This shines a bright light on the practice of Customs and Border Patrol Agents backing up the smartphone contents of anyone they decide they want to - and what could possibly go wrong with that. If it weren't for the compromise we wouldn't know this personal data gets passed on to for profit contractors etc. and out of the governments hands.

This is why any access to someone's smartphone should require a warrant and be trouble (proceedurally) to go through and do. Otherwise abuse will occur as we see here.

Good point. The wrath of the Emperor is more appropriate...

You do know who's calling the shots in the U.S. these days, right?

https://www.theverge.com/2019/...

And if he thought launching a war with Iran would get him elected in late 2020, you can bet he'd do it. He's afraid he'll go to jail when he gets out of office and having something with China to wave around before the election is the only thing that matters to him (no matter the long term damage done to the U.S. leadership in smartphone OS marketshare etc.). He couldn't care less. JMHO...

After watching Samsung implode on takeoff with their Gen 1 - I think I'd want to let foldable tech be released and the bugs / problems figured out a couple of generations before putting the money down for one. JMHO...

Have to agree with you on this. I would suggest you add a caveat though, "except for social issues that the parties use to capture voters (abortion etc.).".

The experiment in paid lobbying that started in the early 1970's has completely corrupted the Federal legislative bodies for legislation that is of any interest to corporate interests. Facebook, Google etc. want their lobbyists to help Congress write what "privacy" is into law at the Federal Level. JMHO...

This shows again, the failure of the government's Nobody But Us philosophy of cataloging back doors etc. and keeping them for use. One way or another they will find their ways into the hands of our adversary's. You can either make everyone more secure or nobody will be. Time for the NOBUS philosophy to go in the garbage can where it belonged to begin with. JMHO...

I believe Pale Moon is a little more independent than that - and if Mozilla imploded with Firefox development stopping they'd still be able to continue, they forked quite a while ago and haven't followed Firefox's changes / degradations.

True, but I wasn't talking about it's creation - I was talking about whomever said they should use it to get an updated cert out a day earlier than they could get an update out - A+ to that guy.

As to Studies actual purpose and creation I'm with you and would prefer it not exist in the application. I remember when they used it to push Mr. Robot advertising out. I'd also prefer we still had XUL for the UI and a bunch of other things. Amazing how much damage the execs at Mozilla have done.

Those are really good points. Waterfox sounds great. And I remember when Firefox used Studies on its first big project and used it to push out Mr Robot advertising with a partner - which blew up in their faces (amazing nobody at the Exec level thought it would and approved that) - which got alot of people to disable that.

Thinking it through, Waterfox will still be using the Firefox engine so that's a good thing (no additional piling on to Blink in usage numbers), seems better than say Vivaldi in that perspective (since it uses Blink). I noticed they have a Mac version even. If Firefox's usage numbers weren't so low (~10% last I saw), I'd defect immediately. Once they go low enough (6%, 5%?), Google's money could stop and the whole thing (Firefox, Waterfox since it depends on Firefox development etc.) would implode. So FF will remain my daily but I'm going to play with Waterfox (I love Pale Moon).

For a few Firefox versions (Android and some Linux versions - ex Debian I believe) this update 66.0.4 is the only way to fix the expired certificate.

Looking at this afterwards, seems the Study option is a great back pocket emergency tool for Firefox (A+ to the brainstormer that pushed that early on).

Thank you to all the Mozilla folks who worked all night Friday and through the weekend who almost certainly didn't have anything to do with the cause but fixed this for us users.

Mozilla, maybe having time bombing plugins after they are installed (instead off a check during installation only) isn't the best idea?

They did put something up on their site: https://blog.mozilla.org/addon...

Guessing they get some temp certificate in place via Studies without having to wait to get a full update through their release process (which will take time).

Interesting, I didn't know that.