Accidentally deleted my original comment, so I rewrote it; not sure why other people copied it verbatim.

No; libreddit is just a read-only frontend for Reddit.

Generative AI data center energy usage is environmentally wasteful and will just raise the cost of energy for regular consumers.

While all websites should have valid certificates, I did run into a case a week ago of the Sears Home Services website seemingly having an invalid one.

In trying to cancel my grandma’s account with them, I found that their website wasn’t well mobile-optimized, and Firefox refused to load it, so I ended up having to use Chrome to load the website and cancel the service.

Loading such a website should be allowed, perhaps with a warning about phishing and/or other security risks. Given that there are valid websites with invalid certificates, their inaccessibility risks discouraging people from using Firefox.

The U.S. isn’t committing to closing the trade deficit in services, showing that Trump’s tariffs are just about American dominance, not ‘fairness’.

Without Manifest V3 support, better to just use Firefox instead. Or, for Firefox extensions that are not specifically marked as Android-compatible, a fork such as Iceraven instead.

Pretending to be ‘pissed off’ to distract the public from his pro-Russian stance neither hampers Russia’s military campaign nor brings back lost Ukrainian lives.

Somewhat of a clickbait title, but hopefully the bug gets fixed all the same. 👍

A ‘dispute’ is when both parties have genuine complaints and are able to be negotiated with. Trump’s starting a trade war for no reason, so doing nothing only serves to normalize his actions.

Privacy and security isn’t an all-or-nothing matter though. While a Pixel running GrapheneOS would indeed be more secure privacy-wise than an iPhone, not only would one have to be willing to do without a digital wallet, among other features that unfortunately have telemetry injected into them, but would still depend on the user not installing any of the common apps that would harvest data, even on a de-Googled phone.

Apple disabled the feature in the UK because the alternative, per the British government, was to add a backdoor to it.

Apple charges unreasonably high profit margins on its products as its primary business model, along with locking down their ecosystem to push overpriced subscriptions to the detriment of competitors, to not need the same level of invasive data collection that powers Google’s advertising business.

Versus Russian missiles ‘accidentally’ causing death and destruction in Poland near its border with Ukraine?

There’s many reasons not to get an iPhone, but privacy worries, in contrast to Android, is not one of them.

Rather than take an all or nothing attitude on the matter, I certainly think your friend would be better off trying make smart choices with his data whenever possible. Ultimately though, it’s something that he has to be motivated to do himself. Perhaps informing him of potential privacy risks would be helpful in that regard.

The problem is that Apple’s extensive marketing of Apple Intelligence has led to expectations that far surpass what the final product is likely to be.

Most people think generative AI is magic coming out of a hat, so even if Apple delivers at the same level as other companies, people will feel like they’ve been misled.

That’s a symptom of Google holding a monopoly over search results.

Real reporting will always cost more to produce than AI-generated propaganda, and if the former has a paywall and the latter doesn’t, people will inevitably end up reading the news that takes the least effort to produce, to the detriment of actual news reporting.

Requiring Google to both carry such content and pay for it at least ensures that it has an even footing with websites seeking to push propaganda instead.

The problem is that society has transitioned to a point where most people essentially go to Google and Facebook for all their information. Given the monopolistic power of such platforms on public opinion, there is a very strong societal interest to ensure that actual news, not merely the propaganda of the highest bidder, is what people have access to.

The responsibility of Google to pay for it can be argued, but as real reporting will always cost more to produce than AI slop pushed by propagandists, there is arguably a public interest in that as well. The alternative is legitimate news more often than not ending up with more ads and paywalls than propaganda, which will just result in more people reading sources based on less reliable reporting.

If that’s what the French want, then it’s Google’s obligation to comply and simply adjust advertising rates as needed.

Even so, there is a societal interest in objective news being available to the public, which means that search engines should be required to carry such content, profitable or not. All the more so due to Google’s monopolistic grip on the search engine market.

Most should offer alternative support options, even if they can’t promote them directly in their apps (an unfortunately anticompetitive practice), given that forking over 30% of a subscription’s cost to Apple or Google isn’t something I’d want to do just to support an app’s development.