Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Anti-features need to be fought with fire (metaphorically speaking).
This means they must be eliminated, not just made optional.
Why? Because an optional anti-feature is just one step away from a mandatory anti-feature.
For example, "secure" booting: https://youtu.be/vvaWrmS3Vg4?t=750 (Jody Bruchon)
Another example are disguised remote kill switches, such as add-on signing ( https://digdeeper.club/articles/... ). It started as optional and people were able to opt out, and everyone accepted it because no one expected what would come next.
All that was left was removing the ability to opt out, and then Mozilla has control over which extensions users are allowed to use.
For years, this feature sat dormant and users did not know of its existence. But in early May 2019, the metaphorical thread snapped and an expired certificate remotely disabled all extensions, wasting millions of man-hours of productivity.
From the digdeeper.club article:
"The funny thing is, the whole point of the extension prison was allegedly to increase security - and yet today, all security addons got disabled because of it! Shows how freedom always has to trump over security or it ends up in a disaster like this."
Evil needs to be nipped in the bud before it can flourish.
rant
slippery slope
boiling frog effect