OT 19/3: We Were Almost Free

  • We sincerely apologize for the extended downtime. Our hosting provider, XenForo Cloud, encountered a major issue with their backup system, which unfortunately resulted in the loss of some critical data from the past year.

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I don't know if anyone remembers but I was going through some dark places with IVF and miscarriages with my wife. I would like to report that my wife is officially 5 weeks pregnant. I haven't told any of my IRL family or friends, but I can't keep this in. This is the first time we have gotten this far, and I am pumped but still afraid of it all crashing down around me. But for now I am going to enjoy this moment.
Congratulations man. Now coach that kid up to be the next kucherov.
 
The doom posting about Firefox feels overblown. Mozilla could definitely do better communicating things, and the internet was right to get on their case about it, but a segment of the internet is flipping out about them removing some language because the definition was proving a bit legally hazy.

They're comparing FF dropping 'not selling your data' to be the equivalent of Google removing 'Don't be evil', like that's some sort of legal precedent. Mozilla has gone overtly evil. They don't even make Marvel characters knowingly, intentionally, evil anymore. They're just the heroes of their own story.

A small non-profit, like Mozilla, doesn't use the same wording as Apple. They must be up to something.

The most proposed alternative, LibreWolf, at least on default settings, isn't really that viable as a daily driver browser. It's a fork of Firefox, but one that, at default, will delete all your cookies and temp files when you close the browser. That would mean that you'd have to sign back in to everything, potentially with 2FA, every time you open it back up.
 
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Think about how quick Majorana 1 dropped out of consciousness. Microsoft said they discovered a new form of matter. Quantum computing.

Barely lasted 24 hours.
 
Been around forums for 30 years, I've never seen this happen before. I don't know anything about Xenforo but I'm not sure how much longer they'll be around.
 
So is the sponsorship I payed for during the period the data went missing just now gone?

From Discord:

SniperHF​

it's f***ed at the moment I can manually fix you though

[username] if you want to message me on the forum directly with a screenshot of your sponsor receipt / paypal transaction history or some such I'll give you a free year.
There's got to be some sort of paper trail that they could follow. Money was exchanged.
 
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Been around forums for 30 years, I've never seen this happen before. I don't know anything about Xenforo but I'm not sure how much longer they'll be around.
Bigsoccer also uses XenForo and haven't been having these constant massive issues HF has for some reason. Maybe they should talk to those guys.

Though twitter embeds have been broken on Bigsoccer for a while now, so it could be a good knowledge exchange lol.
 
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One of the big news stories people aren't talking much about is the DOJ trying to get Google to divest from Chrome.

Google will fight that to the end, but I'd think that Chrome/Chromium would have to be a spin-off. Regulators wouldn't allow Apple to buy it, and likely not Microsoft, either. One monopoly into another.

But Chrome and its Chromium forks own 83% of the desktop web browser market. Even Microsoft Edge is running off of Chromium. The other two main browser engines are Apple's WebKit (Safari), and Mozilla's Gecko (Firefox). Mozilla has also been losing market share for decades, now only owning about 6% of the desktop market.

One of the other issues regulators have is that Google is paying other browsers to make Google the default search engine. Mozilla is primarily funded by this type of arrangement (ironically, in the hopes of keeping regulators away).

However, Apple makes billions each year just from setting Google as the default search engine on their products (changing to your search engine of choice in your browser can be done in seconds), and I don't think that the DOJ wants to mess with both Google and Apple at the same time.

A Chrome spin-off company would instantly be one of the major tech companies, and they wouldn't even be grifting. They'd dominate the web browser market on everything but Apple products.
 

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