Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science @SyracuseIDJC, @SUPolisci, American Politics, Comparative Politics, Political Behavior, Public Opinion, Methodology

Washington, DC
Joined September 2015
Murat Abus retweeted
Te amo firefox, eres el mejor navegador
How is the internet less private than in 2006, when the whole family shared one computer? Back then, the internet was weird, personal, and all of ours. So, we got your favorite meme legends back together to say it louder: What happened to the internet? 1/3
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Murat Abus retweeted
#Firefox browser user since 2005. It's very customizable, both its interface and settings, great privacy and AI controls, in fact, you can easily disable all AI features, and it's from a non-profit organization. For desktop and/or mobile firefox.com
How is the internet less private than in 2006, when the whole family shared one computer? Back then, the internet was weird, personal, and all of ours. So, we got your favorite meme legends back together to say it louder: What happened to the internet? 1/3
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Murat Abus retweeted
In 2004, we took on tech giants to give you a real choice. 20+ years later, we're still fighting for the internet you love, and we've been busy. Here are 4 ways Firefox keeps getting better: 1/5
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Murat Abus retweeted
I wrote a short piece on declining local government capacity, pensions, and obstacles to political accountability. In short: Many people do not notice when there is a slight reduction in the number of instructional aides or police officers, nor are most aware when a city decides to postpone repaving a few street segments. Over time, these changes add up, but even if some constituents do start to notice a difference, it is virtually impossible for them to attribute the changes to decisions about pensions made by policymakers many years ago. The American system of state and local pension governance is also so complex that even the best informed, most engaged citizens would have a very difficult time knowing whom to hold accountable.
Bit by bit, retirement burdens eat up a growing share of spending—and politics makes them almost impossible to rein in. In a new essay for Hoover's Commons initiative, Senior Fellow @SarahAnzia explains how public pensions drain local government services: thefreedomfrequency.org/p/ho…
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Murat Abus retweeted
🦊 Firefox added a built-in ad blocker to its iOS app. It’s a great privacy win, but it actually highlights a massive, anti-competitive problem with Apple On desktop and Android, you can install any ad-blocking extension you want on Firefox. But on iOS, Apple's strict rules ban full extensions for competing browsers. Only Safari gets dedicated content blockers. Because of this, Firefox was forced to build a basic blocker from scratch just to compete So, is the native Firefox blocker enough? It’s a solid start (powered by EasyList), but it’s just an on/off switch. It purposely leaves search ads (Google, Bing) untouched — which makes sense, since search royalties make up 73% of Mozilla’s revenue If you want total control and custom filters on iOS, Apple essentially forces you to use Safari with a dedicated blocker like AdGuard But if you’re loyal to Firefox, you don't have to choose. Add a system-wide DNS layer (like AdGuard DNS). Our system-wide DNS protection filters trackers across all apps, covering the blind spots Firefox leaves behind adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-…
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Murat Abus retweeted
Whatever book you pick up, it’s likely to make you feel better—maybe even a whole lot better. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Ceridwen Dovey writes, in “Can Reading Make You Happier?,” which was published in 2015. Dive into the research behind the therapeutic effect of books: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Wv…
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Murat Abus retweeted
Can governments preserve political support during crises and disasters by redirecting responsibility to God, fate, or foreign powers? In our new article in Political Behavior, we examine this question using experimental evidence from Türkiye. link.springer.com/article/10…
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❗️Mozilla is hitting out at Apple over the closed design of iOS, the platform owner decides which privacy tools competing browsers may offer, it says. So they were forced to build ad blocking straight into the iPhone app. Mozilla says Apple's rules left it no choice, because iOS blocks browser extensions. Mozilla is going after Apple over iOS lock-in, more than two years after the EU's Digital Markets Act forced Apple to allow rival browser engines, Mozilla says the entitlement's requirements are so detailed that no browser developer has met them.
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Murat Abus retweeted
The gold standard for producing PDF documents (especially books and journal articles) has been LaTeX. @typstapp re-engineered the entire process in an incredibly elegant extensible way. On my MacOS LaTeX (TexLive) takes 9.1GB of disk space. Typst takes 43MB. Not a misprint.
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Daron Acemoglu blasts The Economist over their bizarre critique of him: “Your central verdict that I am 'oddly unconvincing' rests on unnamed economists revealing their true opinion of me over a few drinks. No persons who have been offered drinks to get to this truth are named. Would you publish a letter asserting that, over a few drinks, most people tell me that your newspaper is no longer worth subscribing to? The only person quoted with such views is a blogger, Noah Smith, a thin basis for judging a lifetime of academic work [...] If this is the best you can do with a body of work spanning 33 years, then it is your critique that is 'oddly unconvincing.'”
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Murat Abus retweeted
There is a post making rounds about how a fingerprinting script from Alibaba’s AliExpress interrupted someone’s bluetooth headphone connection. AliExpress was trying trying to discretely track users, but was thwarted by Firefox’s anti-fingerprinting technology.
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Murat Abus retweeted
just found this on some old tumblr
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Murat Abus retweeted
Firefox Is Bullying Microsoft publicly... And Microsoft kind of deserves it. uBlock Origin is the free ad blocker that actually kills ads, pop-ups and trackers properly. Microsoft Edge is quietly shutting down the system it runs on. Full uBlock Origin gets phased out by the end of 2026, replaced by a much weaker Lite version. Google already did the exact same thing to Chrome earlier this year. Firefox saw it happening and started posting. "Our support for uBlock Origin isn't going anywhere." Then this one, days later: "Reminder that you can still just use ad blockers on Firefox. Wild concept, we know." Here is the part that should bother you more than the jokes. Google sells ads. Chrome just cut uBlock Origin. Microsoft sells ads. Edge is next. Firefox is now the last major browser where the full ad blocker still works.
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Como cada 18 de agosto recordamos a Khaled Asaad, el héroe de Palmira, de la que fue director arqueológico durante 40 años. El Estado Islámico lo asesinó en 2015 por negarse a revelar dónde estaban las 400 piezas que había ocultado para evitar su destrucción. ¡Eterno Khaled!
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Firefox is now the last major browser that fully supports uBlock Origin As Microsoft Edge (and other Chromium browsers) move to Manifest V3 and heavily restrict ad blockers, Firefox has confirmed it will continue supporting uBlock Origin. The result: Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera… → limited version (uBlock Origin Lite) or built-in blocker Firefox → full support for uBlock Origin For anyone who wants uncompromising ad and tracker blocking, Firefox is currently the only major option left. Personally, I’m staying on Firefox. Zero issues so far. Article: pcworld.com/article/3212428/… Still on Firefox for this reason? 👇 #Firefox #Privacy #uBlockOrigin #OpenWeb
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Brave still fully supports MV2 extensions including uBlock Origin. x.com/brave/status/2… neowin.net/news/forget-go…
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Firefox is calling out Microsoft Edge over its plans to limit ad blockers. Microsoft is moving away from the older Manifest V2 system for browser extensions. This will eventually affect the full version of uBlock Origin on Edge. Firefox says it will continue supporting it. “Our support for uBlock Origin isn’t going anywhere.” “Reminder that you can still just… use ad blockers on Firefox. Wild concept, we know.”
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Murat Abus retweeted
Reviewer 1: this could be two papers Reviewer 2: this should be no papers
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Murat Abus retweeted
Firefox support for uBlock Origin is not going anywhere.
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New article by @kevin_a_mazur in @law_middle Wartime Destruction and State Contraction: The Case of Aleppo doi.org/10.1163/18763375-bja…
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