That’s it, yes - each state gets as many electoral votes as it has congressmen, including senators. Most states award all of their electoral votes to whoever wins the state, with no proportionality to it at all - only two states (Nebraska and Maine, neither one large) do anything proportional with their votes.

With a system like that it’s easier to see how things can end up with the less popular candidate winning - they can, for example, sneak by with 50.1% of the vote in just enough states to win, but bomb it out with 20% of the vote in all the other states. That’s an extreme example specifically for the purpose of illustration, but less extreme versions of that are usually what happens.

The electoral votes also aren’t distributed entirely fairly - the number of electoral votes per person tends to be larger for less populated states. The less populated states also tend to be Republican states. So in a very real sense, each person’s vote counts for “more” in those states, and “less” in states with high populations. I don’t believe it’s really possible to fix this problem without vastly increasing the number of electoral votes, but congress currently has its size capped at 535 members for what I consider not very good reasons.

Yes, the whole system is trash from the ground up. But much of its structure is defined in the constitution itself, which is very difficult to change.

Faithless electors have never once affected the outcome of a US election.

This is not correct. The electoral college is exactly as susceptible to giving the win to the person with fewer votes as it was in 2000 and 2016. It’s also not an issue that’s due to any state in particular and is not an issue that can be solved by individual state action. The NPVIC would fix it but requires the cooperation of many states and is not in effect, and has stalled pretty hard in recent years.

God, you’re exhausting. They don’t sell the data. Get over it. The email left no room for ambiguity. You’re reaching so far it’s embarrassing. Are you really that jaded?

Reviving a long-dead thread for a relevant update, in a top-level post because you deleted all of your replies in the thread where it was relevant.

Mozilla did reply to my email asking for clarification on their Fakespot privacy policy, and whether they collect or sell user data, as we were discussing - though that reply took them four weeks. Their response in full:

“”" Hello,

Thank you for contacting Mozilla and for your question. At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws. The only data we share outside of Mozilla are generalized aggregated metrics with service providers who make Faksepot run to help us with logging and debugging issues to provide an uninterrupted experience for our customers, and we do not share this data for monetary gain. We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

We trust this answers your questions and thank you again for reaching out.

Kind regards, Mozilla “”"

The main difference to me is the lack of a profit motive, which is the primary driver of enshittification. The federation helps harden it against things like abusive admins, since it’s dead simple to jump ship to another instance in that case, but honestly that’s pretty secondary to me.

There was this game of dots I played against my 12 year old niece. The game was looking pretty even with two obvious large snakes building up - she ended up making the move that opened up the first, smaller snake for myself, hoping to force me to open the larger one for her. But I purposely didn’t claim the ending squares in the first snake, which let me avoid opening up the second for her. So she was forced to then open up the second snake to me, letting me claim basically the entire board.

The second image explains it better - with the black lines as the setup she left me with, the usual strategy would be on the left, while I played as on the right, with the blue line as my last move.

That’s essentially how Generative adversarial networks work, and the effect is that the generative program gets better at making its fakes be undetectable

Notes in Google Keep will sync between mobile and web

Ads should be tailored to the content of the website they are on. Not to me in any way whatsoever.

Then you might be interested in this new technology being tested by Mozilla that aims to replace tracking cookies.

Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.

I dunno about the iOS version, but on the desktop and Android versions both you can also disable them directly from the new tab page itself.

In fact, uBlock Origin is one of the officially recommended extensions by Mozilla

uBO Lite was incorrectly flagged as violating policy by someone at Mozilla, but rather than appeal that decision in any capacity at all, the developer just removed the add-on entirely without responding to Mozilla. The original decision was almost certainly just an error.

Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?

I hope that if Mozilla does fail someone takes over Firefox from them

I’m of course rooting for Mozilla, but if things do go sideways…

Please be Proton, please be Proton

And surely you know better than to assume Firefox’s own privacy policy is null and void because the privacy policy for a different, distinct product offered by the same company has some different terms in it? Regardless of what FakeSpot’s actual policy ends up being (I’m withholding judgement until they reply to my email), I can’t see it as anything other than disingenuous to imply that their policy in some way affects Firefox’s policy. Firefox does not sell user data, period.

I’m going with Mozilla on this one.

From the same privacy policy you linked:

I don’t personally understand the disconnect between the parts we each posted, but there is a clear disconnect regardless.

And, regardless, this applies to fakespot.com. Not Firefox. Not even slightly Firefox. Firefox unambiguously has nothing to do with selling user data.

Edit: I’ve also gone ahead and sent an email to the address at the bottom of the policy asking for clarification on the issue.

Four weeks later edit: They replied to my email. Here is their response:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Mozilla and for your question. At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws. The only data we share outside of Mozilla are generalized aggregated metrics with service providers who make Faksepot run to help us with logging and debugging issues to provide an uninterrupted experience for our customers, and we do not share this data for monetary gain. We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

We trust this answers your questions and thank you again for reaching out.

Kind regards,
Mozilla

I think it’s probably a combination of both. There’s an astroturfing campaign going on somewhere, just not on Lemmy, which is overall too small and insignificant to target. But astroturfing works - it creates the echo chambers you’re talking about, it creates apathy. Most people just read headlines, not even the comments. You read a bad story about Mozilla once a week and you’ll start to internalize it - eventually your opinion of Mozilla will drop, justified or not, to the point where you’re willing to believe even the more heinous theories about it.

So you end up with a lot of people who’ve been fed a lot of misleading half-truths and even some outright lies, who are now getting angry enough about the situation they think is going on to start actively posting anti-Mozilla posts and comments on their own.

Your own 2023 article doesn’t say anything about policies allowing Mozilla to sell private data, and Mozilla’s own website openly and proudly claims they neither buy nor sell their users’ data.

And Anonym is a company purpose-created to try to transform the advertising industry into a more privacy-respecting industry. Its mission could not align more with Mozilla’s. They in particular developed PPA, the feature Firefox was getting so much bad press about last week - and which ended up being none of the things the dozens of articles posted about it claimed. It is, in fact, a complete non-factor when it comes to privacy risks, and its explicit purpose is to pivot the internet toward a significantly more private ecosystem.

There are lots of people claiming Mozilla is becoming an advertising company and is selling their users out. There’s some misleading evidence that even makes that superficially appear true. But it’s false.

The fact that Mozilla hasn’t talked much about ad blockers since then is, I think, significant.

When have they talked about ad blockers in the past, period? This is just a meaningless scare tactic. I don’t see them talking about arctic drilling either - should I be concerned?

From the same page you got your image from:

That’s not really what the issue is when people mention LibreWolf depends on Firefox. Its code will always be there, sure - but an abandoned browser is a soon-to-be-dead browser. Something as complex as Firefox needs constant updates to its security and engine, at a minimum, to keep it safe and functional. That’s all work that Mozilla does for LibreWolf, and it’s a significant enough burden that arguably no current fork of Firefox would be able to bear it. It’s apparently a burden even Microsoft wasn’t willing to bear anymore.