I think it's highly disingenuous of you to claim that the regulators in question are acting without any plan or purpose even if those might not be immediately clear. "If you don't like how the table is set, turn over the table."
There is chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml but many options shown there are nonfunctional. The relevant option is listed but I'm not sure if setting it to false has any effect.
Edit: Just found out that on that link above, you can set general.aboutConfig.enable to true to enable about.config.
It looks like the xml page and the about.config one are the same, as the modifications I made are synced.
Thank you so much for that! I was missing the ability to configure a very important option for me in Stable (layout.css.prefers-color-scheme.content-override), but couldn't keep using Nightly because of its instability... You're a lifesaver!
That still doesn't disable all telemetry from being sent. There's a whole slue of settings that you need to change in about:config and then there's still no guarantee.
Even if you follow those steps you listed there and uncheck all those boxes you're shown in the standard settings pages, then Firefox will just continue to send out 'pings' when you interact with certain elements in the browser interface. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Mozilla is like one of those politicians that just won't stop yapping about traditional conservative family values, who is later found to have several extramarital children and numerous affairs with same-sex partners themselves.
Thinkpads come with that, an unspoofable indicator that will tell you with 100% certainty that your image is not being recorded or even recordable unless the physical operator of the machine allows it. Can't beat a physical cover if you really want to be sure!
Good point, I did conveniently gloss over that one didn't I!
A switch to break the physical wire connection is about the only thing I can come up with out of hand right now. I believe the PinePhones come with physical switches for their antenna's so there's that.
What feels like a self-inflicted issue though is that the switches are fail-open, not fail-closed.
To allow for swappable bezels, the switches (on the plastic bezel) in fact just introduce obstructions in optocouplers (on the camera board screwed to the metal lid), which—I don’t know what they do due to Framework’s refusal to release the schematics, but I guess just cut the power line of the camera resp. the signal of the microphone using a couple of MOSFETs.
The problem is, the camera and the microphone are live if the obstruction is absent and disconnected if it’s present, not the other way around. So all it takes a hypothetical evil maid to make the switches ineffective is to pick up the edge of the bezel with a nail (it’s not glued down, this being a Framework) and snip two teensy bits of plastic off to make the switches nonfunctional while feeling normal. This is not completely invisible, mind you—the camera light will still function, you’ll still see the camera in the device list if you look—and probably not very important. But I can’t help feeling that doing it the other way around would be better.
I vaguely remember another vendor (HP?) selling laptops with a physical camera switch, but given the distance between the switch (on the side near the ports) and the camera (on the top of the display), I’m less than hopeful about it being a hardware one.
Say you tell me you want a red sphere. Taken at face value, you show a prejudice for red sphere's and discriminate against all other coloured shapes.
We've all had to dance that dance with ChatGPT by now, where you ask for something perfectly ordinary, but receive a response telling you off for even daring to think like that, until eventually you manage to formulate the prompt in a way that it likes with just the right context and winner vocabulary + grammar, and finally the damned thing gives you the info you want without so much as any gaslighting or snarky insults hiding in the answer!
It doesn't understand racism, it simply evaluates certain combinations of things according to how it was set up to do.
I believe you are vastly underestimating the capabilities of parrots or similarly intelligent birds.
At least when my pet parrot manages to fool me into whatever it is he wants to get out of me that time, he does it for his own primal benefit and not because it was programmed to adhere to some strict set of ethic and moral boundaries set by legal requirements and someone else's idea of how people should think and behave.
I don't think that following the primal benefit would be a good estimation for intelligence, despite the fact that such behavior is common for most species.
What makes human specie special is the ability of some individuals to create new things that didn't exist before. That's a loose criteria of course, because most individuals just follow educated social constructs for their entire life.
Oh yes I agree on that. I should have specified that I was arguing their ability to reason - which from my own experience these birds do most definitely possess to a surprising extend. They are smart, and they have all day to figure out which buttons to press to get you to do something specific they find funny or other such things.
The smart behaviour of parrots and their speech synthesis are two different phenomenon.
Parrots are definitely smart, and parrots can definitely speak, but they can't learn to speak beyond what they are trained to do. It's not like a parrot has ever spontaneously put together a coherent sentence independently.
Absolutely, I also replied to the OP's response below that I failed to specify that I was arguing parrots' ability to reason which I do believe exists to a great extend.
Regardless, speech is just another means of communication. In the end it doesn't really matter if I use perfectly articulated Swahili or just scream "aaar" at you for a few seconds as long as I get the cheeseburger with extra cheese I want from you. These parrots, much like children, just push your buttons and are quite good at finding (or negotiating) the right pattern of things to do and sounds to make to get to a certain outcome.
If you're familiar with the sandbox mmo EVE Online you might like Empires of EVE. They're very well put together and very thorough historical accounts of some massive and long term player driven content/conflicts throughout the history of the game. It was so much fun to read about why my side's leadership made certain decisions and about the other sides' perspectives of some of the space wars I was part of when I still played.
Oh man, I'd really like a copy of that and I see they have a sale on ($40 for both hardcover volumes), but then... $50 for international shipping is a bit steep.
You'd think opting out of sharing analytics data with app developers would also cover push notification metrics but it doesn't seem to be that way from a quick look over the official docs.
Not going to lie, this makes me happy.
[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebDriver/RemoteProtocol/WebDriver_...