That is a major bummer to hear that. However, I don't know how seriously I take this partnership considering they are an open source movement that doesn't charge for their services or really have any streams of income. They accept donations and have already received donations from people like Google for a while, but this is probably because they provide so much to the development community.
The MDN is a staple for every web developer and all of their information is free. They charge nothing for anything you would ever want to learn about in regard to web development. So I'm a little skeptical about this because I don't know how Soros can really take control of something that is already so free and transparent to the public. There is just so little that is hidden in the MDN world and because they don't make their own profits, I don't see offending someone like Soros as a good business move on their part.
I really don't know how I feel about this. I support net neutrality, but MDN doesn't win or lose depending on whether or not we use their browser. They are nonprofit network already existing on private funding. I think I will have to wait and see what their definition of fake news is. There is a lot of crap on the internet. There was that video of the girl who was married to Hugh Hefner that someone had dubbed over with a script saying she was some clone grown in a lab that was clearly fake. Some people might think that is real. I don't know if that is something that should be allowed.
Technically, the internet is kind of like the wild west. If we look at the history of book publishing or any sort of peer reviewed journal, there is a significant editing process that takes place before information was released to the public. I think it would depend on how inline their methods were with this process that has already existed for several hundred years and did censor material because a lot of it sucked and wasn't worth printing.
If the parameter includes claiming to be a news organization to deceive people that you have a certain level of credibility and then producing information that is clearly false, I don't know whether I see the harm in controlling something like this.
If the parameter includes scanning someone's personal blog that is clearly using a WordPress default template so that everyone knows this is just someone's personal ramblings for keywords in order to prevent them from discussing a certain subject, I think that would be wrong.
But, if the focus of their investigation of "fake news" centers on click bait sites that masquerade as a legitimate news source. I don't know that I really care whether those are removed or not. There is some real crap news on the internet. If they could reduce a lot of tabloid-like news somehow, that would be awesome.
I think we just have to wait and see if removing fake news means what we think it means. In reality, most of the stuff on the internet would never have been published by any newspaper or book company and that isn't entirely a bad thing.
Either way the Tor project seems interesting. It is a web browser built on the Mozilla source code, so it might have some familiar features. The main difference I see in different web browsers is the number of applications is reduced with smaller web browsers. I never use applications on my web browser so this doesn't really bother me.
https://www.torproject.org/index.html.en
I found it from a list of best web secure browsers because that is all I really care about when it comes to a web browser.
http://www.techworld.com/security/best-8-secure-browsers-3246550/ There were a couple others that looked interesting too, but the Tor project seemed the most independent. I couldn't tell how a lot of them were created, which bothered me. I don't know who made Tor either, but it is unlikely that someone did with the intention of creating profits because they used open source code.
Just my 2 cents.
