Looks like Mozilla is just relying on Someone Else’s (in this case, 404 Media’s) coverage of this

a new investigation by 404 Media has revealed that ShadowDragon, a U.S. government contractor, is exploiting publicly available data from websites and services like Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo — to fuel mass surveillance programs for U.S. government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

And to my eyes it looks like they’re relying on Someone Else (you) to petition them, although to be fair they do say:

Mozilla will directly pressure 30 companies, chosen based on their size, the volume of user data they hold, the vulnerability of their users, and the value of their data to ShadowDragon — especially platforms where users share sensitive information, including personal communications, affiliations, political speech, geolocation, and immigration status.

… Which is good, whatever directly pressuring means.

Where’s the C come into this

It’s the freest state in the conf– Union, don’t you know

I assumed American police just have infinite power and, more recently, extra legal protection on top of it

I’m addressing, you’re just not understanding

I’ve heard of whataboutism, but this is whatifism. “What if China did something bad in the future?” Then it would be bad.

The actual article title is “What the Czech-China cyber clash means for your security and privacy” - and the answer for privacy is “literally nothing.” The source looks cooked, it’s a site for sexpats, and there is no attributed author.

If you want to contribute to privacy discussion, why not wait for something exceptionally interesting to come around? Or, if you just want to push a universal “hey guys, China is bad” narrative (which I assume all of us already know), can you at least wait for an article with a little more meat on its bones?

OP has a history of posting nothing but anti-China stories (previously, previously) and tends to do a poor job of selecting them IMO).

tl;dr

This cyberattack didn’t expose personal data but shows ongoing risks to Czech digital security.

No privacy impacted, but the article did use the word “privacy” near the title.

I like redundancies. Using Google over a VPN is less effective than using Google through a proxy that also services thousands of other people for Google specifically, for example

And if I switch to Ubuntu, I’ll have to worry about a major version upgrade in April 2029, which is a lot of change for an even less forgiving goalpost… For a lot of people, including unfortunately myself, “just use Linux” isn’t really viable

I’ve considered the “just use Linux” arguments thoroughly and they always come up short for my serious computing work.

It works for 90% of my use cases, the other 10% is unbearably difficult or impossible to reconfigure. And that’s with the assumption I do a pretty significant HD shuffle just to work up to that functionality.

And that’s without worrying about the long term update stability of stuff like Linux, where Ubuntu updates can cause major system issues if you don’t get the next major version. (And please don’t say that a less user-friendly release is the solution to that). 7 years from now beats Ubuntu’s 5 <4 years of updates…

FWIW Ecosia

• Is not particularly privacy oriented
• Donates $0.00 unless you click ads

This fixes the “end of support” problem for around 7 more years

Counterpoint:

The solution is simple. You can just use the Official Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 edition to get updates till Jan 13, 2032.

(Note: if you can just switch to Linux instead, just switch to Linux)

Previously, I wrote a comment assuming this was just a clone of (ex-Mozilla) Send. It appears it is not, and has a completely different looking code base.

deleted by creator

Stuff is happening as late as yesterday, so it’s progressing pretty quickly

Teixeira v Mozilla (2024):

Apart from Firefox, none of Mozilla’s other product offerings were profitable, with the Pocket product notably being allowed to operate in a state of negative profitability for over 5 years before Mr. Teixeira joined Mozilla.

I understand retiring Pocket after a long, long run.

But what’s up with ending FakeSpot? They just bought that. They spent an undisclosed amount of money and are now abandoning it.

Is the FakeSpot shuttering a sign of money totally wasted, or should I be concerned that the FakeSpot TOS allowed them to sell user data (specifically in the event of an acquisition) right before the Mozilla acquisition?

Gemini is nice. It’s got some serious QOL improvements over Gopher too, for those of us that like a little formatting or structure.

I think the current Register title is a little more informative (and cheeky, which is common from their reporting):

Show us your face: New Orleans PD reportedly got secret facial recognition alerts