Remember, all AI companies openly claimed to oppose military usage just a few short years ago. Now they all have government contracts that allow the government to use them "lawfully", while also being able to decide that anything they do with them is lawful. Anthropic is the only one who required clauses against killbots and domestic mass surveillance.

Anthropic never asked for arbitrary or opaque shutdowns. They asked for clearly defined regulations to apply equally (which would've helped their market position and advantage, coincidentally I'm sure /s), moreso to reduce their own risk and liability.

This theory doesn't make sense with the context that they happily signed a follow up deal with OpenAI containing the same restrictions.

The more likely theory was that it was because Anthropic wanted to be the ultimate arbiter of what was considered violating.

Probably because the vast majority of politicians who attack taxation do so specifically to destroy social programs and quality of life multipliers, instead of the war machine or any other area of bearucratic waste, inefficiency, or corruption.

For example "No new wars" becomes "No, new wars!" and all the people who screamed about government spending clap as the military spend doubles, or feign disgust but fall in line eventually because "the other guy would've done the same" as admitting they were wrong or conned is inconceivable.

Also, literally nobody is paying a 70% effective tax rate anywhere. I'd be surprised if you could find anyone paying more than 50% without misinformation. Even when taxes were 90% for a short period of time, for an extreme minority, there were loopholes that meant none of them ever paid anything close to 90%.

Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.

The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.

In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"

Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.

The whole "Thunderbird Council" approach sounds good in theory, but I don't see any assurances that my donation would not fund for-profit service or feature development that could be locked behind a paywall, or that the whole product can't be sold off or transitioned to some closed offering at any time.

The core problem is not Mozilla specific. It's that our legal and political systems are now corrupted and offer no safeguards to prevent this type of fraud from taking place. Tech companies from the very beginning have been given carte blanche to lie, cheat, and pivot any way they please; to betray user/customer investment and change their entire value proposition on a dime. That was the growth and funding model of tech startups; build users by offering product for free (at a loss) until they become dependent on your product, then bait-and-switch. When companies are consistently rewarded for this, and there are no meaningful financial or legal reprecussions, I see no reason to believe that this will change any time in the near future.

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/ach/about/

In the Reddit example I gave, the crime is essentially a form of "bait-and-switch", false advertising, or charity fraud; scamming volunteers into donating their time and labor to build a product under deceptive and misleading pretences then, once achieving a certain threshold of success, changing the value proposition to a state where they would not have donated their time or labor to begin with. The same applies to an open source product which switches to closed-source. When you change the value proposition on volunteers like that, you have transformed their time and labor from a donation to unpaid wages, as they literally built your product and company for free, and are the reason your product exists at all. If you do not pay them out or backpay them in some way, or you can't, you are no different to any other white collar ciminal scammer, exploiting charity for profit.

Allowing this type of fraud to succeed, and become an accepted business practice, is socially corrosive and destructive. It's a strong indicator of corruption to the rule of law in the legal, political, and economic system.

"BE Evil"

This is indicative of Americas mental illness epidemic. You believe the neoliberal pro-corporate oligarchy party, that hasn't had a leftist president since Carter, is "the left"... without even a hint of irony.

We have always been at war with Eurasia.

The entire American tech industry has exported Americas predatory, parasitic, and unethical consumer laws (the majority of which are ghost written by the wealthy and corporate legal teams). When I studied law in school decades ago, tactics like bait-and-switch, false advertisting, intentionally misleading or deceptive practices etc to sell products or contracts were illegal across the developed world.

Those illegal, anti-consumer tactics were the SOP of every tech startup I can think of from the early 2000's onwards; following the same route of initially offering a compelling feature set to attract and entice users – usually for free – until securing a certain number of users or funding, then changing the value proposition to exploit that user base, and extract as much wealth from them as possible, ad infinitum.

Today these tactics are known as enshittification, and the average American pseudo-libertarian software engineer will say this is fine, but that's what every anti-consumer parasite and criminal has said in history. Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain is fundamentally immoral, corrupt, and sociopathic, therefore it should be illegal. Just because it's the norm, or a digital product, you wrote that in the T&C's, or your doing everything behind the liability shield of an LLC, doesn't change that.

What ever happened to the concept of building a valuable, quality product and stable returns for generations? Working to improve the quality of life and standard of living of the community? Of the world? I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that, but most Americans are so heavily indoctrinated with corporate greed and sociopathy they'd consider that sentiment radical leftist extremism. I'm an athiest, but ya'll need jesus (the real brown socialist one). Many would argue Americas current institutional collapse is the natural result of this systemic corruption.

There is evidence of that being a common 50's perspective though. It was when most conservatives and liberals alike had been burned by the greed of the guilded age, stock market collapse, great depression, and world war. The majority of the working class in the developed world were experiencing significant gains in QoL/SoL thanks to labour movements and aggressive unionization, did not view CEO's as admirable heroes, or fellow consumers and workers with malice and contempt. Hard work actually resulted in financial security, and greater opportunity for your children.

The economy of the 1950s was due to a variety of factors, including lack of international competition (European and Japanese industrial bases were devastated in the war), pent up consumer savings from war time, demographics (the baby boom), etc. Unionization was certainly a part of the mix but it seems you're cherry-picking to support your romanticized view.

And let's not forget: the 1950s were a good economic time if you were a white man. They weren't nearly so great if you were black or a woman.

The distribution of work vs financial security was not uniform, but every developed economy had a greater distribution of wealth and stronger economic mobility in the 1950's than in the 1930's, or almost any time in human history. Every country not directly involved in cold/civil war improved in these factors from 1945 until the 80's, and that has continued in most of the developing world until today.

Do you believe black or indigenous populations were in a better position in 1930, or at any time during colonialism/imperialism, than they were in 1950? If you did, you would be wrong, and the only way to support it is by "cherry-picking" and "romanticization".

> What ever happened to the concept of building a valuable, quality product and stable returns for generations? Working to improve the quality of life and standard of living of the community? Of the world? I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that, but most Americans are so heavily indoctrinated with corporate greed and sociopathy they'd consider that sentiment radical leftist extremism.

The implication here was that, at some point in the not too distant past (like the 1950s), the US had less "corporate greed and sociopathy." And that the US was working in some benevolent manner to improve life for future generations and even the entire world.

I made the argument that the economic situation during this period of time was the result of factors like the war and demographic tailwinds, not some sense of morality that has been lost in recent years.

The US has been a violent, oppressive country since its founding. Violence, conquest and displacement, slavery, political assassinations, genocide, brutal individualism.

To suggest that the US of the 1950s, or any other period of time in the 20th century, was morally superior to the US of the 2020s because wealth was more evenly distributed (among working white men) and white men had more economic mobility requires in my opinion a significant romanization about what US society is and was.

The US might have been founded on the highest of ideals but the actual history is very much a story of "actions versus words".

All server security measures are irrelevant if every client req/res is dragnet siphoned off to NSA servers in plaintext. It would also afford the corporation deniability even if they were aware or involved.

This is why everything than can feasibly be E2EE (or performed locally) should be, unless the data is explicitly public. There are too many opportunities for compromise even when the provider has the best of intentions, and ruling class psychopaths aren't intentionally destroying democracy or implementing big brother.

Are you suggesting that PCC specifically is sending things in plaintext, or that the security promises in the server and arch are false, or that a compromised CA means… IDK what?

I’m with you on the big principles, but are you implying more specific attack vectors or just kind of maybe everything could be compromised somehow?

http://web.archive.org/web/20140101231153/https://www.washin...

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/06/on-nsa/