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Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox
(www.theverge.com)
I worked at an IoT platform startup. All of our embedded device demos stopped working August 1st. I was told the same thing happened last year, but it was fine, things would start working in September. I decided to go fix it anyway. Eventually I figured out the culprit was a custom HTTP library. Instead of doing anything sensible, the way it found the Content-Length header was to loop over the bytes of the response until it found the first 'g' add 5 to that pointer and then assume that whatever was there was the number of bytes it should read. Unfortunately, HTTP responses have a Date header which includes the month and August has a 'g' in it.
There were a bunch of these demo devices already flashed and shipped out. The 'fix' to get them to work, even in August, was to downgrade requests to HTTP 0.9 which didn't require a Date header in the response.
Not federating with meta was a choice that could be made by the admins, just changing a setting in the instance. Slop can be posted to any instance by anyone with an account. If an admin decided to sign an anti-AI pact there's no way they could realistically abide / enforce it.