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The Cloud

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KaiRo

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The Cloud

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2013-01-08 21:53

tom jones

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so, we are all Mozilla's product?
i didn't pay for firefox.. i don't pay for Sync.. ditto for my (free) extensions on AMO.. so, am i just a product to be sold by mozilla to google (and now facebook)?

of course not, don't be ridiculous! and no need to explain to me the difference in mozilla's privacy policies, and the importance of the non-profit values -- i'm reading this via p.m.o, i have already bought in on the manifesto.

but i'm tired of this "you are the product" meme, because it's getting stale, and it was bullshit from the start. the scale of internet enables so much great and positive things that weren't possible before, or to people who couldn't afford them before: firefox, google and facebook, to name just a few already mentioned here.

i'll skip firefox, and just remind you about the (free) search across the total sum of human knowledge, available to everyone, across the globe, absolutely FREE, or if you don't know how to install ABP, at the price of some ads, or even god-forbid, tracking (for which nobody ever showed ANY ACTUAL HARM, to ANYONE, btw).

and although i don't personally like or use facebook, i can appreciate that it brings a lot of benefit to those who do, and that most of those benefits comes from "everyone" using it, which could never be true for a paid service.

(i hope i don't need to explain the role of twitter in recent uprisings against oppressive regimes around the world)

i'm not defending egregious terms of service (they are a symptom of other problems), but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater..
2013-01-09 02:03

Al

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Of course you're being sold, Tom. Why do you think Google pays Mozilla and Opera, for example, for search traffic?
2013-01-09 02:29

Mook

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External services
Unfortunately, Persona in its current state is very much a cloud service - you can't realistically use it completely free of Mozilla's server yet. In particular, getting your own verifier up will have issues with all the email-based accounts being shimmed on Mozilla's servers. There's no planned migration path to a different login on a separate domain, either, so if you start with a shimmed ID using a domain (that is, the right part of the ID) you don't control, you can't shift it to something else either.

That said, it's certainly a lot better than, say, Facebook Connect...
2013-01-09 05:51

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