August was a relatively quiet month for quite a busy year in terms of technology. The loss of Firefox users continues, Google shows that privacy is not something it is very good at, and two birthday celebrations
The fire of the fox keeps going out
I clarify once again that I am not in a campaign against Firefox. The directors of the Mozilla Foundation do not need my help to destroy the former pride of open source.
While the Mozilla Foundation devotes all its efforts to political correctness, the open source browser and only alternative to Google Chrome lost about 50 million dollars per year. That would be about 46 users per day.
Much of that statistic pertains to mobile devices that come with their own built-in browsers. Google Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS. Edge, on Windows, has significantly improved its performance, and those who don't like it are much more likely to install Chrome.
Also, Chrome's integration with Google services and with Edge and Microsoft services is much better than with Firefox. And, of course, we cannot deny the influence of Google's incessant advertising on your search engine.
But, that doesn't mean we deny Mozilla's own mistakes; firing valuable employees, abandoning projects, or wasting time on things that have nothing to do with software development.
Google and (lack of) privacy
This was a year of questioning the big technology companies and one of the issues is the way in which they protect user data. We have already discussed how Apple agreed to share iCloud user data with the Chinese government, even handing over the operation to a Chinese state-owned company within its borders.
In the case of Google, it was learned that between 2019 and 2021 it fired 80 employees for practices such as theft and subsequent leaking of internal company information and unauthorized access to user data.
In any case, a spokesman for the company downplayed the issue:
The instances referenced primarily relate to inappropriate access or misuse of corporate information or private and sensitive IP."
“The number of breaches, whether deliberate or inadvertent, is consistently low. All employees receive training annually, we investigate all allegations and violations lead to corrective action up to and including termination, and we have strict processes in place to protect customer and user data from any internal or external threats
birthdays of the month
In August, two very important birthdays were celebrated for all of us.
On August 31, 1991, a certain Finnish student announced that he was developing a new operating system, for which he had ported two tools from the GNU project; bash and gcc. A fortnight later, the first version of the kernel was released.
That first kernel was 62KB in compressed form and contained about 10 lines of source code. Current versions have more than 20 million lines of code
24 days before Linus Torvalds announcement, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee published the first website,
The address of the first website was "http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject, and it led to a page containing links to information about the WWW project, including a description of the hypertext, technical details on how to create a web server and space for links to other web servers as they come online.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990. His goal was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks, and hypertext into one information system. global powerful and easy to use.
It was in the late 1990s that the Briton demonstrated the development of his ideas by showing the first operational browser and web server running on a NeXT computer.
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