I sent in a support ticket asking them to save Firefox and stop all this AI bullshit
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Fuck off
"Yeah sorry boss, i didn't actually read the email, instead i had an AI summarize it for me and it got a key detail wrong. Anyway what's a couple thousand dollars in lost sales right"
https://orbitbymozilla.com/terms
4. Content
A. Content You Share
By using the Services, you represent that you will only share material (including Inputs) that you own and/or have the legal right to share and sublicense to others, including without limitation, content and data contained in any web-page shared through the Services to generate Outputs. When you submit your own content through the Services, you continue to own the rights to that content. You grant Mozilla a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, sub-license, prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display the Inputs for the purpose of operating the Services.
Thanks for the link to the privacy policy. You notice, at the bottom, it has links to both "About Mozilla" and "About FakeSpot"?
When you run the Orbit extension, it connects to two domains with every request:
- orbitbymozilla.com
- prod.orbit-ml-front-api.fakespot.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net
There's FakeSpot again.
And FakeSpot has a terrible privacy policy that allows sale of private data directly to advertisers.
AI you can trust
Lost me there
Easily summarize emails
Haha "Give us access to all your emails for data and corporate espionage we pwomise nothing bad will be done with it!"
Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.
Hmm.
>locally hosted
>Google Cloud
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Remember how the cloud is someone else’s server? Now you can buy it and bring it home, and it becomes only sorta someone else’s.
Amazon and Azure offer their own on-prem products.
"Locally hosted" means it's running on the local host. In this case, that would mean on the same computer running Firefox.
Calling something that is only accessible over the internet "locally hosted" is outrageous doublespeak.
Why does it mean that?
Why does local mean local? I'm not sure I understand your question.
If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter” would you be confused why they didn’t move a rack into your house?
My question is why are you projecting your limited interpretation as a global truth?
In IT context local is a well establised term. It's either hosted locally, i. e. on machine running the browser or not. A datacenter or cloud are remote machines also by the same well established definition.
Ok, now do your own datacenter vs cloud.
The language is confusing, and Mozilla should fix it themselves.
The important takeaway is: data is sent over an IP address controlled by Google, to a remote server, running Google software. No processing is taking place on someone's local computer.
IP address can belong to Mozilla, but the rest is correct.
Hadn't checked, that is not a hard requirement for the platform - assuming they actually have it in their infrastructure.
If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter”
Then that would also be an oxymoron.
Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.
It is, actually. It is local to them, it is remote to you. They are differentiating from a remote server in someone else’s datacenter. It is not that confusing.
This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users' computers.
It is absolutely doublespeak to call it "local". Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.
Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers "locally hosted". It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.
lol, I think we're giving too little credit to the marketing people in tech. I want to read their blogs!
Sounds like they’re running their own LLM instance on googles cloud infrastructure vs using something like OpenAI via API.
As web dev parlance it makes sense but for marketing it is definitely confusing and they should do better.
It just started and already have buzzwords floating around
Probably written by an AI?
Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.
So it connects to Google Cloud for this? What does that mean "locally", if its a Cloud Platform? And what does that mean "Mozilla's", if its Google? I'm a bit confused with this sentence.
Does it download and execute it locally offline or does it send the data to Google Cloud Platform?? The page is not clear about this and I searched for an answer. I have the same Mistral 7B model that I downloaded from HuggingFace website and can use offline with a specific GUI application. It would be nice if I could Firefox point to that file instead.
Otherwise, this does not look very promising and I wouldn't trust it at the moment.
Google Distributed Cloud allows you to run Google Cloud Platform locally in your own datacenter. They can deploy apps to that infrastructure and use the cloud console for management, or even use normal kubernetes tools for it.
Couldn’t say if that’s what they’re actually doing, but running Google Cloud locally is a thing.
Thanks for the clarification. That's interesting indeed. Unfortunately Mozilla is so dependent on Google.
I agree. I’d prefer they just run their own Kubernetes and manage it themselves. Maybe throw some business at Red Hat if they need help with it.
I don't want that. I want full control and absolute privacy. I do not want your AI reading my emails. Look at that summary, it's as long as the whole email, and you're not going to be able to trust that it picked up on the most important part of the email. This is not efficiency, this is novelty.
Well, you can just... not install the extension then?
I won't. But my concern is that Mozilla is heading in the wrong direction lately, and I have used Firefox for a very long time.
We always told them we want things to be optional, and now this is an extension so I dunno. Seems they're listening?
“AI you can trust” …
Then don't install the extension?
Not available on mobile, which is sad. I consume 99% of my internet via mobile devices.
If you install it from a file, everything else seems to work except dragging it around.
Thanks for the heads up.
I find it kind of suspicious that the extension (the fake spot one to) are proprietary.
why are they promoting web-based mail when their email solution is thunderbird?
Thunderbird is more a community project that's outside of Mozilla's jurisdiction at this point
Thunderbird is built by a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, it just isn’t the Mozilla Corporation.
Thunderbird is an independent, community-driven project that is managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird Community.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird
No. It's not.
Edit: sort of is, under a subsidiary called MZLA but still seems more independent from mozilla and their shenanigans (I hope)
What’s the sentence before that one?
Here, read the latest news: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-moves-to-monetize-thunderbird-transfers-project-to-new-subsidiary/
Never wondered why Thunderbird donations aren’t tax deductible?
OK... Now what actionable thing can I do with this info? Use outlook? What good would that do?
I want firefox to exist to create a good browser and thunderbird to exist for a good email client. Is that too much to ask?
I don’t think you need to do anything different. Sometimes when I learn new things I say “oh, interesting.”
Fair nuff. Sometimes it's just overwhelming getting information of something I can't do anything by. Like oh great another thing that's going wrong rn... Woo hoo
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