Instead of apologizing, I think people need to understand the system doesn't work. It is fundamentally broken, just like the police.
Why don't cops go to jail for breaking the law? Because they are the ones who investigate themselves for their crimes. It's the same with politicians: they make the rules and write the laws for themselves. They go on TV and say things they think people want to hear, but when it comes to action they don't follow through.
Politicians are glorified TV personalities and aren't actually held accountable to their supposed policies. They wage a war of disinformation against citizens to get votes, and then engage in gerrymandering to make sure they stay elected.
> Instead of apologizing, I think people need to understand the system doesn't work.
You are claiming Obama didn't affect change, he absolutely affected exactly as much change as his office and the law allowed. Nobody is apologizing, its simply the way our system is designed.
Sorry but that isn't true. Obama had a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate for the first two years of his presidency[1]. It wasn't until January of 2011 that the House turned Republican.
They've been pivoting the Firefox name to encompass many privacy-minded tools for a while now. I would argue that a Firefox VPN strengthens that branding.
Frankly, very few people know Mozilla. Many people know Firefox. There's been lots of brand research into this.
So, for many years now, "Firefox" has been morphing into a brand that encompasses many online tools beyond the browser that are all intended to be tied together by Mozilla's mission & manifesto.
It’s not a matter of paying for stuff, at least not in Europe. I have 3 different streaming subscriptions (still cheaper than 8 channels of flow tv with its 50% commercials), and I absolutely hate watching a tv show, only to find out the European version of the streaming service doesn’t have the last 4 seasons yet, despite the show being over and the finale having “aired” in the US.
In cases like that I turn to torrents and download whatever seasons I’m missing, watch them and delete them again. I still keep my streaming subscriptions though.
It has gotten better, and the problem is mostly confined to cross studio/service shows, or services not available in Europe.
HBO Nordic hasn’t even announced an air date for Mr. Robot season 4 yet, which I guess is great as I can only dodge spoilers for so long, so when it eventually hits I’ll know the ending.
Even if the show was available on a European streaming service, I’d probably stream it anyway. There’s a limit to how many streaming services I care to have, and torrenting is so much easier than trying to navigate the dark patterns most streaming services put around their unsubscribe pages.
I’m also too lazy to subscribe/unsubscribe multiple times per year to multiple services.
Perhaps a “pay per view” model that bills you X per show watched, up to a maximum equal to the monthly subscription fee. That way I could have multiple subscriptions and only pay subscription fees to the services I actually use, and once I stopped watching them I’d automatically be unsubscribed.
Of course that will never happen while there are a million services.
Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.
You can create a free account or a site on blogspot or Wordpress with significantly less friction. That is still a full-fledged website, and not an IG page or Twitter that's a walled garden serving only logged in users.
In this day and age, nobody is going to bother with writing HTML markup when they've used rich text editors to compose everything from emails to Tumblr posts.
Back in the early 2000s I used to write music reviews for a site called Epinions. They didn't have a rich text editor, so if you wanted to do bold, you needed to wrap those words in a <b></b> tag, or <i> tag for italics. It was extremely irritating to have to do that, especially if you were pasting in the content from a pre-existing Word doc that already had all the proper formatting.
If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
>If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content.
You seem to be confusing the implementation of a site with its content, and assuming that homogeneity of layout corresponds to homogeneity of content. It's an understandable bias to find in a community of programmers and web developers, but it isn't true.
The pages of a book are uniformly sized, generally speaking uniformly colored with one of a very narrow set of fonts and typefaces, spaced and typeset according to an industry standard - and yet this places no constraint at all on the nature of the content that can be displayed within those pages. In the same way, a website rendering content on the frontend rather than the backend is an implementation detail which has nothing to do with what content is rendered.
And even in the 90s, many sites looked similar. Rather than having standard templates focused around typography, people just copied what other sites were doing, using the same table-based layouts with black backgrounds and GIFS, and none of that necessarily made the content any better than what exists today.
JavaScript is the first path down a road that leads to tracking and ads and optimization. It's too easy to think, "I'll just serve this JS library off X CDN" and voila, you've enabled someone to track your users. "No JavaScript" keeps you honest.
Honestly, I hope this leads to the state having cause to take it over with no cost. Stakeholders need to bear the burden of the organizations abysmal record.
I'm not blaming all of these fires on PGE. The state is simply not resilient to fire -- the smallest fires quickly become infernos.
They deserve some blame, of course. Clearly arson is wrong, and so is negligence. But how negligent are they really being? It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected.
PG&E has a history of astounding incompetence and negligence, so probably very. PG&E blew up a San Bruno neighborhood because they were so lax about record keeping. I just heard something blow up about half an hour ago (sounded like a transformer). I still have power, but the last time this happened (a month or so ago) PG&E cut power for nearly 20 hours before even bothering to send anyone to investigate (overall I was without power for 22 hours).
It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected.
The easy answer is that this infrastructure should be underground so that it can't cause these sorts of fires in the first place.
From reddit:
From OP's article: "The utility says the transmission level outage on the power line relayed and did not reclose."
Which means:
From OP's article: "The utility says the transmission level outage on the power line relayed and did not reclose."
Unless I'm mistake, the "re-closing" refers to a line that becomes de-energized somehow- the circuit is broken, or "opened". Sometimes this is because a physical cable broke from wind or a tree branch, sometimes it's a technical malfunction; so PG&E sends some juice through the (potentially physically broken) line to see if the current returns, and attempts to restart the line.
Basically, the re-closing sends live current through a line that may be physically compromised, in order to see if it's not compromised and can be turned back on simply. So, in this case, it seems likely that a) wind broke one of PG&E's major transmission lines, causing it to fall onto the tinder-like brush below the tower, and then PG&E sent juice through that broken line, at least once (in the past the re-closers would make three attempts.)
PG&E apparently let one of their cables fall on dry brush, and then sent sparks through it, possibly multiple times, starting the fire.
This poster goes on to point out that Southern California utility companies typically disable this behavior during fire season and other posters pointed out that typically older reclosing mechanisms were just dumb relays that you couldn't easily disable while newer infrastructure will be using SCADA devices that you could easily disable.
> The most recent audit of PG&E’s work in Sonoma County, conducted in 2015, found 3,527 maintenance and repair jobs that had been finished past their scheduled due dates. A 2013 audit of PG&E’s North Bay division, which includes Marin and Napa counties, counted 9,520 repair or maintenance orders finished late and 3,270 still overdue.
> The commission ... counted more than 1,000 late repair or maintenance jobs in six of PG&E’s nine Bay Area districts.
> No other California utility, or utility division, was found to have more than 1,000 late corrective actions in audits the commission performed from 2013 through this year. Only the Sacramento Municipal Utility District came close, with 993 late repair or maintenance jobs cited in an audit this year.
> The 2015 audit of PG&E’s Sonoma operations, for example, included spot-check inspections of PG&E equipment in Cazadero, Guerneville, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa, Sonoma and Windsor. Problems found include one instance of vegetation growing too close to a power line, one of vegetation obstructing the climbing space on a pole and several instances of improperly installed guy wires, which help hold a pole in place.
> Pacific Gas and Electric Co. diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations money collected from customers over a 15-year period and spent it for other purposes, including profit for stockholders and bonuses for executives, according to a pair of state-ordered reports released Thursday.
> The documents link a deficient PG&E safety culture - with its "focus on financial performance" - to the pipeline explosion in San Bruno on Sept. 9, 2010, that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.
> The "low priority" the company gave to pipeline safety during the three years leading up to the San Bruno blast was "well outside industry practice - even during times of corporate austerity programs," said the audit by Overland Consulting of Leawood, Kan.
> "A cursory review reveals that a significant portion, in the millions, has been awarded to the CEO," the commission staff report said in a reference to former PG&E head Peter Darbee, who retired last year.
> [PG&E] chose to diverting money from power line under-grounding projects — among other infrastructure initiatives — to “other high priority system improvements” like boosting corporate profits and paying executives even more. Despite their recent bankruptcy filing, the company's chief executive officer Bill Johnson received an annual base salary of $2.5 million for a three-year contract — double the salary of the previous CEO.
> Thanks to a subsequent California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) investigation, the public learned that between 1987 and 1994 PG&E diverted $495 million from its budgets to maintain its systems to boost corporate profits.
> Decades later, another an investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission found that PG&E diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations collected from customers over a 15-year period to spend on bonuses for executives, among other profit-makers for key stakeholders.
---
Given the decades-long pattern that's documented here, we not only can hold PG&E 100% responsible, we should. Defending them for attempting to operate in WUI areas holds no water when they consistently chose to cash out funds that were supposed to be used for equipment maintenance.
PG&E's practices are indefensible, they are wholly responsible for the deaths and property damage they have caused, their "just turn it all off" solution is absurd, and they should cease to exist if only to give future executives a reason to have a moment's introspection in between sips of top-shelf liquor.
> You're taking it on trust that it's anonymized to the point of being impossible to make any inferences about individuals, which is a huge leap, not only in trust, but data science.
I don't doubt that someone at Mozilla could de-anonymize that data, but I have enough trust in the organization that they won't
> Mozilla is based in a country with sweeping surveillance legislation, and so should not be trusted to hold or process [potentially] personally identifying data, no matter how well intentioned they themselves may be.
Even if Mozilla are completely trustworthy, nothing is stopping them from being forced to give up all that data with a national security letter (accompanied with the customary gag order), to be mined for insights by alphabet agencies.
Have a look through about:telemetry and let us know what you think the US government thinks is so valuable they would threaten powerful people with jail time to find out. Whether my CPU has MMX? Maybe times so far in this session there was auto-starting audio playback which you allowed even though Firefox defaults to never allowing this?
I can /maybe/ if I squint really hard, imagine some murder detective figuring out a way that a value in their suspect's telemetry data helps prove they did it. Only thing is, the murder cop can just ask a judge to let them go take the suspect's whole PC, no need to bother any Mozilla employees with crazy requests.
You are aware that it is publicly known that the US government has been practicing a "collect anything you can get your hands on about everyone" approach for a while now, right?
So your theory is that the US government's policy is to find the most convoluted difficult way to do this collecting and ignore all the easier ways?
"Boss, I just got done with that $500Bn compute job to work out a guy's password as you recommended, rather than just resetting it by email as I'd originally thought of doing. As you pointed out the government can just raise income taxes to pay for it"
"Cool, OK, now I want you to go threaten this company CEO. They collect optional telemetry data and we'd like to extort that CEO into telling us whether a user with this IP address has an Intel or AMD processor"
"Shouldn't I just get them to export the data from their software directly rather than bother with all this? Or just use any of these broadly available malware techniques to get the answer for the user we care about?"
"No, that would be simpler and cheaper, if we do it this way only a true genius like zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC would realise what we're up to, as ever our goal is collect anything but only in the most elaborate way possible so that it's tremendously expensive and difficult"
"OK, but what if the user has disabled telemetry?"
"Then we'll have to think of an even more expensive and elaborate way to collect data. We have a programme to teach goldfish to swim differently depending on whether they have recently seen anybody wearing a T-shirt with a specific logo design on it."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...