries. These wars become proxy wars between the nuclear powers.
You might be asking the wrong question. You could instead be asking: “Do you think this would happen if Russia wouldn’t have Nuclear Weapons?”
Deterrence works both ways. If it really deters a military action against you, then perhaps you can be the aggressor and be safe from retaliation as long as you threaten your nukes.
MAD is the same concept as "an armed society is a polite society"
I don't like either idea. Being civil to one another simply because the other party might respond with incredibly disproportionate violence is not a civilised way to live.
They're quite different actually. A gun does not guarantee MAD. Hence why the invention of firearms did not end wars.
If I had a gun and you had a gun, I can kill you with said gun before you fire your weapon. That's not the case with nukes. With nukes, I see that you've fired yours, so I will fire mine. And due to the amount of nukes owned by the world, we know that said firing of all nukes will lead to the destruction of most if not all life on earth.
> Being civil to one another simply because the other party might respond with incredibly disproportionate violence is not a civilised way to live
Nature doesn't care about civility. Don't let the means get in the way of results. The world has been much more peaceful since the invention of nuclear weapons. In any case, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. We have no choice but to live with it.
What is the alternative? If I have a gun and you aren't armed, your only hope for a peaceful life is that I choose to leave you alone. If I choose to enslave you, abuse you, or kill you, what could you reasonably do about it at that point?
Nuclear weapons are the same. It would be irresponsible to disarm fully while you have enemies that seek to take advantage of you.
Making appeals to what is "civilized" or not is just fluff, it means nothing. At one point in "civilized" society people would duel to the death over insults.
What we call "civilization" is always founded on a threat of using force. Even in a primitive tribal society with nothing but spears, you keep in line with the tribe for fear of retaliation.
All civilizations have grown by incredible disproportionate violence and conquest.
China and Persia old empires, Greek, Egypt, Roman Empire, The Muslim expansion. In America the Incas and Mayas. The Spanish Empire, then the French and British. Then the American Empire.
The only exception to that have been the Phoenicians, then Carthage, that started as pacific merchants, but they were forced into war by the Romans.
Not entirely factious: why not? Life would go on. Not human life sure, but it’s not like we’re the ultimate shepherds of the planet and it would be a valueless rock without us.
If the options are: yield the planet over to some nuclear hardened species to chill out and recover for a few hundred thousand years while other novel (radiation hardened) lifeforms develop, or yield the planet over to the people who have demonstrated willingness to absolutely obliterate their enemies and will likely continue initiating mass extinction events far into the future… I certainly don’t think one option is 100% off the table.
Interestingly, those radiation hardened life forms might actually be better suited to be earth-seed than us — space is an unfriendly environment for human kind, making us ill suited to be the planet’s intergalactic ambassadors.
(Now I want to read some sci fi book where it turns out all the intergalactic species come from planets where the original intelligent inhabitants blew themselves to smithereens and created a nuclear winter, causing the next intelligence to develop a deep rooted desire for world peace and scientific exploration…)
We're all going to die someday so I would certainly be fine with shooting back.
If you are christian you believe mankind lives on in a happy afterlife event, nobody really dies. So no biggie if you shoot back.
If you are atheist, it's not clear why you should care about the continued existence of a species evil enough to murder your friends and family. Seeking justice for them makes more sense. At any rate it's not reasonable for an atheist to believe our species would live forever. We were going to eventually die anyway.
Religious people don't tend to be against war, historically. One general famously said "Kill them all and let God sort it out." The idea that God has knowable opinions against MAD policy seems a bit of a stretch.
People find meaning when they are alive. The person firing the missle- being alive- has as much as anyone else.
Although this article has many valid points, it's important to say that Reddit is mostly used by english speakers. (Maybe 1/3 of the world, i think that probably less). I'm a software developer and i think that most of the time i prefer websites like stack overflow or github issues directly.
As a software developer i see that reddit answers most questions like "Is it better to use A over B?", "Why using C can be bad for my code?". It's for questions that are more open and less exact or technical.
So yeah, i don't see reddit being used as a search engine because english speakers are not even half of the world and it definitely don't answers most daily basis questions.
really nice that you've used wasm and no server. This seems really secure to test.
I was thinking at first: Hey, this might be kinda dangerous, imagine iterating in a tool and sending my database to a server and any attacker retrieves the database.
But since it runs everything inside of the browser with wasm i found it WAY more secure. Nice that you've done it, will probably use it a lot.
It would of course also increase server's potential attack layer. sqlite had some bugs, potentially exploitable, if you are able to invoke arbitrary statements
This looks really nice in the backend side, it's clear that you put a lot of care in the hole security and permissions configuration.
But even as the backend is nice i think there is a big room for improvement in the front-end, i don't have android so i've checked the your website and the screenshots of your app.
Your icons are too big, the interface looks something like from middle 90's with lot's of tables and rectangular shapes. Your "call" button is a lot different fom the rest of the UI.
It's clear for me that it is not your area of expertise so it's really fine actually. The main problem for this is for your users, the first thing they will see is the UI and not much the backend and the features you built, so for a product it's nice to have a nice UI for it to become successful.
If you have money you can try to hire some designers to help you (at least freelancers) Ben awad is a youtuber/developer who is also creating an app and one things you can see from his journey is that he hired designers with his co-founder to help make the app beautiful (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViYUp7jsJNM)
If you still need some inspiration and tools:
- You can try Figma for designing and prototyping, it's free.
- Dribbble for inspiration
- Freecodecamp for courses and tutorial on UI/UX design.
I think this is what you will probably need. Besides that, it looks nice and really promising, just need some polishing.
Thanks! Yep, you're 100% correct that design is not my expertise, I just do what looks fine to me, but I have a coder's brain. Thanks much for those contact suggestions. I do have contact with some designers and one in particular who has offered some help in return for tech. assistance, so this issue is being addressed. I very much appreciate your feedback - thanks!
Seriously, look at their website: https://www.island.io/ There is not even a SINGLE image of the browser itself, it's just 3D renders, there is no way to test it. At least BREX, Slack and the others are product you can see, it's something that you can know it exists. Even in the use cases for the browser they don't show anything about the browser itself.
This is REALLY disappointing for any entrepreneur working on a REAL product and receiving NO from every single investor they talk to.
I mean: i, a nobody, has a solid product, has paying clients. But because i am not friend of a VC or somebody else i need to listen that my product is not good enough, that it will never scale, that i don't have the right revenue to justify an investment. You can see my product, you can test it if you want. But then a guy comes with something that doesn't even have a proper website and is valuated a billion dollars out of the gate.
It's just sad to see what the startup ecosystem has become.