Hey at least it doesn't appear to be written by AI

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. On Sunday, Mozilla launched Come Back to Firefox, which it's calling one of its most ambitious campaigns...

As seen in Firefox 159 Release Candidate for Android.

I chose "Remind Me Later" of course

Not a terrible idea IMO, especially because everybody in my bubbles already either uses or definitely knows about FF

Most ChatGPT users probably don’t know you can be specifically targeted... based on your email, phone number, or unique phone identifier.

Instead, it became clear that Microsoft will respect user choice only when it is forced to. It is important to think about what that means for a company whose operating system runs on more than a billion machines. Microsoft’s standard for respecting people’s choices is legal compliance. Not what’s best for its users. Not its own published principles. Not what’s technically feasible. Not even what it already does for users in Europe.

1. 😲
2. Imagine following your own published principles

From this blog post:

[A]s the indoor music scene heats up and the basketball and ice hockey seasons are in full swing, fans flocking to the Uber Arena, Uber Eats Music Hall, and Uber Platz will see Firefox highly visible around the venue. They may even bump into our very own mascot, Kit, who will be on hand to help them skip the main queues courtesy of Firefox.

We know that the experiences people care about often begin online. The internet is the gateway to how they discover, plan, and navigate their way to concerts, sports events, and nights out before they happen in real life.

Firefox’s presence will help make every step of that journey simple and smoother, starting at the door.

People with Firefox downloaded on their phone will have access to a dedicated Firefox Fast Lane that allows them to skip the main line at the Uber Arena. To ensure the smoothest possible entry, a QR code for downloading Firefox will also be available at the Fast Lane.

Meta's AI Agent Muse maps users and their contacts—including people who don’t use Muse—and shares anonymized insights across its system, according to a TIME investigation of its internal instructions.

In July, there was a sudden spike in .SI (Slovenia) domain name sales, and now that Trump has announced AI will be rebranded SI, their owners are attempting to resell them for millions of dollars.

OpenAI’s chatbot fed the school shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre, our investigation reveals.

In June 2025, Jesse Van Rootselaar received an email notification from OpenAI. Van Rootselaar had been using ChatGPT to discuss committing potential acts of violence—including a mass shooting at a shopping mall—and now OpenAI had banned that account. But the troubled teen living in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was not deterred and soon logged back on with a second account.

In case anybody doubted the corporation that was actively complicit.

Interesting anecdote that demonstrates honoring consent might actually keep bugs at bay.

Been pulling my hair out debugging a relative’s persistent BSOD (once every ~6hrs) after nudging them to take the first degoogling step by switching browsers.

I could not believe at first that a user space program, especially a Windows Store sandboxed one, could affect anything in the kernel, but analyzing every single coredump shows the exact same trigger: Firefox attempted to rename the UrlAssocistions/http registry key in the UWP sandbox’s virtualized registry hive, triggering an access violation in the Registry system service and crashing ntoskrnl.

It turns out that there is a secretly enabled config "browser.shell.setDefaultBrowserUserChoice.regRename" that causes Firefox to attempt this renaming periodically despite the user already having unchecked the “check if default on startup” option . A quick search reveals that it was a vestigial A/B testing feature that was already slated for deprecation, but remained in the current version and a perfect storm of I’m guessing UWP kernel memory bug and Firefox dark pattern triggered this outcome.

Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered.