Societal norms are not aligned with what these educators are saying. I and many other parents know this but they are exposed to technology outside of our direct oversight at schools, friends and relatives houses.

Imagine whining about smoking in the first half of the 20th century or even the 60s and 70s. Sure there’s an obvious element to it, but smoking rates used to be higher than 50%. Societal norms were that everyone was exposed to smoke, government was lobbied by tobacco and tobacco got rich.

There has been a generational shift in attitudes to, and prevalence of smoking, but only when the medical consensus was harder to lobby away and politicians were faced with pressure of a critical mass of bereaved relatives. It’s at the this stage that “average” adult has strong enough convictions supported by regulation that society breaks through.

Meanwhile, as an adult I am borderline forced to use a smartphone for banking, shopping and communication and need superhuman levels of willpower to avoid social media entrapment.

Big tech is 100% thrilled that people still push around the argument that parents are 100% to blame.

Instead of companies or individuals paying you to build your software, that they may find useful, (and some companies may not feel comformatble funding a bit of software that their competitors could otherwise take for free), you instead provide - through a services company - integration support, customisation, hosted versions, or other tertiary elements of value (such as premium documentation) that keep you focused on your project (albeit via some diversification)

If the software is free (as in beer) then what else might potential users need, that you can monitise.

E.g. Documentation, installation scripts, advanced models don't "have" to be free alongside the code. Just a thought.

(a) Ignore browser security updates

and

(b) Install some extensions to fettle with user-agent strings to match popular browsers.

Streuth.

ALMOST EVERYONE is voilating user privacy to some extent. That's the price to pay for free software. It sucks, but how do we climb out of that reality?

Punch the bad guy in the face if you like, YOU have options, but once FF is sunk, the the only provider most people can turn to for the stuff they need is Chrome.

If Mozilla/FF is the bad guy in your analogy then Chrome must be an atroticy-committing omni-cidal megalomaniac, which correct me if i'm wrong, is not better.

If you understand the privacy landscape and don't want to get involved you don't have to. I'm on a multi-container, multi-privacy extension, private-search setup because I roughly understand the environment. But I'm certainly not recommending that setup to my parents.

In my view MZ/FF is the least worst of the VIABLE alternatives and has the best chance of success. Sinking Mozilla's firefox in favour of ladybird or brave but none of these will ever have the marketing collaterall that mozilla has/had to be anything other than niche, until they are bought by Meta or Amazon or (you get me)

Most banking websites that most people need to use don't give a fuck about niche browsers and actively agent-sniff to reduce their support and security footprint. Whining down the phone to megacorp's customer support that "you don't want to use Chrome on privacy grounds" and "they really should support ladybird" will not be the mighty hammer of resistance you think it is.

I don't have a better suggestion and so I'm willing make a deal with a bad guy it means I don't have to install Chrome on my mother's PC.

Those who care very deeply about very tight privacy have enough niche options.

But I want there to be browser that has enough privacy to be sustainable so there’s a reliable option for me to recommend to family members etc which is holds enough market share for websites to test against.

If Firefox’s market share dips any lower website makers won’t support it - testing only against the homogeneity of chrome/edge/safari and then it will become a death spiral and humanity will have taken a step backwards.

It’s a case of use it lose it.

We tried a variant of this with token/credit-based accounting instead of local current Failed miserably. We learnt that "Confused says no" the hard way.

Good luck.

Just a long time BitWarden user and subscriber. Content that it'll likely remain openly auditable - which is the principal benefit here - and do not care that the authors want to make it more profitable/sustainable. For a system keeping all my stuff safe, when they're probably fending off nation-state attackers, that's a position that is satisfactory to me.

Re: the dusty account, the Internet seldom offers me stuff I can be bothered to comment on.

Assuming they stick with openly auditable code (albeit not FOSS) then it's still than purely commercial options.

Nevertheless, my argument is that it should be cherished that we've had (guessing) best part of a decade of opensource BitWarden that cannot be taken away from us. The FOSS bit is purely temporal ... $now, the exact commit/release/tag/head when an FOSS license is in play, it remains FOSS - it's just the next commit isn't FOSS ... but there's no binding license that says it is/should/has-to remain for future commits.

Nobody's rights are being taken away here.

"Beleiving in FOSS" just needs to be more short-term focussed or prepare for continual dissappointment.

You have absolute freedom in truly open source software at the point of any particular release.

So, you have the freedom to fork or self-build/host at discrete time points.

Assuming software made by a company to remain and persist truly open source (compatible)is idiotic.

Praise the freedoms you have had for this time.

The constant criticisms will likely mean that new companies or new products will never opt for open source in the future . And that is a poorer outcome for the world.

> no active refreshing/polling

Maybe not twitter specifically, but the paper mentions a centralised message board like twitter, so we can assume some sort of interactive service would be suggested.

My main point is this that for such a specific bearer (bandwidth, channel plan, duty cycle, range etc) it is important to model the capabilities. I’m not sure how well this would support a crisis (notably free of central management) when there is the potential for large numbers of nodes.

LoRa is excellent at long range, but with Long Range transmission comes a greater opportunity to interfere with other transmissions. Sure you can reach a long way so a low number of rural casualties can be serviced effectively, but what happens when you have a dense urban scenario and there are 10's/100's/1000's of nodes all hitting refresh on twitter and they are all interfering with each other and the few low-bandwidth gateway nodes are attempting to carry the traffic?

Backup now, backup always, backup often. You can't buy that stuff back.