7:45am

I’m writing this from my Linux computer while I take a food break from writing. I’m only 1,500-ish words into my writing day, but I’m hungry enough that I can no longer concentrate on the story.

I took that as a sign.

I’m writing this post for two reasons: (1) discuss Mozilla’s most recent chicanery and (2) discuss my adventures with this site’s reCAPTCHA. The second topic is easier (and shorter), so I’ll start there.

I’ve received the occasional email from people who’ve told me that the reCAPTCHA functionality on this site is hit or miss in terms of working. I was using Version 3, which is supposed to be invisible. There’s an excellent chance that the people weren’t giving it long enough to load and do its thing, but I’ve decided to experiment with reverting to the challenge-based Version 2. We’ll see how that goes.

Right, then… Mozilla’s chicanery.

I picked all this up from a YouTube Channel I sporadically follow. It is The Linux Experiment, and I’ve found his content to be–on the whole–rather valuable. If you enjoy YouTube content and are interested in Linux, you might want to browse his channel.

I’m going to link the video in question next, then summarize and discuss below it.

Okay. So, the TLDW of this is that Mozilla has updated Firefox’s Terms of Service for the first time in a while (if ever), and those updates are… well… a little shady. Furthermore, I agree with the content creator’s hypothesis that it’s in preparation for Mozilla to start selling users’ data and training AI models around Firefox users’ activity and their Mozilla accounts.

This summary does not do the video justice, and I highly, highly recommend you watch it. (Yes, I did a barebones summary on purpose in the hopes you’d watch it.)

Yes, I know… the ship has probably sailed on the topic of companies using our data and activity to train AI models. Same with selling our data. I also suspect that the average user doesn’t give enough of a hoot to actively change their habits in such a way that it would force these companies to change their behavior.

I realize that I am just one person and won’t move the needle at all. That’s fine. The short of it is that I feel better having switched away from Firefox and deleted my Mozilla account (which I did right before starting this post).

Right now, I’m using Chrome. Yes, I know… I went from the Stalker Lite browser to the Uber Stalker browser (in terms of privacy)… but it will give me enough time to decide whether I want to deal with a Chromium-based browser or one of the Firefox forks and trust that the developers have removed all the Mozilla crap.

Oh… one other piece of information. A person from Mozilla did an interview with the guy at The Linux Experiment, and he published the recording of that interview not too long ago.

Here it is.

I’m not sure that the interview really did all that much to improve Mozilla’s reputation. A veteran attorney commented on the video that there was no need for such ambiguous updates to their Terms of Service (paraphrasing, at best… apologies for however I’ve butchered the comment).

I didn’t watch all of this video, because I saw it before I understood what the situation was with Mozilla. Now that I understand, I need to go back and watch it in its entirety. But that will happen after I get today’s words in.

Firefox used to be my go-to browser, and I am very sorry to see Mozilla choose the path for it that it has.

I never used Thunderbird or any of Mozilla’s other offerings, because I felt there were better alternatives out there… at least for my use case.

I’ll circle through all my devices and get rid of Firefox after I have written my words for the day. After all, my stories are the most important of anything I do.  🙂

I hope the days treat you and yours well. Stay safe out there.