Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is taking charge of one of the internet’s most important — and most complicated — companies.

Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”

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  • mjr@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Wait wait wait. Where does Vivaldi say that in any way?

    In the bit I quoted from what was linked. Of course, they don’t phrase it like that, but it’s what they’re doing.

    Their user security https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/

    We strictly protect the security of any and all personal information you provide to us while using Vivaldi products and services. We do not share or sell information to any third party and we proactively protect all user data from disclosure, with the only exception being if requested by legitimate law agencies with a court order.

    …which is immediately contradicted lower down the page by most paragraphs in “Type and purpose of data collected by third party vendors”. OK, it’s not personal information, but it is still information that they’re sharing with third parties.

    It’s also not clear to me how much notice they give of changes to that policy, either.

    That’s privacy not security, though. The basic problem is that we can’t look at all the code, audit it, modify it, test it, check it always behaves well.

    No disagreement there, but Vivaldi isn’t repeating anything that’s been tried before. Vivaldi is an employee owned company that wants to succeed, wants to offer the best interface, security and features to the general public it can whilst simultaneously keeping itself uniquely true to its values and survival. Gee, so horrible of it to want to scrape a living for its employee owners. Ridiculousness indeed.

    But this has been tried before. I’ve worked in employee-owned software companies for decades and seen many others come and go. Attempting to hold part of your code hostage seems doomed to fail eventually: most go bust, and some get bought out by so-called “carpet-baggers”. To succeed in an ethical way, they need to find a way to get paid to develop the software, not fall into the trap of creating it and then trying to get paid later by keeping part of it secret. I don’t want to be caught in the fallout yet again if another company learns this the hard way and then their software becomes obsolete and lost.