Thank you UBO
regarding tracking: I guess I don't care about that since I get these updates from Google about where I've been in the year with dots on a US map.
And of course Chrome, Firefox, and Safari don't provide a reliable way to stop those obnoxious auto-playing videos.
It burns me up that the fact that I blocked autoplay reliably means that Firefox could do it, they just don't want to.
edit: I might have gotten the settings from a blog, but I have a strong feeling they might have been from combing the firefox bugtracker.
Advertisements have been around for thousands of years. The concept predates industry, democracy, and (depending on who you ask) capitalism itself.
There's an excellent, short, readable, and information-dense source on this, by Hamilton Holt (a magazine publisher himself) published in 1909, describing roughly the prior half-century's remarkable development of an advertising-funded publishing industry, and the absolutely corrosive effects visible even then, Commercialism and Journalism. Quoted in the first pages an observation from the 1880s, already nearly three decades prior:
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>
Holt doesn't name his source, I've since learnt it was John Swinton, himself a journalist (chief editorial writer of the New York Times in the 1860s):
Nowadays, it is more like the people running the airport security line, who record down their observations.
And every few minutes some data leaves my MBP to Apple databases hosted on Amazon cloud. I do not suspect Apple nor Amazon of anything but there are too many hands dealing with it - breach is just about 'when' not 'if'.
Big players with a moat get to pull the ladder up and enjoy an obscene data advantage nobody else can even get a start on.(AI has a similar problem)
I think any right to privacy has to include non essential internal use with some very careful wording on what “essential” means.
My motivation is that I would love, and personally pay a ridiculous amount of money for, a service that obfuscates the upstream data that ends up in stuff like bidstreams and other behavioral tracking data sources in a way that makes the data essentially worthless (or even better, extremely expensive) to them. Have had almost no success, at least from means that wouldn't get you in hot water- it feels a lot like pissing into a forest fire expecting to put it out.
Nonetheless, it might be wise for advertising companies to prepare a contextual advertising business model that could survive possible potential legislative action and regulatory scrutiny.
Intrusive targeting just doesn’t create that much lift. Fairly course demographic n-grams actually optimize better than arbitrary sparsity.
Knowing that this viewer is in such a zip code? Yeah, that can matter. Knowing their address? Those are bits I need to throw away before feeding them to the recommender anyways.
If I’m trying to target ads I want neither the computational burden of the granular data nor the scope for getting hacked.
It's possible to have ads without the current levels of surveillance. Many of us grew up in such a world.
The ads still work just as well without the Trojan Horse surveillance. Commerce does not suffer.
Of course so-called "tech" companies are terrified of a world where this computer-based surveillance to fuel online ads is competitive or tightly regulated. For them it is "unthinkable". For some of us subjected to this nonsense, it is easily thinkable. It is fresh in the memory.
EFF have done good work vis-a-vis government surveillance, but EFF has always been a libertarian project to promote and protect tech power by weakening government oversight of the net.
EFF have been putting some significant distance between themselves and their (admittedly, true) Libertarian origins. Cory Doctorow (long-time public-face, current special advisor) has distinctly non-Libertarian leanings.
<https://www.eff.org/about/special-counsel#main-content>
The more-libertarian John Gilmore and Brad Templeton are both emeriti:
<https://www.eff.org/about/emeritus#main-content>
I've raised the question with Cory previously, response was, effectively, that there's a considerable overlap between viewpoints, regardless of ideology. And I'd personally heard Templeton express concerns over Google over two decades ago (Q&A at a Stanford event).
My read is that viewpoints at EFF are diverse, and that concerns over commercial surviellance are also longstanding. E.g., Privacy Badger, aimed directly at same, was released over a decade ago, 14 July 2014:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.eff....>
Privacy Badger is at best an also-ran privacy tool that’s had little impact in general, and no impact on big tech bottom line. It’s a joke in the grand scheme of things.
Also, “concern over Google” is utterly immaterial to the fact that EFF takes millions from Google. They’re not too “concerned” to cash the checks. Neither was Mozilla.
"You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather."
"It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness."
To be clear: creating media for the purposes of spreading an idea is not inherently bad. What's bad is having an industry built around planting ideas in human minds, regardless of the validity or broad utility of those ideas.
And to head off "but then how will people learn about <PRODUCT>?" People buy marketing material, coupon books, attend conferences for the things they care about, and if necessary research options when they need something. A market does not need the feature of shoving information about available products and services in everyone's face to function well. And if you're someone who likes seeing ads, great, open up the yellow pages or digital equivalent and look at all the ads you want. How will ad-supported services like mass social-media sites fund themselves? Not my problem, maybe they don't and they shit down. What a shame.
But at least Ads i can avoid - the fucking software eating everything I can’t avoid unless I become a hermit.
Commercials are often annoying, sure. I like cable with a DVR because I can skip 100% of commercials and the stream can't make them unskippable. But there's no sense in overreacting to the general concept of advertising.
When I go on a date and a woman tells me about herself I understand she may be emphasizing the good and downplaying the bad. It does not make her evil. It's normal for anyone to do.
It is more like you go on your date, but the woman you go on a date with has no interest in you whatsoever. But she carefully documents your interests, your behavioral habits and shortcomings, along with information about your education, race, religion, age and salary. Then this person sells this to people who you don't want to date, but want to meet and exploit you.
This is why you get ads for timeshares, water filters or casinos that you don't want - but these people have money to put an ad in front of you.
Essentially nobody is against a local pizza shop putting up a flyer. But most (almost all) ads are by companies like Coca-Cola, who simply want to beat you into submission to associate whatever it they want with their product.
Beach Summer Fun == Coca-Cola.
Childhood Wonder == Disney Resorts.
etc. etc.
You can form an opinion based on facts, but almost all advertising is not about presenting you facts to consider. Its about forming an impression for you.
To me the most sad part is that it's all worthless. If Pepsi does better than Coke, I DONT CARE. And yet, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens toil away hours every day to try to convince us one way or another. And in the process make the world uglier and more hostile.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677216
“ I’d like to see more work put into finding ways to utilize the work from PoW. For example I have an idea to use Monero’s CPU-favoring PoW for PoW based DDoS protection as seen in Tor [0]. When a user accesses a website they are given a PoW challenge to complete. This challenge is actually for a share of mining rewards as in P2Pool. The mining reward share would go to the website operator. This would harmoniously improve several things about the web. First, it would help protect websites against layer-7 DDoS attacks. Second, this L7 DDoS protection reduces the webs dependence on companies such as Cloudflare, the internets biggest man-in-the-middle. Third, it provides a way to pay website owners costing the users a small amount of their computers time and energy in much the same way as ads do currently. Fourth, it reduces the webs dependence on advertising as the way to fund your website. Fifth and finally, it helps secure the web-native currency in which website operators would be paid and which others can use for whatever they want.
I think such a solution would be truly beautiful.
0: https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens... “
It was better when it was smaller. Pretty much everything is in some stage of enshittification.
> Ads could still be targeted contextually—based on the content of the page you’re currently viewing—without collecting or exposing sensitive information about you. This shift would not only protect individual privacy but also reduce the power of the surveillance industry.
This is financial engineering. Someone still needs to pay for the metal and electricity.
but honestly, yeah, there's a lot of business models that wouldn't work without them, and some of those businesses make useful things.
Ads have always been part of the commercial internet and I'd argue they were far worse back then.
The reason Google started off so well was because adverts were non existent, then just relevant text on the side. Compare to altavista, excite, hit it etc it was a beacon of calm.
You might try setting the about:config settings “media.autoplay.default” to 5 and/or “media.autoplay.blocking_policy” to 2:
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/e24277e20c492b4a78...
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/e24277e20c492b4a78...
If you think there is a Firefox bug, you can file a bug report and link it to this autoplay bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1376321
I want a reliable way to block autoplay of all videos, whether or not they have audio.
To summarize this: advertising is a zero sum game. (In the few instances where it isn't, it's also a good thing).
Advertising does not make people excited, or happy, in general. The type that does (movie trailers, mostly) can stay.
In general, advertising makes people unhappy.
Think of the teenagers who see photoshoped, paper-thin fashion models and wish they were them. And then spend their money fruitlessly trying to be something that is impossible.
Think of the people convinced by advertising to invest in scams, or to gamble their money away.
This one gets me personally - I can't see a twix ad without wanting to buy a twix. And yet the world would be better if I didn't! They aren't healthy and I was perfectly happy before I saw the ad and then realized I needed one.
And in general they are UGLY. They demand your attention. There's a reason most people here use uBlock.
???
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
It seems to hurt a lot of people’s feelings in SV, but no, you wearing an EFF tshirt and making yearly corporate-matches donations doesn’t remove your culpability for working for big tech. Likewise, the EFF knows how many of the “small” donation come from SV tech employees.
It’s a sham organization that was premised on a faulty understanding of regulatory frameworks that does very, very little of value in the past 15 years.
If I'm reading it right, the wikimedia grafana indicates they're usually under 20 Gb/s for reference.
Maybe we could break this into categories of knowledge:
* A user identity on any particular site, and the personally identifying information (PII) attached to it (email, phone, IP addresses used)
* A wider identity profile that can be stitched together via site user identities and browser fingerprinting
* The topical interests of an identity
It'd posit that to break tracking you'd have to disguise the first two by randomizing PII and browser fingerprint. Randomizing the third is more about making the collected data on personal interests useless regardless of identity, thus decreasing the value proposition of invasive advertising.
For example, faking traffic jam data for google maps with phones. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-04/man-creates-fake-traf...
Faking wifi and location data to unlock airpods pro in India. https://www.reddit.com/r/AirpodsPro/comments/1gqscig/two_guy...
DataPools is a Wi-Fi geolocation spoofing project that virtually relocates your phone to the latitudes and longitudes of Silicon Valley’s elite pools. https://adam.harvey.studio/datapools/
These are just a couple of fun examples, obviously you could augment these with LLM/DL tools and other anti-censorship (mixer, DCnets etc ), bot(nets) tools to create multiple identities that post in other languages, create fake photos of your in various countries, to make it hard to follow.
I'm aware that "national security" is often invoked in these types of discussions, and a little aware more than I think the general populace at how valuable some of this data is to intelligence operations. However, I would counter that by saying perhaps someone should consider whether it's a problem that such "critical" national security functions belong in the hands of companies that control the flow of such data for profit to anyone with a pocketbook, and ponder whether this is actually working to cause net help or harm for national security. I would argue strongly the latter, to the profitability of the people that control such data and contribute a lot of money to the elections of people that put forth their agendas, but this isn't the place to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/06/15/using_snarks.htm...
Obviously this requires companies to embrace said technologies.
That is hilarious and should be expanded.
Tackling this from a technical level, to me, at this point seems infeasible. Feel free to inbox my email if you have any more thoughts about this, this is something that is difficult to discuss in such public forums.
I will just leave this - to me, people place undue faith in adblockers and extensions. That fixes only a part of the problem. You're also placing a lot of trust in your browser (not to mention the extension). If I really, truly want to determine who you are - from the perspective of a data miner - I can trivially hide all backend requests behind a proxy that you will never know about, and your adblocker will never know about. It provides a false sense of security that a lot of otherwise technical people hide behind.
First, there was an internet before there were ads. When there's a need there's a way and BitTorrent and Napster taught us that P2P is feasible when the users care about it.
Then there's the issue of competitive advantage. If the newspaper from the next town over has a website then my local newspaper has to have a website too. So the incentives would switch from "I'll finance this service with ads" to "this website costs money but that's another cost of doing business".
And finally, people do pay for services. Patreon and Wikipedia are examples where a bunch of users provide the funds for those who can't/won't pay for a service.
Would all services survive? No. And it would certainly be a different experience. But I believe an internet driven by a mixture of fans and sensible economic strategy wouldn't be a bad thing.
p2p is feasible but you still need someone to produce the content that you're trading between yourselves.
You must be very young, or have forgotten?
The Internet (and the Web also) existed well before ads. Advertising (all commercial use) was forbidden.
The Internet existed and was much better. All content was from people who cared about it, not because they were exploiting you for ads. The glory days of the Internet was before ads were legal.
If you’re on a mobile and have metered traffic, chances are you are wasting more money downloading ads than the website owner would make. If you could pay directly instead, both you and the owner would be better off. Zero tracking, zero ads.
I don’t think anybody had any success yet, but we can dream.