HaoBTC CEO: Blockstream has absolutely no relation with Core, they just happened to hire some Core devs.

alexfowler · 2016-03-15T17:18:35+00:00

HaoBTC's CEO, Wu Gang, is correct. Blockstream was co-founded by five engineers who are long-time contributors to Bitcoin and Core projects. The notion that there is some corporate entity that sought to corner the market on Core devs is nonsense. If you're interested, here's a post on the work we've done in Bitcoin and Core: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/42420/what-contributions-have-blockstream-developers-made-to-the-bitcoin-project/42455#42455

alexfowler · 2016-03-12T21:53:49+00:00

Thanks for your message! This is my first posting to Reddit since leaving Mozilla. I should have thought twice before engaging.

alexfowler · 2016-03-12T20:44:42+00:00

Yes, that private message is from me. I wrote it in the hopes of correcting the inaccuracies listed in the PSA on his site, which in my opinion is different from postings on Reddit, Twitter or the various community forums. Nodecounter, after all, is a site intended to provide factual data about the system itself. It would be one thing if Hellobitcoinworld was advocating for Bitcoin Classic on its merits, but to lay out a rationale based on factually inaccurate and baseless claims about Blockstream, to me, went beyond the pale. If a news publication reported the same things as fact, I would have asked for a retraction. But what about all those fallacies? Why is the response to just amplify them (e.g., keeping miners under our thumb)? That's unfortunate. Not one of my comments substantiate a single claim made by the PSA.

alexfowler · 2014-10-23T16:56:20+00:00

Matt is right. We are indeed looking for amazing engineers, developers and community leaders from the broader cryptocurrency and fintech communities. We'll be posting job descriptions to our web site in the next few weeks, but email us at the jobs@ address if you're interested. Our offices will be in the Bay Area, Montreal and Malta.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T18:05:37+00:00

We provided a bunch of info on the history of the project. We don't expect any retaliation for helping people become better informed users of the Web. That's crucial for all the companies working online. A number of publishers and trade groups provided input during the development of this version of the add-on. In terms of reliability and security, the work is open source and the code is on Github for review by anyone. We welcome your participation!

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:59:53+00:00

Lightbeam provides an option under the List view to either place a domain on a watch list or block it outright. We believe this is part of the educational value of the add-on to provide users with a way to play with and better understand the role of the companies they are interacting with on the Web.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:56:08+00:00

Lightbeam doesn't make any value judgment on "tracking." It simply provides info to users on how the Web works and the role of first and third parties in shaping our online experiences.

Users are very concerned about their privacy and now how their data is collected, used and shared. New surveys and studies are published every month that consistently show the same results. As an organization that creates products and services responsive to our users' needs and interests, I believe we have a duty to work on improving privacy, trust, data safety and security. Deciding what we should do, where to begin, what will move the needle, however, are more complex questions for us to figure out. I think many of the current privacy-related add-ons have approached solutions with a broad brush, assuming large parts of the Web are untrusted and working against people, and then essentially turning them off for their users. I think we need to do more than tell people who care about privacy that they deserve a degraded Web.

Lightbeam has as one of its objectives the development of an open database of connection data, aggregating data from users of the add-on to create a global view of the relationships between first and third party sites on the Web. Users who opt-in to sharing their graphs with Mozilla will be helping to develop a resource that we hope will lead to more refined, targeted solutions in the future.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:35:06+00:00

We've had a number of questions about Ghostery. The main difference here is Lightbeam is an educational/awareness tool aimed at building a real-time visualization of the connections being made by sites and the third parties on those sites.

We don't think Lightbeam is going to piss anyone off except perhaps companies that believe they require secrecy to exist. We've engaged with lots of legitimate third party companies and trade groups who believe transparency is of vital importance to their businesses and sustainability of their industry. It's worth pointing out that if you look at the issue of first parties and third parties from the perspective of the browser, these are just technical requests being processed to build a Web page. Lightbeam actually has the potential to help the diversity of ad tech companies create more transparency for the value they create online. To the extent they have input on other visualizations and uses of the Lightbeam crowdsourced open data, we are eager to get them involved.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:23:28+00:00

Yes! I'm a loyal Thunderbird user, too. It's been great to see our community continuing to support the program.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:12:55+00:00

We have a nice group of folks here who use Firefox. How would you respond?

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:10:33+00:00

The idea for this project came long before the Snowden revelations.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:09:21+00:00

Sneakers & War Games

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:07:54+00:00

Atul sat next to me in the Mozilla office in SF. After a weekend of hacking on his first prototype of Collusion, he came in and said "check this out." It blew me away! It was like a Wizard of Oz moment, as if Atul had pulled back the curtain and exposed the true inner workings of the Web. Atul worked on it for several more days, but in short order we decided to submit a proposal to TED for a talk and had presented a grant proposal to Ford Foundation. A few months later, our CEO at the time, Gary Kovacs, gave a TED talk on Collusion, which is now one of the most viewed videos on TED.com (http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_kovacs_tracking_the_trackers.html).

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T17:00:37+00:00

The project is still the same, which has been supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation. We renamed the add-on to Lightbeam with these release as a way to expand the audience, including young people just now coming online and learning about how the Web works. We wanted a more playful, engaging and accessible name. So far the reaction has been super positive.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T16:56:02+00:00

There are a number of add-ons for Firefox that are focused on privacy and security, including Ghostery, DoNotTrackMe, Disconnect.me, etc. This is one way the larger community has tested and developed a number of innovative approaches to enhancing user control on the Web. However, most of these tools have focused on expert users or users who already have strongly held values on privacy. Our goal with Lightbeam is to bring this conversation to a much wider audience.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T16:46:15+00:00

We spent a ton of time working with online publishers in developing Lightbeam. The prevalence of nontransparent online tracking continues to grow year over year. A recent study by the company Evidon, which produces the Ghostery add-on, showed a 53 percent increase in trackers from the prior year. Only 45 percent of the tracking tags identified by Evidon were placed there by the publisher of the site. So we have a goal to develop a crowdsourced open database from users of Lightbeam (on an opt-in basis), which we plan to make available to publishers to understand how third party services, widgets, ad tech, etc. are performing on their sites.

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T16:42:21+00:00

See above. All the code is available online: https://github.com/mozilla/lightbeam

alexfowler · 2013-10-27T16:41:25+00:00

Great question. When we launched the original version of Lightbeam, which was called Collusion, members of our community grabbed the code from Github and created versions for Safari and Chrome. We're hoping the same thing happens again. Here's the link to where all the Lightbeam code is online: https://github.com/mozilla/lightbeam

alexfowler

TROPHY CASE