Unfettered capitalism would do way more good than current-day crony capitalism. In fact, many people, namely libertarians, think it would do much more good than even honest capitalism.
Right, but how many of those billionaires started as millionaires (or were born into a millionaire family)? When you have generational wealth, it's much easier to take risks.
Oh hell no. More lawyers to find more loopholes. How about addressing the root cause: the lack of competition? The way to do this is lower the barrier to entry, which is made of 100% over-regulation.
You can involve all the antitrust you want, as long as you don't lower the barrier to entry you're just lying to yourself and adding more useless middlemen.
The barrier to entry is definitely not "100% over-regulation". Starting an airline would be extremely difficult even if it were entirely unregulated. You need airplanes, pilots, and a variety of flight and ground crew. You need landing slots at busy airports. And then you need a customer base big enough to fill up your flights.
Even if all of that were easy, you still want anti-trust regulation, because airlines are a cutthroat business. If you start up NerdBird Inc, specializing in SF-Austin flights, it is absolutely in the interests of United and American to undercut you on that route for as long as it takes to drive you out of business. Which will probably not be very long, as airlines are expensive to run and margins are thin.
Look at what happened to Virgin America? It was a consumer-focused airline that was doing very well financially, and it was forcibly acquired because of regulations that US airlines must be US owned.
Yeah, read the article. He was against the merger - regulation drove the forced consolidation, which he did not want. He posted about it a ton when it happened.
If you remove regulations, businesses will raise barriers to entry. Businesses don't like to compete. Competition is a zero-sum game that they might lose. Instead, they prefer to form cartels and turn it into a non-zero sum game where they all win (and consumers all lose).
World history clearly shows that lack of regulation inexorably leads to trusts, cartels, price fixing, price dumping, and all sorts of other anti-competitive agreements. It's trivially easy for a monopoly or cartel to raise their own barriers to entry to maintain their hegemony.
In fact, there's a good argument that the governmental barriers to entry you are lamenting were in fact driven by entrenched businesses as an example of regulatory capture and not a flaw in regulation itself.
If you let businesses get so big that not only are they not regulated, but they have taken over control of regulation itself, you're in a real pickle.
But what is the minimum size for a business to "get so big they have taken over control of regulation"? I have seen very small companies (like, think size of one) deftly manipulate state- and federal- level regulations to their advantage.
> But what is the minimum size for a business to "get so big they have taken over control of regulation"?
This is sort of like asking, "What is the minimum weight you can put on a seesaw before it tips?" The answer depends entirely what's on the other side.
One way to look at free markets is that they provide economic stability in the same way that tensegrity [0] structures provide physical stability. They work not because any element provides stability, but because — when very carefully composed together! — the elements exert opposing forces which all balance out leading to a stable system.
The "brilliant idea" of markets is taking advantages of forces that already exist — human selfishness and the desire to profit — and harness that to produce a system with some level of efficiency. The downside is that there's no real way to evaluate market participants in isolation.
At least on its face, I don't buy that high barriers to entry in every market is "made of 100% over-regulation." Depending on the market in question, there may be extremely high capital costs that have little to do with regulation. What you're trying to do may be highly dependent on partners who be motivated not to give you the best products/services available at reasonable prices. Competition may be entrenched simply by virtue of having been in business much longer than their new competitors, taking advantage of their scale in ways that startups can't -- including locking up potential customers through contracts.
I don't have experience in Hipmunk's field, but I do have experience, in another life, with CLECs, "competitive local exchange carriers." CLECs bloomed thanks to deregulation of their industry in the early 1990s, which is great -- but they were virtually all gone within a decade, not due to re-regulation but to the simple fact that achieving scale and profitability was monumentally expensive and difficult. The company I was at, Intermedia Communications, was bringing in close to a billion dollars of revenue annually by the time they threw in the towel and agreed to be purchased... and they still hadn't come close to turning a profit. But by that point the writing was already on the wall, and the industry was collapsing from hundreds of players to dozens. (The rise of wireless, of course, was the final death blow, but the industry was basically undead by then.)
I don't take Hipmunk's demise as a sign of "too much regulation" at all; airlines went through a similar contraction to CLECs, and what killed Hipmunk -- airlines choking off their pricing data -- will act to prevent any new competitors. That's not a function of too much regulation -- it's a function of not regulating the right things. What if airline pricing data was subject to FRAND ("fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory") licensing?
Regulation is absolutely used too often to protect incumbents, but you simply can't blame lack of competition in every industry on too much regulation. Arguably, when implemented correctly, regulation can increase competition, not harm it.
Do you expect to ever end the arms race of finding loopholes vs closing them? What would this look like?
I don't believe it's possible. You can't fight bad actors by hoping they'll just somehow lose. The unregulated "more competition" market quickly turns into a "less competition" market as the most ruthless parties establish dominance through whatever means necessary. Your barriers to entry, in the extreme case, become things like physical intimidation.
More importantly, the most brilliant minds (and there are still a LOT of them) are working for large companies on unimportant problems instead of doing research. Academia has lost all of its prestige, and companies pay ridiculously more.
I've been a Libertarian since long before I started programming, back when I used to earn next to nothing at the Army and realized the shortcomings of regulation. In fact, I started from the lower class, never had robots, computers, consoles or cellphones like my friends growing up. So no silver spoon here. You can keep telling yourself I'm a "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" but I have my opinions on economics.
I am now convinced that a free market is the best way for everyone, particularly the poorest. There are many who think likewise and we are not callous or selfish. To me, you're the selfish person by keeping us from having better lives. Money does not grow on trees and everything the State does is another opportunity to slow us down and make our poor poorer.
I am always ready to be convinced otherwise, but so far every bit of data I have seen points that way, with ease of doing business, deregulation and a low tax burden being major factors towards a more prosperous society.
The obvious answer is that the facts prove you wrong. The market reigns supreme in the USA compared to Northern Europe, and yet it is USA that looks like a third world country. Collapsing infrastructure, untold poverty and homelessness for huge chunks of the population, shrinking middle class, world leader in putting people behind bars and antidepressant prescriptions...
How would a minimum wage slow Ms. Brown down and make her poorer? To be serious, I would really like an anecdotal example on how medicare for all, minimum wage and a better social support system would be negative.
devcpp is probably conflating circumstantial luck with personal skill, assuming they are implying they bootstrapped themselves. The evidence for luck is ubiquitous: most people stay poor, regardless of ability.
Please don't automatically turn to socialism as the solution to this. Over-regulation is in part responsible for the crony capitalism we're in. You will find that most of these 388 individuals are heavily invested in lobbying to make sure regulations are on their side and hindering their competitors.
Probably not. There's a clear conflict between what (some) power users want and what the best/safest choices are for the general public. And, in general, mainstream platforms like Firefox should default to what's best for the general public. (Yes, you could have bypass mechanisms but backdoors like that are more or less asking for trouble.) See also Apple.
Added: It's not clear to me how "hostile to power users" this particular change is. But my general statement still applies.
It is not clear what is best for the general public.
You can aim for the "safest" choice, which seems to be what you are advocating. If so, it needs to be said explicitly and the implications of functionality reduction (that safety increases always brings) openly discussed and debated.
The model of claiming "we will do what is best for users" with a freedom to replace "best" by "X" has been thoroughly compromised by googles and facebooks of this world. We need to be explicit about goals and tradeoffs. Not attacking your post, just arguing for being clear and honest on goals of non-commercial software.
They have those evil metrics about what users are doing.
If 1% of users are getting exposed to malicious software by a feature and 0.0001% of users are using it, it's a little more clear than you say. I've made both of those numbers up, but I think it's likely enough that very few end users are depending on the ability of other software to silently inject plugins.
With the caveat that power users are probably the ones to have turned off metrics. Mozilla is probably aware of it, but it's still hard to compensate for that.
I do agree with you to a point. I do think they have a difficult task trying to balance protecting people from their own ignorance and catering to power users who know exactly what they are doing and desire more freedom.
An option that just occurred to me is to be able to start Firefox with a special flag that would give access to some extra options to allow actions that reduce security - such as sideloading for example.
To help prevent innocent users being coerced into starting Firefox with that flag it could be something like "Firefox.exe -pleasehackme".
Power users would know what the flag is for but even the most naive user might hesitate to start Firefox using a command inviting themselves to be hacked :-)
Probably a stupid idea, but just putting it out there.
I don't think there is any way to enable unsigned extensions on vanilla Firefox, and I don't think they will ever allow it.
Their justification is that if there were some command line option to allow it, then users could be tricked into doing that.
But, couldn't the user not also be tricked into simply downloading the developer edition? Couldn't the user be tricked into deleting their home directory?
Personally, I find these justifications dubious. There is a kernel of truth that in some edge cases it can offer some protection. But it feels far more like something Google or Apple would do, and Mozilla is either cargo culting them, or has been pressured into doing this.
> The hacker can probably still compile one by their own, but at least it will makes them pain in the ass.
I've compiled a branded build of Firefox myself, and it is as simple as setting a single flag at compile time. Almost trivial. The only protection that branding has is legal, not technical. If I tried redistributing the branded build then Mozilla might sue me. Do you think they will be able to sue malware authors when they do it?
There is absolutely nothing stopping a hacker from replacing or patching Firefox.exe with a branded version that will run their hostile extension. Even if they do not have write access to Firefox.exe, they can download it somewhere else and change where the shortcut points to. It would be almost impossible to tell the difference.
This is not a serious security measure.
But I think you are missing the bigger point here. If they can write to files on your computer, then it is far too late. They can encrypt and ransomware your documents, they can install a keylogger, and they may be able to extract all of your passwords and cookies from Chrome and Firefox.
It would be like if someone stole your car, but at least they don't have the keys to the glove compartment.
Not sure if that is what they do, but on many platforms, there is also code signing. E.g., even if you could trick someone to download your patched/hacked version of Firefox, I believe they'd get a warning on Windows that the software is unsigned.
That is a fine idea. We can make Firefox as safe as they want at startup. Just keep it as a default option -- something power users can turn off and do not make this a hardcoded choice "because those users turning it off may not know what are they doing". Inform, not restrict. My 2c.
Yeah, exactly. Malware could also just delete vanilla firefox and replace it with the developer edition. Just overlay ads over the browser window itself. Or anything else really.
Trying to protect against hostile code already running on the same computer as the browser is futile. At best, it should warn the user if suspicious modifications were made.
And it comes at such a high cost for such a narrow measure of protection.
Yes, I'd argue "safest" is usually the best default for the general public. My reasoning is that a bit more fine-grained control, performance, choice, etc. doesn't have much upside for most people whereas getting compromised can be a very big downside.
Perhaps Firefox hasn't been very clear on its tradeoffs but Apple, for example, seems to have been IMO. (Yes, it tends to be wrapped in marketing rather than tech speak but I think they've been pretty consistent about their priorities.)
I personally have no objections (usually not even strong feelings) to setting defaults, as long as that's what they are -- default choices that users can change if they see fit.
But an option that cannot be changed is not a default choice -- it is a hard coded design decision. My 2c.
And so is, for example, Android. But due to some (shady) tactics, a successful fork of either is impossible for a small group. Saying to a hungry kid in a favela "you are free to get rich" is technically correct, but ignores practicalities.
You could argue that Mozilla is either a shepherd (making best decisions for most users and that's it; take it or leave it) or a partner (listen to users and try to implement features they want) but you cannot eat your cake and have it too.
What makes it nearly impossible to fork Firefox? Mozilla already distributes an unbranded "fork" that allows unigned extensions. It's just a build flag away. What potentially shady tactics am I missing?
What, specifically, is the feature you think Firefox is removing the option to have, that you think people want?
I suspect that if we drill down to this point, you'll find the feature is still available with a trivial amount of work, or on the outside case it's the more specific thing they actually talked about, it's not a trivial amount of work, but it's just not automated for enterprise installs anymore.
I also think the discussion moved to a more generic "safe default with options for users to change" vs "choices hard-coded based on perceived safety for general users".
> Manually installing extensions from an XPI file.
Everything I see indicates that is still supported. Especially if you read the comments to the post. XPI files seem to be supported, what they removed was the ability have an executable installer install them automatically.
The change, which seems to have been communicated poorly, seems to be that some actions within Firefox need to take place (allowing the user to opt-in to the extension) before it will be used by Firefox.
This comment[1] from Caitlin Neiman, who I just looked up on Google and appears to be the Firefox Addons Community Manager, states:
Developers will still be able to self-distribute, and you will still be able to install extensions from self-distributed (non-AMO) sources.
Going forward, developers won’t be able to distribute an extension through an executable application installer.
> I also think the discussion moved to a more generic "safe default with options for users to change" vs "choices hard-coded based on perceived safety for general users".
I'm pretty sure what they did is not hard coding choices. There are multiple ways to get an extension locally, the hardest of which but still works no matter what is installing the developer version and using source (XPI files can be unpacked).
What they actually did was lock down one method of installation which is almost never used by users and is used by orgs and malware, which is to drop extension into the plugin folder with the extension name as the folder name and have it automatically added to Firefox. Now they require you add it through the Firefox browser interface so the user
has to opt-in to the extension.
Do you really consider being able to provision your own profile a backdoor? I do it all the time. Do you think that Apple is a good example of what to do?
Having a single entity control what extensions you get to install is not what is best for the general public.
Personally, I think that Firefox should be the more flexible extensible alternative to Chrome. It should be to Chrome as Linux is to Windows.
They need to stop chasing the demographic that is going to hurt themselves.
>what the best/safest choices are for the general public.
Sometimes I think tech people forget 'the general public' is made up of adults capable of learning and making their own choices if educated properly on matters.
Sure. Most adults can learn lots of things. Most of us only care enough and have time enough to educate ourselves on a very small subset of the tools we use and tasks we perform on a daily basis. By and large, I trust the tools I use out of the box to be safe (subject to what common sense typical functional adults would be expected to have).
It is often reasonable to provide the option to use tools in ways that are less safe. Sometimes that's unavoidable. You can certainly use a chainsaw unsafely although I also think it's perfectly reasonable for chainsaw manufacturers to not provide easy ways to defeat the various safety mechanisms that are built in.
So you'd only buy a chainsaw with a codepad entry where you have to contact the manufacturer and ask them 'can I cut this log'; ooh, so much safer! But where does that leave the people who been buying that brand of chainsaw for a decade or more and don't want the restrictions?
Just remove the codepad, well yes, so long as the manufacturer doesn't weld it on ... oh, and they just decided to weld it on. Such safety, much wow.
How many topics do you have time and energy to be “educated properly” on? What are the odds that learning about the issue would lead to a different outcome than what Mozilla is doing? Firefox's openness means it attracts a lot of attention from people who have relatively uncommon preferences but believe they speak for a large group of users and that group tends to portray every disagreement as a betrayal rather than reasoned decisions.
I can properly educate myself on many, many things, especially over time. A major issue is correctly utilizing available time. In developed countries today, many "adults" would rather direct their time at very low-value activities, like having children and / or pet slaves, watching disgusting amounts of Netflix, wasting countless hours on Facebook ranting about personal issues or envying others, taking unnecessary and unproductive trips, etc.
While lots of readers will dislike this comment, are not ready to digest it, and will claim that I am wasting my time writing this comment, I think as a society we should prioritize creating competent humans who can appropriately use technology, whereas this move by Mozilla is just more of the same, prioritizing mindless consumers who have no idea how any of the things that their lives increasingly rely on function.
I think such consumers should be left to fend for themselves, as that is the only way a majority of people actually learn. This is especially true for Firefox, which has never been a "consumer" browser, and has always been a browser for people who wish to understand how it works and be able to modify it in a straightforward manner. If someone desires a browser that does whatever it wants without asking, Chrome is a perfectly fine option.
In the end Firefox will anger power users and general public still will use Chrome because they can't resist when it's advertised from every corner (and, honestly, just works better).
Power users should probably use unbranded versions of the browser that don't have these issues. AIUI, such versions are widely available, even from Mozilla themselves.
EU has many checks and balances, is governed by Germany and other like-minded countries, and has given lots of guarantees as well as an option to leave. If Facebook decides to discuss on that level, maybe an actual agreement could come out of that.
Facebook can come and expect to discuss on the level of trust that a country gets when it has existed for less than 2 decades and has been treating its citizens/users like an authoritarian dictatorship surveillance state. There are a number of other parallels, and none of them put FB in a good light.
Then these are incompetent people who forget to multiply the cost of the ransom by the amount of times it will likely repeat if they don't refuse to discuss with abductors.
It's like saying "why would we put this guy is jail? He's committed a crime but it's done now". Yeah, sure. Except without a deterrent he'll do it again tomorrow. This is the same except it gets rid if the motive instead.
