I'm just waiting to see how long it takes for these companies to sew advertising into the AI output. That's the best part about using AI chat programs, you can search for and read information without ads, without needing accounts on a bunch of random sites, without being tracked, and without nightmarish page layouts and color choices. It's a good thing that you just know marketing dweebs are looking to get their greedy sausage fingers into.

It is the same thing if you have to be politically connected in order to exercise the right. Even if you want to strip the right from everyone, you're removing a right.

What you do in the workplace and what you do in war are very different things. You may wish to consult your employee handbook if you don't know this.

"Anyway I shall bring whatever I choose to the office. Turns out if enough people bring it, then it matters, because a company needs employees."

I doubt you'd be as in favor if this if you were on the losing side of it.

"The workers at Mozilla did the upstanding thing, they informed their employer they would quit and gave them the option to choose"

No they didn't. They refused to work but still wanted to be paid. Had they quit, that I might have respected. They stuck around and interfered with the activities of those that chose to continue doing the work they were being paid for.

"Oh yeah I do know it's because Eich free speeched on something you agree with and then got massive blowback because people free speeched right back at him."

I don't want any activism in the workplace regardless of who is doing it. I'm not antireligion, but I don't like religion in the workplace, even if it's just passing out pamphlets or seeking donations. I'm pro-gun rights, but I don't want to hear about that at work either. I want to do the job and go home and not run into any non-work related strife along the way. There's enough stress on the job, we don't need to add more.

Mozilla is going down over this BS. You're still fanning the flames.

"You can't have freedom of expression without people having the freedom to say you're a dickwad."

On the job? That's not where your freedom of expression should be practiced. Do that on your own time.

"I don't even agree he should have been fired over it but he should have had to answer for it and the idea he would be fired over it to me is nowhere near out of bounds"

Except that a firing would have been out of bounds. CA protects employees against discrimination based on political affiliation and activities. By denying people the ability to participate in the political process, are you not in favor of stripping rights from workers yourself?

"He donated money to strip rights from one group of people."

Have you ever donated to a group that's against the second amendment? Based on your comments, you probably have. That's the same thing. The Constitution says we have the inalienable right to bear arms, yet in states like CA, those rights have been stripped from one group of people. Law enforcement still has the right, but individuals? Not so much. I know in NYC, if you're "connected" enough to politicians, you can have the right. But not so for others. So if you support the democrats, should you be ineligible to be an executive or any highly paid individual working for an org like Mozilla?

That's basically what politics is, deciding who can do what through legislation. Rights are codified by law. Any discussion of potential legislation will likely include the granting or taking away of some form of a right.

"It was once mainstream opinion that black people weren't actually people and so it was OK to keep them as slaves. That did not make that less harmful."

No, but no one was fired for it (or forced out) either. If you want to change the laws, get involved in politics. Run for office. Support like-minded candidates. Attend rallies. Do whatever you like in support of the change you want, but don't bring it into the office and use your role at the company as a weapon. That's what many of the employees at Mozilla chose to do to Eich. Like you said, you could even choose to leave if you learned about his donation from the data breach. I don't have an issue with that, other than thinking it petty. But refusing to do the job you're paid to do until an executive is ousted over something they didn't do on the job and was perfectly legal and supported by over half the population? That's way out of line.

"I am no slave, all my time is mine."

If you don't wish to work for your employer, quit. That's the honest, upstanding move. Refusing to work but still expecting a paycheck is some really weak energy. You're a tech worker when you're on the clock, not a political activist. Mozilla lost sight of that, and now see where they are as an org. They're now unpopular and untrusted. The majority trust and rely on Google more than the hacktivists at Mozilla.

He didn't say anything or do anything at Mozilla that would have negatively impacted those workers. As a private individual, he donated a mere $500 to a political cause that he supported. That was it. It was information that no one at Mozilla should have even known about, it was learned about as the result of a data breach.

Imagine the reverse where executives of a company where examining data breaches for info that showed that their employees were doing things in their off time that they didn't approve of and used that to terminate their employment. I bet you wouldn't like that. So why is it okay in the other direction? Just because they make more money? Everyone in tech makes more money than most of the population. Are you sure that's a slope you want to slide down?

I don't see his job title as being relevant. He was CEO of Mozilla, so what? Anyone can start a company and be a CEO. That doesn't mean their personal lives should be under any sort of public scrutiny. I don't even like it when people do that to politicians, and they're elected into public offices. You shouldn't have to surrender your right to have a life just because you're an executive or just because you make a higher income much or most of the rest of the population. Your work should be judged on the merit of your work, not your personal life. That's my point.

"Between his position and salary he is in the top 0.01% of people in the country, to accept and operate in that position there is and should be extra scrutiny."

As tech workers, many of us are in the top single percentage of income earners. Does that mean that none of us should be allowed to get involved in politics? If I remember correctly, his offense was donating all of $500, privately, with his own money. It was also illegal to use that information against him in a workplace. If he had let himself be terminated, he very well could have sued Mozilla and won based on state law.

Whatever happened to this being a free country? When did mob rule take effect?

"Why? Why should I be forced to work with someone who not just wishes me or my friends ill but acts on that? I only have one life and I'd rather spend it with people who are worth the time."

He didn't wish ill on anyone. He saw marriage as an arrangement between a man and a woman, as it had always been. You dismiss the fact that Obama and Hillary both supported it at that point in time, but I'm mentioning it to show how mainstream the opinion was. It was not an unusual stance, except in parts of CA and maybe MA. You can verify it if you want, it's true.

"If you wanna be that weird cowboy hatted buy holding up a sign saying how god dislikes gay people, go nuts."

Eich never did anything of the sort. He made a small contribution privately, in his own time. It wasn't part of his career, it wasn't brought into the workplace by any account that I've ever seen. This would the equivalent of forcing people out because they voted for the wrong party, which I'm sure you'd probably also be in favor of. But that's not American, IMO. We're all entitled to have our own beliefs, vote how we want, be religious if we want, do and say what we want. When it comes to the workplace, it's time to set your personal views and activities aside and act professionally. It shouldn't matter to you what your peers do in their off time so long as they're professional at work. It's a path to ruin otherwise. You'll never find large groups of people who are completely in sync at all levels.

"I only have one life and I'd rather spend it with people who are worth the time."

When you're at work, it's the company's time, not yours. That's why you're being paid.

The way you phrase that makes it sound like he hired thugs to go out and kneecap people. No such thing occurred. He made a small donation to support proposition 8 which opposed same sex marriage. At the time, only 52% of CA voters supported it, so by your POV, half of California wanted to "cause harm" to those same people. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton also opposed same sex marriage at that time, one later served two terms as President and the other came close. Yet here in the tech world, people just can't accept that opposing views exist when it comes to politics.

It's also not like he left willingly. The childish behavior of those involved gave him no other choice. In the end, once the adults left Mozilla, the children ran it into the ground. It would have happened much sooner if not for the Google bucks. While Firefox crashes and burns, Brave carries on. Go figure. People in tech need to control their egos and separate people's politics from their technical contributions. Tech isn't a cult, it's an industry.

Defamation of character isn't legal though, and a service claiming that someone is a shoplifter who isn't is a big problem.

I guess you've never had a health issue that gets worse over time. I'm going through a similar situation with my employer. I started to work from home in 2020 due to the virus. My employer permanently closed our local office around that same time. Since then, a neurological disease that I've been fighting for years has gotten worse and I can only safely drive short distances, or longer if carefully timed around medication. The next closest office is at best, well over an hour away, each direction. I was threatened with termination if I didn't start showing up in the office, despite successfully working from home since 2020 and even being promoted during that time. Why should people with serious health problems suffer and lose their jobs that they're perfectly capable of doing just because these employers want butts in chairs in cubicles? How does that serve humanity in any way, shape, or form?

It was time to stop talking and look how the election turned out. Bluesky is the forum for sore-losers whose ideology is losing mainstream acceptance. They get to congregate in a bubble and pretend that it's all the fault of the evil orange man and his supporters where in reality, the populace just isn't into the extremes that the leftists were trying to drag us towards. Just look at the lunatics in California right now flying the flags of the countries they say they don't want to be deported to. It makes no sense. If you want to be in America, you'd think you'd fly its flag, at the very least. But looting stores and torching people's vehicles will certainly help make society better. I don't Bluesky, but I'm sure I know exactly what the narrative is there.

In 2021.

https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/...

It doesn't really explain why the user was banned this week, this being 2025.

I call bullshit on that. The "nothing in return" is actually preventing the needless loss of massive amounts of lives. While it's mostly academic for us here on the Internet to opine about this conflict, there in Ukraine and occasionally in Russia, lives are being lost. Lots of them. The new administration is clear that they want the loss of life to stop. What's the alternative? They keep fighting an endless war? Western nations have resisted letting Ukraine use our weapons to strike deep into Russia, and that's likely what it would take to win. But that risks starting a nuclear conflict, and no one wants to risk that. So with that in mind, what's your solution? Are you willing to risk going nuclear to keep Ukraine from having to concede anything?

If you look at the original commit that caused the controversy, they did remove the phrase "we don't sell access to your data" from the terms of use (TOU):
https://github.com/mozilla/bed...

They may have gone back and changed it again, but I think you're naïve if you think it was just bad phrasing and not actual intent to sell people's data. Don't forget that Mozilla is at risk of losing their Google funding which is going to make them desperate for cash. They have huge motivation to find new ways to make money.