abbenm

Psst you're literally on the fediverse right now.

Oof. I want to cheer this project on as much as anybody, but there's no two ways around it, those terms have every appearance of being extreme and expansive. Just to copy it here for others to see:

When you post Contributions, you grant us a license (including use of your name, trademarks, and logos): By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section. Our use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels.

This license includes our use of your name, company name, and franchise name, as applicable, and any of the trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, and personal and commercial images you provide.

https://loops.video/legal/terms-of-service

It's safe with us

Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don't work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don't even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn't work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it's easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won't work on stub articles, and just janky because you're manually zapping things

❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don't have to be done with JavaScript.

❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you're trying to do a quick copy you're going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it's possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

✅ Archive.is - works!

✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they're probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it's not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you're signing yourself up for.

🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it's a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.

So unless they are willing to change their model I’ll just refuse to live.

Wait what

Not when they use the conjunction “so”. If they’d used “and”, then sure - there could be any number of reasons. Using “so” as a conjunction like that in the sentence gives it an equivalent definition of “therefore"

You're technically correct in your narrow focus on the conjunction "so," but you are missing the bigger picture. Yes, "so" generally functions as a logical connector like "therefore," meaning that the first statement is directly causing the second. Their sentence could be read as "Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it's harder for users to investigate," which isn't a comprehensive or precise statement on its own.

But that's a pretty pedantic take. The point that they were making doesn't rely on an exacting technical breakdown of the closed-source nature of Vivaldi. Rather, they're making a general observation that closed-source projects tend to be harder to investigate. With that in mind, the use of "so" is informal and reflects a broad conclusion that aligns with general knowledge about open vs. closed-source software. Closed source inherently implies limitations on access, which, while not exhaustive in this single sentence, still holds weight in the general sense.

Why are you making it about that question in particular? There's a lot of topics that have been raised here, notably Google's Chromium project, the way it's killing ad blockers, the way that other browsers also use chromium, people associated with those browsers.

In this range of subjects I'm not sure what the significance is of elevating this libre software question above everything else.

I don't love Peter Theil by any means, and his association with any project is, to my mind, enough to completely discredit it.

But I get a little worried when it starts turning into references to the bilderberg group, and whatever that link is to NCIO.ca is just completely nuts, low evidence jumping to conclusions.

He certainly has crazy ideas that I want no part of, but I think it crosses the line into conspiratorial to suggest he was instructed by Germany to act as a foreign agent to sabotage the global economy.

Please show me where you explained that Vivaldi’s source code is harder to investigate because “users need to download a 2 GB repo” or a “tarball dump”.

I can see why you think this is not entirely implied. But I also don't think that it's incumbent on them to have laid it out with such specificity. You can read this reference to closed source in the most charitable way as alluding to the whole motley of things that render closed source projects less accessible.

It takes a little squinting, sure, but the internet is a better place when we read things charitably, and I don't think such fine grain differences rise to the level of straight up misinformation.

I mean, there are some real whoppers around here on Lemmy. There's no shortage of crazy people saying crazy things, I just don't think this rises to that level.

Brave also uses chromium.

nothing is free

Plenty of things can be and are free at the point of service/point of consumption/utilization.

That's all they need to be. And there just has to be enough willpower to do that from enough people.