Slashdot Mirror
Tor Executive Director Hints At Firefox Integration
blottsie writes: Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a "private browsing mode" in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off. "They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base," Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. "Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users." The product that best fits Lewman's description, by our estimation, is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.
So, the very thing which could protect users privacy by default, on a massive sacle, almost so transparently as to be irrelevent. Possibly the biggest privacy breakthrough in the history of the internet, and your first thought is concern at increased data throughput?
No wonder privacy is in such a bad state!
You already contribute financially to illegal activities. You do business with a business which is used by criminals, saving the criminals money due to economies of scale for said business -- examples: internet, phone, mail, transportation. If you think it is acceptable to do this because it has a lot of legitimate users, what makes it different for Tor? Lots of people value their privacy, especially now that the NSA is unconstitutionally searching all your unencrypted communication. If locks are to keep honest people honest, encryption is to keep dishonest government slightly more honest.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Interpretation: only remove what *I* want you to remove. Because if you so much as dare to remove my stupid, barely-used half-broken feature and make me install an addon to get it back, you're worse than Hitler. But screw everyone else, they can lose whatever, no matter how useful or heavily-used it is by comparison.
Interpretation: only remove what *I* want you to remove. Because if you so much as dare to remove my stupid, barely-used half-broken feature and make me install an addon to get it back, you're worse than Hitler. But screw everyone else, they can lose whatever, no matter how useful or heavily-used it is by comparison.
The excuse Mozilla gave years ago when they first started to bloat things up was that people were not really making use of extensions or even aware of their existence. People don't want to have to search for and install the extensions and would rather have that functionality built-in when they first install.
Instead of adding the features to the core app, they could have created extensions that added this functionality, then bundled them, enabled by default, with Firefox. That way the functionality would already be there without the user having to do anything, and then the "power users" who were more familiar with the extensions system and didn't want that functionality could just go disable them to improve performance and memory usage.
But they didn't do that for some reason...