Ryan Sipes, if you can read this, everybody online remembers the 2020 Servo team lay-offs, and the juxtaposition of the C level compensation.
If you are serious about winning back donors and trust:
- Allow for a transparent breakdown of expenses on things like external consultancy and also C level compensation
- Allow financial ring-fencing of donations. Such that my donation can only finance Firefox devs or Thunderbird devs.
(Not teams, not products, not managers/VPs/Directors just developers. Everyone else's compensation should come from corporate donations or other means)
I love Firefox and Thunderbird, use both everyday, was also a yearly donor up to 2020 (now I just donate to Archive.org and KDE).
You have great products that people love but if you are serious about gaining back trust you need to show judicious spending on the top side of the org. Justifying it with we need to spend money to get fundraisers doesn't pass the community test.
We need to add Palantir in bold letters to that list, they are behind this in every way except for 'officially'.
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [1]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [1]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor of Gotham for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [2]
Greece/Austria/Finland/Belgium/Italy also discussing.
The best one for me is Portugal, parliament approved this law all while the country is being devastated by hurricane winds and flooding with several calamity zones. They are really bringing Law into effect by maximum obfuscation.
EU anonimity online is over because ivory tower folks want to speedrun all of us into 1984.
And this is obviously just a stepping stone to mass message scanning. The revolution will not be organizable.
Irrespective of the accuracy of estimates it will be in the thousands, and most tragicly it will be very young men and women most of whom university educated, the very people that would be the country's tomorrow.
Worth reminding everyone in the EU and UK that this is not a 'them' problem.
Palantir is the main software vendor for Europol. Equally pretty much all the 1984 proposals for age or id online verification that are being massaged into existence (both in the UK and pushed by the European Commission) have their fingers all over them.
They sell pre-crime and opinion control to our democratic leaders and apparently everyone in Davos loves it.
> If that's all they offer, it's on the companies to implement a fallback for edge cases like these.
These news articles and the adjacent online discussion are textbook warfare psyops 'nudging'.
Doesn't matter if you are real/bot, being payed or not. The discourse is now changing the goalposts to focus on the details of OSA implementation, not OSA itself. Mission acomplished.
It's on governments to stop pushing legislation that slow boil us into autocracy. It's on us to not be ok with that.
The EU is by far one of the least corrupt and most transparent organizations in European History, by design and by process.
The fact that I am able to produce all those reference documents in the previous comment is substantial evidence of this.
The issue here is the European Comission. Both in the appointment of Commissioners as well as in the checks and balances against the Comissioners and President of the EC.
To be anti-EU is throwing the baby with the bathwater and more seriously plays into the hands of every geopolitical player around us.
This is (mostly) about Tech companies' money, namely:
- Palantir Technologies
- 'not-for-profit' Thorn
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> ... the complainant contended that the precision rate of technologies like those developed by the organisation are often overestimated. It is therefore essential that any technical claims made by the organisation concerned are made public as this would facilitate the critical assessment of the proposal. [1]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [2]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [2]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [3]
> Kutcher and CEO Julie Cordua held several meetings with EU officials from 2020 to 2023 - before the former stepped down from his role - including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.[4]
> The Ombudsman further concluded that Thorn had indeed influenced the legislative process of the CSAM regulation. “It is clear, for example, from the Commission’s impact assessment that the input provided by Thorn significantly informed the Commission’s decision-making. The public interest in disclosure is thus self-evident. [4]
> EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has announced that she has opened an investigation into the transfer of two former Europol officials to the chat control surveillance tech provider Thorn. [5]
Plenty of EU states already have a constitution in which this proposal would be de facto unconstitutional.
The issue is what is the European Commission willing to do in order to guarantee that fat contract check goes to Palantir or Thorn or whoever has the best quid pro quo of the day.
This is not Stasi this is Tech billionaires playing kings and buying the EC and Europol for pennies on the dollar and with it the privacy of virtually every citizen of zero interest for law enforcement or agencies.
The online Stasi analogies are simplistic. This is (mostly) about Tech companies' money, namely:
- Palantir Technologies
- 'not-for-profit' Thorn
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> ... the complainant contended that the precision rate of technologies like those developed by the organisation are often overestimated. It is therefore essential that any technical claims made by the organisation concerned are made public as this would facilitate the critical assessment of the proposal. [1]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [2]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [2]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [3]
> Kutcher and CEO Julie Cordua held several meetings with EU officials from 2020 to 2023 - before the former stepped down from his role - including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.[4]
> The Ombudsman further concluded that Thorn had indeed influenced the legislative process of the CSAM regulation. “It is clear, for example, from the Commission’s impact assessment that the input provided by Thorn significantly informed the Commission’s decision-making. The public interest in disclosure is thus self-evident. [4]
> EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has announced that she has opened an investigation into the transfer of two former Europol officials to the chat control surveillance tech provider Thorn. [5]
This dystopian direction of the European Commission coincided with a lot of interaction between Thorn, the European Commission, and Europol. [0][1][2]
Thorn is coincidently is also the vendor of Spotlight, software which solves exactly the problem they are lobbying against.
Thiel's Palantir also has overlapping software capabilities and is also raising questions in their work with Europol. [3]
Connecting these dots was the only thing that made sense to me in order to explain why these repeated repackaged proposals keep steam rolling everything despite all the security concerns, unconstitutionality, and general lack of common sense.
I don't know your reality but literally anywhere in the 744 million users in Europe if you consider the technology literate average of internet users I guarantee that someone who is not even bilingual is precisely the exception.
I would hazard say the same is true in most of Asia and Africa perhaps less so in South America where Spanish/Portuguese are more monolithic.
That very much exists, and is issued yearly.
Consolidated Financial Statements 2024-2023:
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
Expenses in Software Development (2024):
> 290,448,000
Total Expenses (2024):
> 588,215,000
Ryan Sipes, if you can read this, everybody online remembers the 2020 Servo team lay-offs, and the juxtaposition of the C level compensation.
If you are serious about winning back donors and trust:
- Allow for a transparent breakdown of expenses on things like external consultancy and also C level compensation
- Allow financial ring-fencing of donations. Such that my donation can only finance Firefox devs or Thunderbird devs. (Not teams, not products, not managers/VPs/Directors just developers. Everyone else's compensation should come from corporate donations or other means)
I love Firefox and Thunderbird, use both everyday, was also a yearly donor up to 2020 (now I just donate to Archive.org and KDE).
You have great products that people love but if you are serious about gaining back trust you need to show judicious spending on the top side of the org. Justifying it with we need to spend money to get fundraisers doesn't pass the community test.