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Orbit by Mozilla
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Why does local mean local? I'm not sure I understand your question.
If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter” would you be confused why they didn’t move a rack into your house?
My question is why are you projecting your limited interpretation as a global truth?
In IT context local is a well establised term. It's either hosted locally, i. e. on machine running the browser or not. A datacenter or cloud are remote machines also by the same well established definition.
Ok, now do your own datacenter vs cloud.
Huh? What is there to do? Datacenter, cloud computing?
And what term might be used to describe the location of the datacenter down the hall, that is not used to describe the one across the country? It’s pretty standard in IT, but also used outside of IT by normal people for things such as describing a pub.
If the thing is not runing on a user computer, it's not local. If a datacenter is down the hall it's still a remote machine. It's always remote, unless the user is physicaly in a datacenter and using the server directly.
This whole argument is proof enough that the original language is confusing. For your argument to make sense we need to assume that local is used as a non-IT term and cloud as an IT term in the same sentence. That is very confusing language no matter how you look at.
The language is confusing, and Mozilla should fix it themselves.
The important takeaway is: data is sent over an IP address controlled by Google, to a remote server, running Google software. No processing is taking place on someone's local computer.
IP address can belong to Mozilla, but the rest is correct.
Address owner: Google LLC?
https://dnschecker.org/domain-ip-lookup.php?query=prod.orbit-ml-front-api.fakespot.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net%2F&dns=cloudflare
Hadn't checked, that is not a hard requirement for the platform - assuming they actually have it in their infrastructure.
Then that would also be an oxymoron.
Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.
It is, actually. It is local to them, it is remote to you. They are differentiating from a remote server in someone else’s datacenter. It is not that confusing.
This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users' computers.
It is absolutely doublespeak to call it "local". Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.
Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers "locally hosted". It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.
We actually do have better terminology for "local to Mozilla" and "remote to Mozilla"... It's first party and third party.
And, from the looks of it, Mozilla is indeed using Google Cloud Services as a third party, according to their privacy policy.
That’s a given. Google Cloud Platform is managed through the same Google Cloud Console as everything else, which is in Google’s datacenter, even when it it’s running locally - unless you opt for an air-gapped option. It’s how companies can make data locality claims while using the same tools and one of the selling points pushed by cloud services.