Yes, my point is that they don’t have a political ideology.

Like, the IRA was bombing things because the goal was Irish independence. They wanted the UK out of Northern Ireland.

Al Qaeda was bombing things to get the US out of the middle east. They wanted no US troops on Arab soil.

Boko Haram wanted an area to be fully under Muslim law, with no western books or education.

That’s the normal definition of terrorism, a group that’s terrorizing the population in pursuit of a political aim of some kind. It isn’t normally considered terrorism if there’s no ideology involved, and it’s just in defence of a criminal enterprise.

In the case of the narcos, I don’t know of any political aim. I don’t think they have any particular ideology, other than “we want to keep making money selling drugs to Americans”. To a certain extent, I can see how they could be considered terrorists because they’re terrorizing the population, the courts and the government to get their way. But, in the past there has normally been a line drawn between a terrorist organization and a criminal organization.

Terrorist / Terrorism seems to be a magic word in US law and policy.

If a country has organized crime in their country it’s no big deal. If there are close ties between the rulers and the criminals, that’s unfortunate.

But, if the criminals are now labelled as terrorists, then you get to go on the state sponsors of terrorism list, which comes with all kinds of sanctions and restrictions.

If you look at so-called “terrorist” organizations, there’s almost always elements of “terrorist” activities, but also evidence of other random criminal activities, and often legitimate political activities too. Take Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA. Some of their funding came from fuel and drug smuggling. So, where you draw the line between a “terrorist” group and a criminal group is pretty arbitrary. I think most people would say that the Mexican cartels are primarily criminals though. While they do kill people in ways that are intended to send a message, the message is generally “don’t mess with our profits” rather than some political ideal.

Every country has some corruption, definitely including the US. So, what happens if a Mexican politician was accepting bribes from Narcos and passing legislation favourable to them? When does that become the state sponsoring terrorism?

Putting the “terrorist” label on Mexican cartels seems like a prelude to doing things that violate Mexico’s sovereignty. If the cartels are merely violent criminal organizations, it’s a problem for Mexico’s government. If they’re “terrorists” then the US can lob missiles into Mexico, because it has a long-standing policy of violating the sovereignty of countries that “harbor” (i.e. contain) terrorists.

Firefox and the Chrome engine are open source projects. Anyone can modify the browser to enable ad-blocking in some form if a user is sufficiently determined.

Technically, sure. But, these are extremely complex software products, and it would be one hobbyist vs. an entire software division of a trillion dollar company who are determined to make sure you see ads.

Unfortunately, there are only 3 companies developing browsers right now: Google, Apple and Mozilla.

Apple’s browsers are only available on Apple platforms. In fact, if you’re on iOS you have no choice, you have to use Safari. Even browsers labelled as “Chrome” or “Firefox” are actually Safari under the hood on iOS. But, on any non Apple platform, you can’t use Safari.

Google is an ad company, so they don’t want to allow ad blockers on their browser. So, it’s a matter of time before every kind of ad blocking is disabled for Chrome users.

Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google, so there’s a limit as to what they can do without the funding getting cut off. They seem to be trying to find a way forward without Google, but the result, if anything is as bad as Google if not worse:

“investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term;”

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/

All these other browser people like are basically reskinned versions of Chrome or Firefox. They have a handful of people working on them. To actually develop a modern browser you need a big team. A modern browser basically has to be an OS capable of running everything from a 3d game engine, to a word processor, to a full featured debugger.

It looks like it’s only a matter of time before there will be 0 browsers capable of blocking ads, because the only two companies that make multi-platform browsers depend on ads for their revenue, and both of them will have enormous expenses because they’re obsessed with stupid projects like AI.

Ah yes. I want to be a senator, but I’m conservative, so I’m going to use my kitchen as a set in my political ads.

What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.

Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it’s probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.

The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.

What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?