Meanwhile tech companies can and eagerly will summarily and mercilessly financially ruin you and effectively banish you from human interaction if they simply don't like your opinions.
Are you referring to people getting booted of Twitter and Patreon?
Poor Sargon, now he's only got all his other sources of revenue and publishing platforms left. Maybe he shouldn't have given up his day job.
PiHole is better than nothing, but DNS based blocking is very limited these days compared to what an in-browser ad blocker can do.
For example, it can't do much about ads served from the same host as the content. It can't do pattern matching based on the URL. It can't selectively disable Javascript, e.g. to disable 3rd party scripts. It can't stop auto-play videos.
It doesn't work with YouTube either. Currently PiHole can't block YouTube ads, much to my annoyance.
How do you explain France then? They used to love nuclear, built loads of it, have new sites already approved.
Or what about the UK? Sites already approved, ready for someone to start building a reactor. The government even guaranteed well above market rate for the energy produced, plus all the usual subsidies.
Yet companies are pulling out and taxpayers are fed up with the massive bills. The cost clearly isn't related to NIMBYs, that's already been taken care of.
Huh, thanks, I didn't know that. I switched to Signal ages ago but I was thinking to ditching it because I can't get anyone else on board and it kinda sucks.
It's more subtle than that. The big sites saw a modest drop, which in time they recovered from. Smaller sites saw a larger drop.
That was probably their intent. Google News tends to help smaller sites get traffic, and they felt it was traffic that was drawn away from the big players. In reality it was extra traffic as people consumed more news.
90% of news sites in Brazil opted out, and they claim it resulted in a negligible drop in traffic. People are still going to want news, they will just get it directly if they can't use an aggregation site.
It boils down to if headlines and snippets of news are substantial enough to merit copyright protection and possible licencing.
The news sites think they are, and their argument is not without merit. After all, if Google is making money from ads on a site that is nothing more than their headlines and snippets then it's difficult to argue that those headlines and snippets do not have substantial value. It also requires substantial resources to create them.
Google's argument is that such aggregation is a net benefit for the news sites so they should be happy about it. It's kinda weak because the law would expect such things to be accounted for in licencing negotiations, which might be as low as â0 if the value really is there.
They see people paying hundreds of dollars for cable TV which has a hell of a lot of advertising.
That reveals a lot about how most people think of these services. They hate ads, but they want the content and the deal has to be a lot shittier than just pay+ads to put them off.
Shows will continue to have more and more product placement. When you see a character on screen there will be a link that lets you buy their entire outfit, everything in their house and the car they rode in on.
Also you are going to need ad-blocking glasses when you go outside. And earplugs.
On Netflix you can rate stuff out of 5 stars. If something sucks just rate it 1 star and Netflix seems to be clever enough to understand that you watched it because you like that kind of thing, just not that particular show.
On Android you can use the open source Newpipe app for ad-free YouTube, or a hacked official YouTube app.
Unfortunately it's become impossible to block YouTube ads on smart TVs because they changed the way that the ads are served. They now come from the same domains as the actual content, and there are thousands of them, and even if you manage to block them it just causes the app to hang as it rotates through domains looking for one that works. A PiHole or similar is no longer effective.
If they offered a reasonable ad-free option I'd take it. But $12/month is ridiculous. Way more that Netflix, for a start, and even if I cared about their premium content I wouldn't pay that much for it.
It seems to be because you get ad-free music, but I don't want that.
Give me ad-free normal YouTube for $2/month and I'm in. Otherwise I'm sticking with ad blocking.
Hangouts has over a billion installs on Android. It's extremely popular, by far Google's most popular messaging app and the default for handling SMS on Android. A lot of people use it.
Hangouts video chat is the best free video chat system available, especially for more than two people. The way it handles conference calls is unparalleled. They keep talking about replacements for text chat, but it's the video chat I'm worried about.
The problem with this theory is that they are still supporting ad-blocking, just with a different and more limited API.
Currently each extension implements its own filtering engine. They propose to replace this with a fixed filtering engine in the browser itself, similar to the one in AdBlock Plus, and with a limit of 30,000 filter entries. So it will still be possible to block Google advertising, just not with the flexibility that many users want. It also breaks a bunch of other privacy related extensions that don't affect Google sites.
Also, Apple implemented the exact same thing in Safari years ago.
Problem is that Apple already did it a while back, so they would have to include Safari in their complaint and Google would just say they are adopting a proven, popular standard.
In fact Google appears to be trying to bring ad-blocking to Android. They are implementing a new API that allows for AdBlock style filtering but done by the browser itself, which means it would work on Android where Chrome doesn't support extensions.
The problem is that the new API is similar to the Apple one, which is quite limited. A 30,000 filter limit, not even enough for the popular EasyList filter, and it forces you to use the rule matching system that the browser implements rather than the more advanced one that extensions like uBlock Origin feature.
The other issue is that WebRequest (the current API) has become a kind of cross-browser standard with Firefox, and extension developers like not having to write different code for Chrome/Opera/Edge/etc and Firefox.
You make it sound like if you stood up for yourself they would just stop providing the stuff you want. Have you been reading Ayn Rand by any chance?
What do you imagine Europe is like? We can't buy stuff because the corporations decided a two year warranty was too much to ask and abandoned one of the biggest markets in the world?
You might want to take a leaf out of our book. In the US corporations shit on you and you can't do anything about it. We have laws to protect ourselves from your corporate masters.
So people simply stopped reading news because Google went away?
No, they went directly to the sites instead of going via Google News links. That's what they want. No free snippets generating ad views for Google, they want those impressions for themselves.
$200 would buy me five years of coverage on my policy. Consumer laws mean that design defects have to be covered by the retailer, no matter how long they take to come to light.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile tech companies can and eagerly will summarily and mercilessly financially ruin you and effectively banish you from human interaction if they simply don't like your opinions.
Are you referring to people getting booted of Twitter and Patreon?
Poor Sargon, now he's only got all his other sources of revenue and publishing platforms left. Maybe he shouldn't have given up his day job.
PiHole is better than nothing, but DNS based blocking is very limited these days compared to what an in-browser ad blocker can do.
For example, it can't do much about ads served from the same host as the content. It can't do pattern matching based on the URL. It can't selectively disable Javascript, e.g. to disable 3rd party scripts. It can't stop auto-play videos.
It doesn't work with YouTube either. Currently PiHole can't block YouTube ads, much to my annoyance.
Problem is you can't add your own certificates to many devices, e.g. smart TVs.
How come it's only $10 in the US, but in the UK it's $15.64?!
If Google was a little more fair I might be tempted. This is just a total rip-off.
How do you explain France then? They used to love nuclear, built loads of it, have new sites already approved.
Or what about the UK? Sites already approved, ready for someone to start building a reactor. The government even guaranteed well above market rate for the energy produced, plus all the usual subsidies.
Yet companies are pulling out and taxpayers are fed up with the massive bills. The cost clearly isn't related to NIMBYs, that's already been taken care of.
Huh, thanks, I didn't know that. I switched to Signal ages ago but I was thinking to ditching it because I can't get anyone else on board and it kinda sucks.
It's more subtle than that. The big sites saw a modest drop, which in time they recovered from. Smaller sites saw a larger drop.
That was probably their intent. Google News tends to help smaller sites get traffic, and they felt it was traffic that was drawn away from the big players. In reality it was extra traffic as people consumed more news.
90% of news sites in Brazil opted out, and they claim it resulted in a negligible drop in traffic. People are still going to want news, they will just get it directly if they can't use an aggregation site.
It boils down to if headlines and snippets of news are substantial enough to merit copyright protection and possible licencing.
The news sites think they are, and their argument is not without merit. After all, if Google is making money from ads on a site that is nothing more than their headlines and snippets then it's difficult to argue that those headlines and snippets do not have substantial value. It also requires substantial resources to create them.
Google's argument is that such aggregation is a net benefit for the news sites so they should be happy about it. It's kinda weak because the law would expect such things to be accounted for in licencing negotiations, which might be as low as â0 if the value really is there.
They see people paying hundreds of dollars for cable TV which has a hell of a lot of advertising.
That reveals a lot about how most people think of these services. They hate ads, but they want the content and the deal has to be a lot shittier than just pay+ads to put them off.
Shows will continue to have more and more product placement. When you see a character on screen there will be a link that lets you buy their entire outfit, everything in their house and the car they rode in on.
Also you are going to need ad-blocking glasses when you go outside. And earplugs.
On Netflix you can rate stuff out of 5 stars. If something sucks just rate it 1 star and Netflix seems to be clever enough to understand that you watched it because you like that kind of thing, just not that particular show.
On Android you can use the open source Newpipe app for ad-free YouTube, or a hacked official YouTube app.
Unfortunately it's become impossible to block YouTube ads on smart TVs because they changed the way that the ads are served. They now come from the same domains as the actual content, and there are thousands of them, and even if you manage to block them it just causes the app to hang as it rotates through domains looking for one that works. A PiHole or similar is no longer effective.
If they offered a reasonable ad-free option I'd take it. But $12/month is ridiculous. Way more that Netflix, for a start, and even if I cared about their premium content I wouldn't pay that much for it.
It seems to be because you get ad-free music, but I don't want that.
Give me ad-free normal YouTube for $2/month and I'm in. Otherwise I'm sticking with ad blocking.
Hangouts has over a billion installs on Android. It's extremely popular, by far Google's most popular messaging app and the default for handling SMS on Android. A lot of people use it.
Hangouts video chat is the best free video chat system available, especially for more than two people. The way it handles conference calls is unparalleled. They keep talking about replacements for text chat, but it's the video chat I'm worried about.
It would definitely make me switch. The slightly annoying Firefox UI isn't bad enough to live without uBlock Origin.
The problem with this theory is that they are still supporting ad-blocking, just with a different and more limited API.
Currently each extension implements its own filtering engine. They propose to replace this with a fixed filtering engine in the browser itself, similar to the one in AdBlock Plus, and with a limit of 30,000 filter entries. So it will still be possible to block Google advertising, just not with the flexibility that many users want. It also breaks a bunch of other privacy related extensions that don't affect Google sites.
Also, Apple implemented the exact same thing in Safari years ago.
Problem is that Apple already did it a while back, so they would have to include Safari in their complaint and Google would just say they are adopting a proven, popular standard.
In fact Google appears to be trying to bring ad-blocking to Android. They are implementing a new API that allows for AdBlock style filtering but done by the browser itself, which means it would work on Android where Chrome doesn't support extensions.
The problem is that the new API is similar to the Apple one, which is quite limited. A 30,000 filter limit, not even enough for the popular EasyList filter, and it forces you to use the rule matching system that the browser implements rather than the more advanced one that extensions like uBlock Origin feature.
The other issue is that WebRequest (the current API) has become a kind of cross-browser standard with Firefox, and extension developers like not having to write different code for Chrome/Opera/Edge/etc and Firefox.
https://smartasset.com/taxes/c...
Slide it up until your take-home is $9000.
You make it sound like if you stood up for yourself they would just stop providing the stuff you want. Have you been reading Ayn Rand by any chance?
What do you imagine Europe is like? We can't buy stuff because the corporations decided a two year warranty was too much to ask and abandoned one of the biggest markets in the world?
You might want to take a leaf out of our book. In the US corporations shit on you and you can't do anything about it. We have laws to protect ourselves from your corporate masters.
So people simply stopped reading news because Google went away?
No, they went directly to the sites instead of going via Google News links. That's what they want. No free snippets generating ad views for Google, they want those impressions for themselves.
$200 would buy me five years of coverage on my policy. Consumer laws mean that design defects have to be covered by the retailer, no matter how long they take to come to light.
That's how it works in Europe, and we haven't turned Communist yet.
Did Corbyn or Sarkeesian actually do that? I don't even know who the other two are.