Vulnerabilities such as spectre are only relevant if you run untrusted non-free software. Also these vulnerabilities show that sandboxing is not effective on current CPUs, and specific mitigations does not solve the problem in general.
They can't distribute firmware blobs simply because FSF and GNU do not in principle participate in distribution of any non-free programs.
Also consider that if a manufacturer can distribute opaque firmware updates to your system, it practically has remote control over it, е.g. Intel can activate a backdoor in specific CPUs when needed by publishing a microcode update.
From my own experience, JPEG quality and compression efficiency can differ a lot depending on the encoder implementation. It would make more sense to compare specific encoders rather than formats in general.
In 2014 (WebP was released in 2010) Mozilla claimed that the standard JPEG format is not used to it's full potential [1] and introduced mozjpeg project that is still being updated [2]. I wonder how it compares today with current WebP implementations.
Of course, no one will be making cars intentionally unsafe, but the law is also a risk factor, the risks of getting fined, jail time or licence revocation count too, and these risks can be made higher.
Advertising does not simply suggest you something that you might need, it often tries to manipulate you into needing something, and with the amounts of personal data being collected and advancements in machine learning this manipulation becomes dangerously effective.
Telling computers and humans apart is a wrong goal. Every request comes from a computer that is commanded by some human. And why shouldn't users be allowed to use automated user agents when they don't do it for spamming or anything malicious?
CAPTCHA is essentially a proof-of-work variant where challenges are designed to be solved by humans rather than computers, and same as any PoW it works by means of consuming some limited resource (human time, processor time, energy).
There is also Simutrans-Extended (https://bridgewater-brunel.me.uk/) — a fork that adds even more detail and realism to the simulation and tries to achieve better game balance.
> Human-sized computing: a reasonable level of complexity for a computing system is that it can be entirely understood by a single person (from the low-level hardware details to the application-level quirks).
"Personal Mastery: If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual."
Software vendors can deliberately leak "pirated" copies of their programs to Russian torrent sites with backdoors and other malicious code added. That could be an effective countermeasure.
Using git is no big deal, but storing the repo on Github means sharing the information with a third party (Microsoft) even if the repo is kept "private".
Our perception of time is very subjective: it is affected by our age, by what we are doing, and it is known that it can be significantly altered by consuming certain substances. We learned from others that there was time before we were born, but do we feel that? In my own subjective perception of time the moment of my birth seems to be infinitely far in the past, and I can't be sure that the final moment of death will be a finite point approachable by consciousness.
This is not enough if we don't stop DRM (which Firefox also supports).
DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.
> I think that Google using data to personalize ads and recommend videos is ethically ok.
Advertising does not simply make people aware about some goods and services, it often works by manipulating peoples desires and fears. And to manipulate effectively, ad companies need to collect as much information as possible about every person. Google collects and manipulates at scale when it becomes a threat to society and culture.
Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org) embeds issues, wiki etc. into project repository.