firefox and yahoo spaz!

[Aggie]

It is unavoidable unless you want to live in some sort of commune with limited internet access

That, my dear Sibling, is the plan.

You can't prevent them from trying and they can't prevent you/us from trying to defend ourselves, just like any other evolutionary war out there.

I think the Cold War is perhaps a more apt comparison...  the US forced the Soviets to collapse basically by outspending them (vast oversimplification, I know).  Care to guess who's got more resources in this conflict?

I'm not terribly susceptible to marketing ploys or impulse buys - albeit more than I'd like to admit, I'm sure.  It's how aggressively they are now building individual profiles that chafes me - the bastids would have your genome mapped and linked to your facebook account if they could figure out how.  

[Griffin NoName]

As I have no money. I am not tempted byt the evil adverts. Not that I ever took any notice of them.

However, I do object to anything which forces upgrades with associated costs. I can''t afford them. Soon the impoverished will be unablr to function. This is discriminatory.

[Sibling DavidH]

That's my attitude, too.  We spend little, are not possessions-oriented and consider ourselves pretty resistant to selling, although I sometimes wonder about how far some of our choices were conditioned by these pressures.

But then I find that my good old whatsit no longer works because they've upgraded the whatsit-handler, without asking me.  Or my friends all have the incompatible  whatsit-handler 2.iii.

[Opsa]

I hear ya. But in a way it's kind of freeing to not have a problem with shopping at thrift stores. I love the thrill of the hunt! And I love having to be creative. And looking like an individual!

I'd try living beyond the grid. It would be hard at times, though. But what isn't?

[Sibling DavidH]

Oh, yes, charity shops (as we call thrift stores) are wonderful.  We get all sorts of goodies from them, especially interesting clothes.  Also lots of stuff for Cap'n B.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

You can't prevent them from trying and they can't prevent you/us from trying to defend ourselves, just like any other evolutionary war out there.

I think the Cold War is perhaps a more apt comparison...  the US forced the Soviets to collapse basically by outspending them (vast oversimplification, I know).  Care to guess who's got more resources in this conflict?

The soviets didn't collapse outspent, many analysts have looked into their model and it could have gone on easily for 30-50 more years no problem, and that assuming no internal changes. What brought the system down was the speed of social change with Gorbachov's perestroika, and the (fortunate) lack of forcefulness* to prevent the runaway. Were they as capable as the west militarily? Perhaps they weren't in equal footing in a number of military endeavors, but on the one that mattered, number of nuclear heads and means to place them on their targets, they were more than capable to hold their own.

I do understand what you say though, although you could easily say that that is just the status quo (the ability of a citizen to protect his/her interests from the powerful has always been limited, and the past decades with some sort of little balances are quickly eroding). The powerful will always have the odds in their favor, no real change there.


*There was an attempt to hold the union by force but it wasn't forceful enough. In comparison the Chinese had no qualms when the protests showed up not long after.

[Aggie]

I do understand what you say though, although you could easily say that that is just the status quo (the ability of a citizen to protect his/her interests from the powerful has always been limited, and the past decades with some sort of little balances are quickly eroding). The powerful will always have the odds in their favor, no real change there.

We should be thankful that we are sitting here whinging about how tech corporations are going to more effectively advertise to us, and not that death squads will be at our door because we spoke out against the elites.  There have always been much worse abuses of power, and I daresay that there always will be. 

_{some of my paranoia about lack of privacy does reflect a fear that the elites will not hesitate to seize this data to send the death squads at our door, if the shit ever really hits the fan.  I am not anti-authority but have a rather pessimistic view of trusting them to play by their own rules, or even to make rules in the interest of the public}

I do feel, however, that we are passing from a consumerist society to a hyper-consumerist society, and that there is a one-sided arms race going on with regards to privacy concerns on the internet. Let me paint a broad metaphor:  You live in a city where much of the economy is driven by a large chemical factory in the area.  The city is a lovely place to live, with lots of services and entertainment available, and all your friends and family live in this city.  The chemical plant is known to release emissions which are not acutely toxic but are reasonably likely to take 5 to 10 years off your lifespan.  Exposure is ubiquitous within the city limits.  You can protect yourself from these fumes, but it requires wearing a full-face respirator and a chemical protective suit at all times, and take extra precautions in purifying your drinking water.  Your alternatives are:  a) Live life normally and die a little younger  b) Take the precautions to protect your health, although it's inconvenient   c)  Move far out of the city, losing all the services and personal connections that the city provides, and probably your job in the process  (there's no other cities or towns in this metaphor)

That's about how I see this issue.



PS Scratch oversimplification, and substitute myth instead.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Wanna hear pessimistic? The elites will eliminate dissenters and everyone not useful to them, when they start feeling that they have no other option, that is, when resource depletion will prevent our still growing population to survive as they are now. First it will be the dissenters but that will not be enough to balance things out so genocide cannot be that far from that point.

I'm quite Malthusian on that view, and despite the fact that population should stabilize in about 50-70 years to between 9-11 billion, the rate of resource depletion will make that population unsustainable. With some luck I will not have the "pleasure" to witness those beautiful times but my son likely will.

[Sibling DavidH]

Bloody malware!  I decided to install Waterfox, which is a well-known version of Firefox for 64-bit systems, and is supposed to be faster.  I ran the huge setup file, and AVG stopped it from opening a Trojan called isearchall.exe.  Thanks, AVG; balls to Waterfox.

Mind you, the filename's a bit of a giveaway.

[Opsa]

Weird! I've never heard of it. Proves what I know.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Bloody malware!  I decided to install Waterfox, which is a well-known version of Firefox for 64-bit systems, and is supposed to be faster.  I ran the huge setup file, and AVG stopped it from opening a Trojan called isearchall.exe.  Thanks, AVG; balls to Waterfox.

Mind you, the filename's a bit of a giveaway.

A quick perusal of the intertubes seems to link that key-logger with the optional AVG crapware packaged with Waterfox-- using a custom install with only the bare-minimum Waterfox stuff seems to skip trying to install the malware.

I haven't tried it though.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

If you want a 64 bit Firefox you have to get Nightly which is the official Mozilla 64 bit implementation and as it's name implies is compiled nightly. I've been using it for a while and it does work and even there are plugins (flash, silverlight) for it. You have to dig to get to it because Mozilla isn't to interested in publicize it (you will find it close to the bottom of the page):

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/

[Sibling DavidH]

Thank you, folks!  I'll try this Nightly.
Isn't it ironical that my existing AVG caught malware which AVG was trying to sneak in.

EDIT: I've installed Nightly and it imported all my bookmarks and add-ons automatically.  It does seem faster; I have hopes.  I'm doing this edit on it.

[Opsa]

Bravo Zono!

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

 
---
Nightly seems to be faster for certain things and slower for others, the advantage is when you have 200 tabs open and are eating more memory which a 64 bit app manages better. Hopefully it works for you, remember that for all practical purposes you are beta testing so you may find more crashes than with the release (32bit) version.