The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”, said 12ft.io has been locked by its web host, and promised to take similar action against other paywall bypassing technologies.
Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That's like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills whenever I hear them say things like this! These things belong to me, I should be able to control them. My perception, my LITERAL GATEWAY FROM MY MIND TO REALITY is mine and I have a right to control what I see.
So this confirms that people have a negative reaction to ads, which every actual internet user knows in their bones already. This means they ALSO are not even doing their one job of persuading people to buy shit. Of course this won't lead to companies reducing investment for ad carrying or finding ways to make them more appealing, that costs money, instead they will use AI generators to produce WORSE ads and leverage their capital to have governments capitulate and force users to watch by banning blockers, probably VPNs too. Bill Hicks was the most correct about advertising, and remains undefeated.
gasp you mean to tell me you DON'T like 20 million videos playing over the top of the recipe that you're trying to read while trying not to burn dinner? unbelievable.
Looks like it hasn't been updated in a few years, but its open source so you could just fork the repo and add more. There are also quite a few forks already.
I tried to give my mom a pihole, she made me get rid of it because it broke the NY times and some rando mobile game she plays. Some people can't be helped.
Not even a linux guy, but I had a Pi from a decade ago that I never opened, decided to set it up and use it for something useful, friends suggested Pihole. pained myself for 2 days getting everything working (most of my trouble had to do with peripherals and IP addresses not the device itself) but after the grief, got it working and it was well worth it.
I even printed a sticker for it that said "where ads go to die"
I don't mind the old system of one or two ads on a page or a 10-second ad at the start of a YouTube video if they don't track their users. But these days it is growing out of proportions, we are almost at American television with the amount of ad breaks in a YouTube video, and it's absurd.
Before I used Firefox on Android, any search about a game I'm playing would result in a half page video ad in the top half of the screen, accompanied by the bottom half being a request to share your data with 1496 trusted data partners.
Now I use Firefox with add ons, and I get the results I requested. The modern web is basically unusable in it's raw form.
I am used to rejecting the cookies if they are not automatically blocked by Vivaldi or Firefox, but on my phone I use Safari, which still has a decent add blocker by default so most of the time it is just a cookie banner where I have to reject them. Or put the site in reader mode
There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.
And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you "don't even mind" it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people's brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.
You either have to directly pay for something or indirectly pay for it by selling your time or data.
Companies need to get their name out there and in the past you did that with a banner on your building, a space in the phone book and maybe your name on the side of the vans. Now we live in the digital world and we use digital advertisement. Heck a lot of companies sponsor certain event including charity events.
If we would totally remove advertisement, your local mom-and-pop shops will get more traffic, but in a lot of countries they would have basically a monopoly unless another competitor exists in the same region.
I don't really mind watching a bit of advertisement on something like a YouTube video or a banner ad on a site. Heck, buildings or vans with logos etc are fine as well in my opinion. My issue is more with the tracking and some forced advertisement (putting your logo on my clothing, vehicle etc).
Ok, it's obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.
But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don't get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn't serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.
And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can't have democracy without free press, and currently we don't have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.
Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.
Independent reviews are a good thing yes and they shouldn't be sponsored by a related company to keep their integrity, that doesn't mean they can't get paid from a different form of advertising. Heck you can even check on the integrity of professionals differently. In the accountancy, we are paid by the clients who we need to audit or need to advice etc. Using things like third party audits and a high accountability for professionals.
Ratings aren't that great especially on platforms like Amazon/AliExpress and other crap offering dropshipping platforms from corrupt countries.
Corporations generally don't do anything for free, but a lot of companies do, but that is generally to get their name out there or because the owner wants to decuct his private life from his company profit ... Even governments can't spend money or personal all they want, in the end it is money from the people. People here in NL are pissed that the government spend money on things like getting the NATO here for the last meeting or for the royal family. The public broadcasting is also something that is under heat and not just here.
In most countries you have some kind of government funded press heck I think most press aren't even corporations, but more companies except some of the larger once maybe.
Almost nobody is going to work for free for the majority of their life. It would be better if all of us did more work for society, but most people aren't in the position I am in that they just can take an extra week off to do that.
I agree consumerism is killing our planet, but there is a huge difference between the crap a companies like Google are doing and your local plummer who has advertisement on the local radio on their van and make a slightly SEO optimised website. Advertising is often the only way to get your company visable if you are competing with a well established company. Same reason as that there is nuance between companies and corporations.
Yes we need to promote repairing, reusing, recycling and the circular economy I agree, but somebody like iFixit wouldn't really thrive without their advertisement. We also need more financial transparency by the company we buy from and just skip on companies from China, the US and other obvious corrupt countries.
Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it's in their owner's interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.
Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become "min maxed" by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.
For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent "forth estate" or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public's interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.
If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.
TLDR: We don't *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.
Well I agree we need a better structure to keep people in check I agree with that. Things like social media and a companies like RTL having a massive stake in private television will help to destroy the planet and keep the difference between the lower class, the middle class and the rich.
But I disagree that we should just get rid of all advertisement completely. Again there is nothing wrong with banner ads, websites, vans with logo's and other low stakes form of advertisement.
If governments would start to pay YouTubers instead of YouTubers earning money from adverts and sponsors it would not only allow the government to control the narrative, but people will still abuse the system. Same way as that social security or subsidies are abused currently.
Consdering I work in an accounting firm I do see the amount of cost some companies have with advertisment, but most of them with a lot of costs do it to get more customers. Some of them need to do it to keep their profit rising or the same.
There is an issue with misleading adverts including misleading prices (excluding tax), there is an issue with hidden ads (like logo's). But personally I think social media (including Lemmy) is just the bane of our existence. Yes a lot of that is funded by adverts, but also by selling your data and the like. Personally I believe that they are brainwashing people more with that, than with a lot of the advertisement. Ow and the people who keep on defending companies like they are their family are also a big part, people saying they are going to get Domino's instead of pizza f.e.
The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you'll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.
Nothing new. Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
I disagree, ads today are way more malicious than they used to be, ads are the biggest vector for malware today, they are used to stalk users to an insane level and most ads are porn, gambling, drugs or fascist propaganda.
At least back in the day you would only get sketchy ads on sketchy websites.
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I use a degoogled CalyxOS phone so all those apps that load ads via Google services don't even work, or they work and the ads don't load haha. One caveat is that I can't use paid apps either though, I'm not against those.
But yeah system wide blocking is definitely the most thorough method!
Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much
Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks
Tangentially related but britta filters actually suck as far as I know; they're like the worst water filter for removing materials. Did a test myself with a fresh filter - 105 ppm tap to around 72 ppm vs 0 ppm for zero water pitchers and around 30ish for epic, it's been a bit so the numbers are rough for the britta and epic but I test my tap and ZW pitcher routinely.
Almost 70. Spent way too many years watching cable shit tv. I hate ads. I fucking hate ads with a nuclear passion. I have ad blockers, pirated shit and some services that do not show ads so far. If there are ads I find an alternative or read a book. Our teen son screams ad every time he sees one that sneaks through ad just to get me going.
i know this may go against the general attitude here but i gotta say this does make me a little sad when i think about it. and i use adblockers as well, but i never knew what the numbers were. when it's put into context like this it's hard not to be discouraged by the fact that this is still probably a minority of users. i mean what the hell, how are people still using the internet with ads turned on.
I'm starting to notice that a lot of people don't even notice what are ads or not. When i installed pihole and enabled it for all devices at home. My gf was complaining why suddenly a loy of pages wouldn't work anymore. Yeah, so she always clicked the ad/sponsored link everywhere and didn't have the slightest clue. And let's not start about social media and how basically 75% of it is (hidden) ads.
Personally I'm of the mentality if some company force feeds me their ads while i was not actively searching out their product type, I'll think 3 times before ever considering their products. Thankfully, i see basically no ads (online) anymore these days.
i guess it's true that technology has been getting too easy to use. the barrier to entry being too low means people aren't really ready to use them safely.
The use of the term "Dark traffic" here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don't use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.
I propose using the terms "clean traffic", for ad-blocked website traffic, and "dogshit traffic" for everything else.
depending on your household's browsing habits, it can be downright insane how much traffic goes through ones network (and the web at large), that is just nothing but dog shit.
I monitored my pihole at my place and my own traffic is usually no more than 15% garbage with about 750,000 domains blocked, but the second grandma or grandpa starts doomscrolling boomer things on their phones and ipads. I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them "what the fuck are you doing on your phone?"
also set up a Region exemption or whatever, blocking russian, chinese, and a whole bunch of other untrustworthy TLDs and im literally showing my grandmother the repeated attempts to communicate with something in fucking China in real time whilst she's playing some solitare game she downloaded.
both of them shield, coddle, and enable a 53 year old man who is an overt Nazi and purge/mass death obsessed eugenicist freak, (my uncle), a lot more needs to be said to them honestly.
Well, "dark traffic" sounds SCARY. You wouldn't want to do anything scary, would you? Like, use the computer you paid for to control the content you want to see? /s
Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them and decide what to allow inside my head. This is war.
"We paid for the right to show you this!"
You paid for the opportunity not the right, but you didn't pay me, motherfucker -- and my price is everything you have or fuck off and die.
Edit: You know what? This is how I really feel about ads.
This is a consent issue, and I will not allow advertisers inside me. They hire psychologists in order to exploit humans' most vulnerable mental blind spots. They don't just brainwash us. They mindfuck the entire human species, and they do not recognize consent. We need to treat advertising as the collective mindr*pe that it is, otherwise they will never stop exploiting us, and we will never be able to build a bright future for humanity and this world. They are manipulating the trajectory of an entire species with zero regard to any future well-being. The butterfly effects are inconceivable. Our minds are sacred. The advertising industry is committing a crime against humanity that we have failed to recognize as such, because money is all that matters today. They must be stopped before Big Tech perfects brain-computer interfaces.
“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”
And Scott Messer, founder of publishing adtech consultancy Messer Media, added: “Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent.
Are they trying to present it as if poor innocent users need to be protected from the vile ad blockers?
What's frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don't have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead "☝️🤓 actually you don't own it." Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that's my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
You have that right at least in Europe. The nuance is that website provinding content can choose to not serve it to you. Or something like that but maybe more complexe.
They got it the wrong way around. Visitors who use adblock are not "dark traffic", the bullshit scripts and tracking they use are dark. The adblock users are actually the only clean traffic. The adblockers aren't "brutal", the people without blockers are being brutalized.
"dark" as in "not visible". Adblock users can't be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. "Dark", in this instance, is not a derogatory term.
"Brutal" is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.
I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.
Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.
Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.
Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.
The main clencher that got me running a blocker were the few sites whose payload was 90% ad related and as long as the page was open it kept feeding me more ads until a gigabyte of RAM and 5% of my CPU were dedicated to something I wasn't even looking at.
I know surgeons who can’t start a zoom call. Being uneducated in a particular area is not stupidity. If you avoid dating someone over their lack of adtech knowledge, I would assume they are the one that dodged a bullet.
adtech is nothing new or exotic. We have been dealing with this shit for years. if they still do not have a very basic knowledge of it by now, that's not a great sign.
Unix and lawnmowers are nothing new or exotic either. I’m not stupid for not knowing how to repair a lawnmower, and I wouldn’t presume you’re stupid just because I can run circles around you at the command line.
I would, however, question your intelligence if you lack the ability to perceive the reasons behind different people knowing different things. It’s not that complicated.
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Oh I’m fully aware people can specialize their intelligence, focusing so much on some areas they neglect others and fall behind. However, that’s also a choice they made. That unbalanced tech tree was their own doing.
Okay I checked out Gemini. I love the vibes, but the amount of dead links just in the quick start guide makes it hard for me to even try to get into it
When a midair collision and a series of radar outages captured attention in the United States this year, some air traffic controllers thought it might finally lead to solutions for a nationwide staffing shortage and other longstanding problems at the country's air traffic facilities.
Lol after watching the Mehndi Jubilee debate I can't help but feel this is the next big bullshit push from Republicans masked as a lefty cause.
What I noticed with that debate is how many right wing people were 100% on board with getting rid of the constitution. They fucking hated it. Maybe it's a coincidence but I find it funny I'm now seeing posts like this. I suspect there will be more coming and the conversation will be pushing towards actually ripping up the constitution (except for the 2nd)
We all know that groups like Cambridge analytical, heritage foundation, TPUSA and others are relentless with their online social media presence and actively work to shape pop culture with their views. Including making the left either look insane or distracting them enough too give their right wing views more access to the general public.
You'd be crazy to not consider that the fringes are not targets. You should absolutely be critical of the fringes. Given that this and a few other posts here on Lemmy were posts that I originally saw on right wing spaces, I do believe it is suspect.
Advertisers build profiles on demographics to better manipulate them. You better believe these groups have the left figured out. You can't directly prove it but you sute as fuck can see the results with how much ground and engagement the left have lost in the past 10 years. They've went from having a very strong presence to people believing they're putting cat litter in classrooms. You can believe it's due to idiots on the right. But it's as much the fault of idiots on the left.
Just calling everyone to your left a conservative without actually engaging with the ideas presented isn't a very effective strategy for accomplishing whatever it is you want to.
Nobody has presented anything other than calling me a bot. The .ml instance is corrupted by something that stinks. I think most other instances rightly call it out for this. It's clear just from the tone and rhetoric when the instance is a .ml just like when dealing with a trump supporter.
This is clearly a leftist meme advocating people read Marx, and you're here acting like communists are right-wingers. It's bad-faith, and is what is getting you called out.
Yea? Give it time. This will be the next hill. Use the fringe left and far right to burn the constitution so trump can get whatever he wants even another term.
If the fringe left is really "fringe," then even if we wanted to do whatever it is your conspiracy theory thinks leftists want to do, then we don't have the power or influence to do so. The left wants revolution, the right wants to maintain the status quo. The constitution already isn't stopping Trump from doing what he wants, it isn't a magic document.
Why don't you decide to productively engage with leftists, rather than just insult us with conspiracy theories?
Because I'm done with leftist bullshit. I can't watch them continuing to shit the bed and not realizing they're the problem.
You're right they don't have power or influence. But that isn't the fault of the right. It's the choices and actions of everyone on the left. The left need to wake up and see how potentially they direction was influenced by powerful people who herded them towards actions and ideas that were toxic pills
Leftists have heard your conspiracy theories, the ones you've failed to materialize any evidence for, and rejected it. Right-wingers such as yourself would do well by reading leftist theory and engaging with the ideas that have existed for hundreds of years, growing and expanding over time, rather than just assuming this is a new thing where the far-right is telling people to read Marx. You're incoherent and insulting towards those to your left without base.
No. I want the left to be united and successful. But I'm done with how oblivious so many of you are to how ineffective and useless you all are. I'm tired of watching so many opportunities go by year after year while you all waste it by trying to be the next PETA. I'm blaming the left for the reason the right have succeeded. The left have made themselves so aggressive and abrasive to the general public that it's alienated then further and further from pop culture. I've watched the left to form a dominant position to the weakest and it was from our own actions. I'm done fucking sugar coating it. The left is cooked until they wake up
Probably shouldn't accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being a shill then. Especially if you're going to cry and moan when you get it back at you in return.
The left have made themselves so aggressive and abrasive
You mean like coming in and accusing everyone of being secret right wingers?
I’ve watched the left to form a dominant position to the weakest
What? Are you hundred years old? No you fucking didn't.
The left dominated media and culture as a result of that. They had Hollywood and literature. Science wasn't some taboo subject. The left dominated the Internet. They were early adopters of technology and creators of many things. Right wing people really were getting phased out. It wasn't acceptable to publicly be a racist or even sexist or want to end social programs or destroy democracy.
Then the left turned. They started succeeding these areas and allowing the right to control the space. I watched every comment section get filled with Lefty's telling others to not roll with pigs and just let the right spew their bullshit. I watched Lefty's take massive momentum and channel it into a public street so that momentum could get their shit kicked in by police. I watched people take over cities and end up arguing if they should click or clap what consensus really involved rather than getting shit done. I watched as climate conscious people told others to deflate tires of random people going to work and then wonder why their cause is alienated from the general public. I've watched the left turn into hostile, toxic, uninformed, ineffective luddites.
The right took over and used basic common sense Media and public relations concepts to become more and more palatable while the left lost it all. And they still don't realize this. Forming a mob and blocking traffic or yelling at people at cafes or burning small business is not a good look especially when the goal is not clear. We all know there's agent provocateurs amongst these protests. Has anyone thought about countering or exposing them before organizing this stuff? No right, they just show up and go to town then act surprised every time. It's nuts.
Remember that feeling when Democrats showed up with those cardboard signs. When you saw that were you like "aww they're trying their best maybe next time guys" or were you like "I'm fucking done with these people"
Because that's where I am with much of the left. Until the left wakes up, we're getting what we deserve for becoming complacent and ineffective.
The left dominated media and culture as a result of that.
Do you even know what “the left” is? It’s not liberals; it’s not Democrats; it’s socialists, who want to abolish private ownership of the means of production. And we have never dominated the media, because the media are owned by the bourgeoisie. We won’t dominate the media until after a socialist revolution, when the proletariat own the media.
They’re both pro-capitalist/anti-socialist parties.
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Most Liberals are left. Democrats are not. Socialist are further left. Socialist, especially .ml try to say they're the only left. Not arguing about this beyond this. It's just facts.
Quite a few changes were made to the manifesto, especially after the Paris Commune, but it's also more of a propaganda leaflet to advertise the party platform, not a work of legal code nor an extensive exposition on Marxism. There's also been numerous updates on Marxism over the years, most notably but not exclusively from Lenin, and socialist states have gone through numerous revisions in their legal code over the years as well.
I don’t know a single IRL American who would say this.
Some would have nasty things to say about the Manifesto, sure, but it’s not something they’d bring up, and not because it’s old. And trust me… The Bible or Adam Smith is the constitution as far as some are concerned. There is either no issue with old documents, or cynicism/worry over the ones we have.
Again. Lemmy at large, and the loudest parts of the internet, do not represent how Americans see stuff. The political influencers in particular are just in an alternate reality.
That's a weird strawman. I've never heard anyone use that argument to justify dismissing the Communist Manifesto. Like ever. Nothing close to it in fact.
I've been told several times to stop "wasting time" with Marxism-Leninism because the foundational writing is old, and that instead we need "new theory," as though we can't carry what's useful from the old while adapting to new conditions (which is core to Marxism-Leninism anyways).
The US and its European NATO allies are working on new arrangements to keep the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine going for as long as possible. Here's why the outcome will be the same no matter how much additional support is delivered.
Ooof the cope is hard here. I imagine it has to be for Russia to throw away the lives of its soldiers at such a high rate without causing internal uproar even in an authoritarian society.
Denial isn't just a river in Egypt, the empire supported Nazi regime of Ukraine is going to lose hard. Well they already lost months ago, but now they will not even be able to continue "weekend at bernieing" it 😁😁
I see the whip has cracked at the Russian bot farms after Trump decided to go on a bender again. Relax, he's just trying to distract from the Epstein stuff again. He'll be back buddying up in a week or so then you can go back to throwing soldiers in the grinder to try and reform the Soviet Union.
Sorry for the spoiler, yes, most of the plutocrats did manage to take their money with them. No, raping a bunch more countries won't stop your people from starving.
Should we ban BBC and NPR as well? How about any newspaper that has been shown to be infiltrated or complicit with state propaganda operations like the NYT?
State media in practice just means they disclose who owns them, instead of hiding their connections to government agencies through many layers of fake independent organizations.
Most local news stations are owned by media conglomerates, most newspapers too. If anyone ‘owns’ them in any other sense, it’s through financially motivated means.
Learn about the first whole genome from Ancient Egypt, which has shed light on the life and ancestry of a potter who lived during a period of great change.
Did you know broadcom uses excess capacity in its semiconductor fabs to make the raspberry pi stuff? They sell it to the """ nonprofit """ Rπ foundation at cost to manufacture. This is not some charitable arrangement at all. Lower end hardware has expired patents and is capable of scaling into the computing space and growing from there. The path of least resistance created by the Rπ ecosystem suppresses grassroots adoption of any newcomers in the space. The unprofitable business structure for broadcom prevents scalable business investment by any competitors in low level compute. The actual Rπ chip is for TV tuners in particular. It is proprietary with only a partial datasheet for documentation. Three quarters of the actual die in the π is completely unused junk from the TV tuner stuff. In reality, if Rockchip could complete in a market without a monopoly and only compete on meritocratic value, broadcom would go out of business. The actual Rπ is barely good enough to suppress far newer and better spec hardware. All American businesses are anticompetitive crap of similar scope. The companies do not innovate and try to milk the lowest end ancient crap at a price point that makes large scale investments impossible, suppressing progress and innovation. Nvidia absolutely does this too. Buying a current GPU as a consumer is a joke of no value. They have produced the same tiers of VRAM for 3 generations. The 3090 series had firmware options all the way up to 32GB that only required the right chips and a configuration resistor to enable. Nvidia refused to let OEMs create models with more VRAM. If Nvidia was an honest business, a 5090 would likely be either 96 or 128 GB of VRAM and a notable value and progress. They do not do this because then their monopoly would be regulated. They are catfishing everyone, both consumers and competitors alike. Cutting them off from a market instantly makes domestic scalable competition possible.
Either this halfwit red team is using spurious sophistry to criminally benefit from those that stand to gain massive market share, or they are so chronically incompetent we should tax the air they breathe to recoup losses suffered by the planet.
Why would you ever want to route your request like this through a third party especially an ad company? To get the favicon of a site you just request www.example.com/favicon.ico.
AFAIK there's also a special file name Safari uses for bigger PNG icons. That Google thing probably just facilitates all this machinery, but I agree — I wouldn't rely on Google for such things myself.
Self-Serve Invite Link Feature — Fixes #348
This feature enables admins to generate an invite link for contractors
Admin Flow
Generate Invite Link
Navigate to the People page. Click on the Invite...
Just got mine set up this weekend, really works a treat! Utterly painless. Even put the client on the Roku I apparently don't own, hope the pricks somehow notice lol
You'd be surprised how many people nowadays just leave random shows or movies on in the background while they're on their phones.
Even my Dad does it, I ask what he's watching on Netflix, etc and half the time he has to check even tho he was the one who clicked on it in the first place...
If I put on something with video I want to absorb it. There's more video content in existence than I could ever watch, I always want to watch something worth watching. If it's something I've seen before them I'm rewatching because it was entertaining enough that I want to watch it again. Even if I try to ignore it, it's good enough that it'll rope me in.
Put something on and not watch it? Is it boring enough that it's not pulling you in? It's just background noise? Then why isn't it a podcast or something?
If you're ignoring it then why turn it on? Do you turn on lights in rooms you're not in? It feels... like something just above brainrot. Like it's not rotting you, but either it's not engaging or it's just background noise (with an unused visual component)
There are at least three VHS copies on ebay right now that I found pretty easily. Radarr found it on rutracker for me as well (though it looks like it might be dubbed).
But it needs fixing. It's split in 2 almost 1 hour parts, the part 2 ends around minute 38, then loops around back to start after credits. The image is mirrored (flipped), but the 2 parts seem continuous (nothing missing).
But I haven't watched all of it.
I don't think I can directly link pirated stuff here, so the titles are "Operation Sandman 2000 TVRip avi Pt 01" and "Operation Sandman 2000 TVRip avi Pt 02" uploaded in 2018.
Wow, you are my absolute hero. Thank you so much for this, and for the perfect explanation. I can’t believe I didn’t find this earlier and I’ve been trying for more than a decade! Some safe copies live with me now. I really can’t thank you enough!
For me it was Not4Sale - TV Sheriff and the Trailbuddies. I actually bought the DVD from OtherCinema, maybe the only movie I’ve ever bought. I don’t think you can even buy it anymore.
I never use a vpn with torrents. Private trackers in my experience have been enough to be fine. The only times in 20 years of torrenting tons of shit I’ve gotten isp letters were once I downloaded a Pokémon rom from a pubic tracker, which was stupid, and once I had a roommate that downloaded some shitty movie from a public tracker
Yup, same. Your options are usually either “pay for fake ratio bonuses” or “seed dead torrents for six months in order to get enough time credit to convert into ratio.” If you’re trying to chase the freeleech tags, then you’ll never hit decent ratios because now you’re seeding a torrent that has 1000 other seeds and only 5 leeches.
And if you have to pay for fake ratio to get started, just fucking pay for Usenet and skip the hassle instead.
Cross-seed is a big part of being able to sustain on mediocre upload. Download a torrent on one site but get credit on 7 different sites.
Alternatively many sites offer infinite download if you have a certain total size of torrents available. (Sometimes together with a account age requirement too). So get a permanently online torrent client (mini pc, seedbox, vps, etc) and you're set on those sites.
Go buy a garage sale DVD of something that is semi-popular and doesn't already exist on the private tracker, rip it, and post the torrent yourself.
'S what I did back when Underground Gamer still existed; I had a version of Mechwarrior 2 that didn't already have a torrent, so I spent some time making a nice summary and uploaded it myself. Worked a treat; I had enough ratio to get me through my rough early weeks and never looked back. Until the site shut down, of course.
IPtorrents is the best. You should try to keep a 1:1, but you just have to seed for 2 weeks, and you get points for 15 torrents to use as upload credit, even if you don’t upload a single byte. I’ve never had to think about my ratio.
At this point, I can say I've literally waited decades for movies to show up on streaming. I remember Office Space and They Live not being anywhere for years. Those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.
yep. I no longer pay for prime, but in the last few months of having it, I just torrented it anyways. whoever designed that app for the Apple TV should be forced to use it for 2 years straight
Yes, that's the point being made. One could already paying for a Prime membership, yet still needs to pay more money for shows that should already be included in said Prime membership.
Except they aren’t because rights don’t work like that. Not all rights holders want to enable streaming following those guidelines, but might wanted a fixed price per view
Technically its illegal in New Zealand (after the great John Key and The Hobbit saga) but the ISPs don't give a shit. Never used a VPN and only got one letter just after the law took effect. Nothing since. So many people here do it it's unenforceable.
I think it's also technically illegal in Australia but because the rights holders can only come after you for the retail cost of whatever was pirated it's functionally legal. the MPAA would rather sue a kid in the US for hundreds of millions than one in Aus for $14.95.
Even here in the heart of Europe, Denmark, there's not many that really care enough unless you run your own tracker. Back in the day with CD's and DVD's it was a lot worse though, because it's obviously easier to catch someone when there's physical media involved.
But I've been having much better luck finding Spanish content on streaming sites, instead of torrent sites, and then downloading. See Guides for downloading streams.
Download The Stream Detector for Firefox. This addon provides an easy way to keep track of manifests and subtitles used by various streaming protocols. Also allows for detecting custom file types and downloading media files.
The usual suspects for modern stuff is easy to find in Germany. What becomes difficult is getting older or obscure stuff (like the Pokémon show) in a decent enough quality.
Recently ordered the first season dvd box to trial the ripping process as most of the stuff I found is either incomplete (missing entries) or not up to quality (mixing audio segments between english/german or leaving out the intro/outro)
firstly, in the comic, none of the streaming service has the movie, so a site telling him this doesn't change that point.
second, even if one streaming service has that movie, it might not be the one you are subscribed to. so instead of "just watch"ing, you have to make a new subscription on that service and pay for all their content although you just want one movie
thirdly, often it's not a matter of whether or not someone wants to pay, but how much someone is willing to pay. This depends on many factors, which boil down to how much they want to watch the movie and how much they can afford. imo there are two acceptable ways to charge for entertainment: paying once for that particular piece and you get to enjoy it as often/long as you want forever, or you pay a monthly fee and get access to everything for as long as you pay. unfortunately, thanks to the fragmentation of streaming services, option b has become quite expensive and not a lot of people are not willing to spend that much, but they would be willing for a lower price.
firstly, in the comic, none of the streaming service has the movie
This is based on what?
even if one streaming service has that movie, it might not be the one you are subscribed to. so instead of "just watch"ing, you have to make a new subscription on that service and pay for all their content although you just want one movie
Which is a different issue entirely than it not being available at all.
it's not a matter of whether or not someone wants to pay, but how much someone is willing to pay
Same thing.
unfortunately, thanks to the fragmentation of streaming services, option b has become quite expensive
The services have not become fragmented. There was never one streaming service that had all content available. They've just added more options.
I don't want to pay (I don't think anyone wants to pay). All of what you said (well more said I said) was never mentioned by me. Really where did I (or anyone here really) spout anything about totally going to pay or sign up for anything?
And your logic of ease goes as much against your position as for it, as you can literally go to a site and type in the name of the show and that's it (in this case download/stream the show for free). Hell your logic falls even farther apart when you factor in the next step of finding the listed legal service, signing up (if you can in your area), putting in your payment and then typing the show into the service (and in amazon's case maybe paying again).
The issue with piracy being a service issue has not changed, I was more then happy to pay netflix $10 for the ease of the service back in the day. But now? I will pay an amount just to stick it to netflix, fuck them.
Once again, just say that. There's no need to fabricate some nonsense justification for it.
All of what you said (well more said I said) was never mentioned by me
You replied to me. Not the other way around. I was replying to OP. If your reply was not in reference to the OP then I don't understand why you replied to me.
Really where did I (or anyone here really) spout anything about totally going to pay or sign up for anything?
There are only handful of words in the OP and you couldn't read them all? What exactly do you think "Cant say I didn't try" means? Try to what? Go on, take a minute.
your logic of ease goes as much against your position as for it
Only when you intentionally misrepresent my logic. My logic was that it was easy to find where to stream shows, not to stream them. Because that is the logic OP is using for not paying.
I was more then happy to pay netflix $10 for the ease of the service back in the day
The "ease of service" hasn't changed. What happened to just not wanting to pay? Your logic is all over the place.
Once again, just say that. There’s no need to fabricate some nonsense justification for it.
Where Once again did we fabricate or justify anything?
You replied to me. Not the other way around. I was replying to OP. If your reply was not in reference to the OP then I don’t understand why you replied to me.
If you look above you will see the thing you replied to was my comment "Why go to that effort just to pay?"
There are only handful of words in the OP and you couldn’t read them all? What exactly do you think “Cant say I didn’t try” means? Try to what? Go on, take a minute.
Really? this has what to do with my statement? Did you not mean to reply to me?
And besides, If you look for a show/movie/thinger and its not available in your area does that not mean you did try? (hell of a lot more effort then I would ever go to).
Only when you intentionally misrepresent my logic. My logic was that it was easy to find where to stream shows, not to stream them. Because that is the logic OP is using for not paying.
Ah yes, knowing where I can pay (or in the case of most non us places, can not pay) is the exact same as watching the thing.
The “ease of service” hasn’t changed. What happened to just not wanting to pay? Your logic is all over the place.
Yes it has, netflix is not the same nor does it have even 1/5th the shows/movies avalible (worse so outside of the us) and costs much more ($23.99 per month now). Hell the interface alone makes me want to shoot my TV (full volume previews anyone?). There is no logic issue with not liking the changes, the only logic issue here would be thinking that people will endlessly put up with enshitification.
Where Once again did we fabricate or justify anything?
I've already explained this, multiple times at this point. I'm not repeating myself again.
Really? this has what to do with my statement? Did you not mean to reply to me?
Listen, you're obviously trying to rope me into some sort of strawman argument. I'm not interested. When you want to get back to talking about the comic in the OP, I'm ready.
I’ve already explained this, multiple times at this point. I’m not repeating myself again.
No, you have not. You keep deflecting. The comic does not fabricate or need to justify anything, it is just whats happening.
Listen, you’re obviously trying to rope me into some sort of strawman argument. I’m not interested. When you want to get back to talking about the comic in the OP, I’m ready.
Really, at this point you think I am trying to rope you into a strawman argument? After placing words and motives in my mouth? You, who comes to a piracy community trying to push some sort of pro corporate agenda and is somehow shocked that you are not taken seriously?
You keep deflecting. The comic does not fabricate or need to justify anything, it is just whats happening.
I'm not deflecting, you are. I keep telling you and you come back with "I didn't say that", but I never said you did. It's in the OP. Once again, I replied to the OP. Answer the question about what "can't say I didn't try" means if not that the character fully-intended to pay. Any further deflections will be considered bad faith and disregarded.
I keep telling you, "can't say I didn't try" holds true if the media is not available. There is no justification here, no fabricated anything. Its amazing that anyone would go so far when the high seas are easy and available, but for you its some sort of high treason.
I think you might want to look up what a threat is, because that's not what that was.
I keep telling you, "can't say I didn't try" holds true if the media is not available.
You never said that. And it doesn't hold true if you don't try, which is what you suggested ("Why go to that effort just to pay?"), regardless of whether the media is available or not.
There is no justification here, no fabricated anything
I don't understand how "Can't say I didn't try" is interpreted as anything other than justification.
but for you its some sort of high treason.
I said nothing of the sort. All I said was to stop bullshitting and own it.
JustWatch is still useful if you want to act like you watched it legitimately, e.g., if a coworker asks where they can watch it. Even if your coworker also pirates, they might not have an account on your private tracker, Usenet, etc..
I may be wrong, as I haven’t actually torrented anything substantial since Demonoid was still a thing, but it all feels less accessible than it used to be.
Even with good internet if you're watching on the wrong device (desktop/media center PC) your stream will get bitrate locked to a 720p equivalent or whatever because of DRM bullshit.
My internet is fine win any other streaming service. Prime streaming is the worst one out of all the major streaming services. Which is fucking weird considering Netflix runs on AWS.
What do you suggest? I'm just going by whats worked for me so far. I was thinking of trying some other services but if it works for me I'm kinda ambivalent.
I was thinking about trying them. I'm trying to create the best experience for my parents so anything that makes it quicker or easier for them to access content the better.
So, I don't use Kodi and use stremio instead, but with stremio, the main addon is torrentio. There are others, but idr them off the top of my head and that's the go-to.
As far as premiumizeme vs debrid, it was basically a drop-in replacement. Just had to update the "provider" and the api key in the config.
With Radarr, Sonarr, and Plex, I get a better TV and movie service than anything I could pay for. I can afford to pay, and I would, but they won't offer anything reasonable. I ditched Netflix years ago when they removed the rating system to promote their low quality schlock. They kept removing content. Content would auto-play. Discovery broke as they kept trying to make me watch things I didn't want to watch. If they make their products worse, and keep charging me more every year, they shouldn't be surprised when I leave.
Plex is still MUCH easier to share with my friends and family. I’ll be sticking with Plex until the UX on Jellyfin is comparable. Also Plexamp is the best music app I have ever used. It’s unbelievably good. Also Plex has more features like the ability to download and select new subtitles on the fly, and consistent skip intro functionality across all apps on all devices.
I know, for some features Plex is better, and for a very few features Plex will always be better because it's centralized. Jellyfin, being self-hosted, doesn't have an easy way to share and combine libraries from multiple users, and no single "login" page like Plex. This may be annoying for users, but we know all the problems that centralization comes with.
But this makes me think about the fediverse. What if Jellyfin servers could federate with each other? I wonder if anybody is working on such a project.
Edit: okay, apparently I found this feature request on the Jellyfin features tracker.
Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.
On UX, Plex is more full-featured I’m sure, but the performance is so much better on Jellyfin that it quickly overrode any feature concerns I may have had.
And being FOSS, there’s some nice diversity in client apps. I use Finamp for music and really like it. There’s Plappa for audio books too. And for basic viewing there are multiple choices. I think I use Streamyfin because it supports downloads.
Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.
Thanks for your suggestion. I spent some time investigating this to see how feasible it would be. I have my own domain and static IP, so setup on my end would be pretty straight forward. Users would need to enter my domain:port on first login, but I could walk them through that. I'm going to give it a shot and see how practical it is. If the performance is better, as you say, then it probably trumps those features you mention. With the exception of subtitles for me and the family. We use subs most of the time and need on-demand selection. Automated subs are very hit or miss.
It's also disappointing to hear the Jellyfin app doesn't support downloads but I guess if Streamyfin is available on all the platforms then I could just use that.
I tried Finamp and the UI is very not good on iOS. It also lacks a lot of features compared to Plexamp.
Strongly agreed, from the owner of a dust covered lifetime Plex Pass.
Even if we eliminate all the other reasons you might not want to use Plex or might want to use FOSS, just the performance and UI responsiveness alone makes it worth the switch.
And I do have some non-techy family that watches remotely on smart TVs and uses phone apps.
Jellyfin is literally all I watch not to mention the BEST alternative to all the centralized AD riddled garbage (Now in forced foreign languages) 'Tubi, Pluto, Prime Video'! Crazy cause being a "Prime" member isn't enough nowadays cause they want you to DOUBLE Pay on top of a Membership Subscription to remove ads which is sooo counterintuitive?!
Straight out of that (Black Mirror) episode called (Common People) Season 7 Episode 1... Predictive Programming at it's finest.
Same. I signed up for Netflix when they came to Canadas in 2010. Immediately had to start using proxies/vpn to access US Netflix since Canada's selection was broiled ass.
By 2013 there was news of Netflix talking of blocking non-US users from accessing US Netlix. Immediately cancelled, spun up my Plex server. 30TB later and I got 18 friends off of all their streaming services too lol
The raison d'etre of video streaming, ending cable... only to reproduce cable decades later.
Segmentation, exclusives... somehow the music industry didn't go down that path. The game industry is mostly doing the same, except mostly Valve and indies.
I wonder that pattern is part of enshitification, the inexorable transformation of a delivery service to rather than facilitate the distribution of content, make it actually harder to share it while keeping reasonable (always arguable) money to all parties involved, first and foremost the actual creators.
Pretty much. Even if I didn't prefer owning the actual files and managing my own media server, streaming services are just dogshit these days anyway. Overpriced, libraries are all ass, no one service will ever have everything you want, constantly removing shit, they're awful.
A jellyfin setup backed by an *arr stack may be a lot more work than a Netflix subscription but it's legitimately better in every single way otherwise.
Me exactly. I keep a lot of the streaming services because I don't want to host a bunch of 4k stuff myself, though I do often get the 1080p stuff for when I fly on planes or haven't yet re upped my subscription for the show I want to watch. But many shows aren't on any of the sub services in my country, so those are straight to the seedbox.
Just Watch is a pretty great service for this, especially when recommending a show or movie to others. Other services integrate with it too (like Trakt, which is a nice one stop shop for discovery, scrobbling, and list management).
Try Freetube with VPN set to an uncommon location like Bulgaria or Argentina etc. This works for most videos, but still some won't load. I use invidious for those vidoes. This way, you won't overload the invidious instances.
every time they patch freetube, yt breaks it a day or two later. can't watch in yt directly because i have to prove I'm not a robot, and apparently i am since i can't pass the tests (and tried almost all ivpn locations). only one invidious instance works, but not in freetube.
Totally agree with the FreeTube recommendation. Libredirect will even open links in FreeTube. I use IVPN and use non obscure servers but every once in a while I do have to try a different one.
Try using different countries. E.g. I sometimes had luck by using Brazil, Chile or other ones. I've recently hadn't had much issues when viewing through Grayjay (on Android). But also not from FreeTube (on Ubuntu/Desktop)
This Invidious instance still works. Don't push it too hard, though: it's all we've got.
Also, if you log in to YouTube in Chromium or something (assuming you're on desktop) and then use yt-dlp with the --cookies-from-browser chromium argument, it should work. This is also possible on Android via Termux and iOS via iSH if you copy ~/.config/chromium to the app.
Cycle through VPN locations until you get a winner if you get a block. It's annoying, but the purpose of a VPN is to let you look like you're anywhere. So find a good spot to watch YT and then just settle in.
Good to know. I was using FreeTube on a Linux machine I have set up to do most of my Youtube watching, but I had to disable VPN. I got tired of trying different countries and just turned off VPN. I'll try Swedish servers...
TBH I just use youtube.com in my browser (Floorp/Firefox) with uBlock Origin. With SmartTube on my TV.
The alternative front ends or apps don't seem to support loading my watch history, playlists, or subscriptions, and they don't sync between my devices even if I manually import stuff. Making usability an absolute nightmare.
The problem is how do I get my history and everything on desktop and android TV then, does it sync with other apps or my google account or something like that?
I just sign in, it shows it all. I have to go back through and delete videos my kid watched cause it fucked up my feed. His account is age restricted, it won't let him sign in on the tablet. I need to look into it more, but the history definitely syncs from smarttube to revanced and YouTube in Firefox on my desktop
That makes sense for your use case. My use case is that I don't want my YT watching habits being scooped up if I can help it. At one point I might not have cared too much about things like YT, but under the current administration I have a lot more reservations about that.
My first hurdle is understanding that i need to add a boot sequence and navigate to the EFI file in my mounted pen drive.
second hurdle is understanding i need to disable secure boot so that the dell bios doesnt think something is wrong and always run the bios repair program.
third is understanding that i need to disable Intel rapid storage for the full install (luckily linux mint tells us this)
and honestly the hardest thing was installing fastfetch cuz theres a lot of outdated information out there on how to install it on Mint.
the process took about 4 hours, i consider it very lucky that i was able to do it so fast.
I run mint on 4 gb ram without issues. Sure, I'm careful to not open too many apps or too many tabs, but they all work fine. Only 4k video editing is undoable on such a machine. I also have a 4 gb swap partition, but I'm careful to lay off programs when I see it get hit.
My mom uses xfce on a 2 gb laptop. For her is enough, because she only knows how to open a single tab on a browser (mostly fb or yt).
I use quite a bit of old and underpowered kit. But I actually use it. The oldest laptop I use regularly is a 2009 MacBook Pro running Chimera Linux. It is only a Core 2 Duo but it has 8 GB of RAM. It runs all modern browsers and office suites. I can code on it. I can use Docker. I can do dev ops in the cloud. I can call into LLMs. Slow but capable. But I could not do much of this realistically with 4 GB (even slow).
One thing I am not doing is watching videos in 4K. The resolution is 1440x900 so it does not quite display even 1080p natively (so 1080p or even 720p for me—which is totally fine). I suspect most people who really only have 4 GB of RAM are in a similar situation.
if you go in not knowing what to do, it can seem 'difficult'. but it's mostly like on any other oem prebuilt:
optional: prep the target disk (backups, wipe or clear part table, etc), reset bios to defaults.
if necessary: switch from raid or rst to ahci sata mode, default boot mode to efi, disable secure boot. note that some distributions support secure boot but your method of creating an installer might not--you may be able to re-enable if you want after install.
note that hp systems have a hoop to jump through (a confirmation prompt to disable) after disabling secure boot on the next startup. do not use esc key to trigger boot menu, use f9 for boot menu, f10 for bios entry.. as esc will cancel the confirmation code prompt and automatically re-enable secure boot.
insert or plug-in installer, hit the magic key upon power on (f12 for dell, f9 for hp) to bring up boot menu and select installer media, boot and run installer.
I’m glad you said this, I was thinking “I just plug in the USB stick and install Linux”
In fact, the hardest but for me is remembering the special key to press upon boot up so it goes into boot selection mode and I can just select my USB stick…
Some laptops don't really let you boot from external install media so easily nowadays.
I helped a buddy get Linux Mint on their "old" laptop to try it out. But it turned out you needed some manufacturer provided code to unlock booting from anything but the main harddrive within the bios.
We contacted support but never heard back. We did find a work around when they decided to swap the existing HDD for an SSD, they used a USB to sata cable to install Mint on the SSD from their desktop then installed the SSD into their laptop in place of the original drive so it booted straight into that.
Welcome to Linux. Glad to see you're not letting the hurdles get in your way and are working through solutions. There's more to come.
You say "5 year old laptop" as if that's ancient... 10th gen Intel 😄. I don't even look at laptops newer than 5 years. Don't need much more for internet tasks and office work.
Ive got an HP Zbook g6 coming my way soon I'm excited about, and its way overkill for what I'm gonna use it for; i just need a bigger laptop because i have giant meat hooks for hands and I actually use the numpad
Tl;dr, you can get a lot of laptop at decent prices looking at "older" hardware
I don't completely agree. One party tries to fuck everything up in order to buy up everything on the cheap, while the other party is paid to keep everything exactly as it is, so their owners don't risk losing anything.
They're not the same, but the leadership in both parties are traitors to the people and deserve death.
You have to understand the backing behind these parties and how that informs how they operate. They both are largely funded by capitalists, often the same capitalists. So there are a core set of interests which they both protect. There are issues that don't fall within that space where they can be different, some issues that affect different donors differently, and they have different strategies for managing to achieve those shared interests, but when push comes to shove they are still going to do what will be good for the capitalists and the power of the state to represent those interests.
For a narrow example from this meme: Most US presidents have presided over truly awful crimes, some actually illegal, some merely morally criminal, or perhaps criminal on the world stage but not for the US. A just society based on rule of law, as the US claims to be, would prosecute these people for their crimes, whether that be for war crimes, abuses of power, corruption, etc. Ideally while they are in power in order to stop them, but at the very least you'd think that after they leave power there ought to be more political will to go after them, if not for legal or moral reasons, at least for cynical political ones.
But they basically never do this? Why not? Because those crimes help uphold the interests of capitalists and/or the state. They are mostly part of the set of things that the parties agree on. The next president would like to be able to continue to get away with those or similar crimes, so holding the previous president accountable for their actions risks setting a precedent that would come back to bite them.
There were criminal proceedings against Trump, but they were for things that are small in the grand scheme of things. Obama didn't go after Bush for lying to get us to go into an illegal war, or for using torture, or violating civil liberties, etc. because he was doing the same things. Trump didn't go after Obama for any of this because... he kept doing the same things. Going back to the most famous example of this, Nixon literally did what Trump did in terms of trying to subvert the "democratic process" and Ford pardoned him.
Basically if you're president, you can get away with whatever the hell you want as long as it's for rich people and/or the next guy wants to be able to do the same thing.
There is no change inside the DNC. It is controlled by neo-liberals who will squash any and all progressive ideals...else they would be out there fighting for them. Neo-liberals are about keeping everything the same for their corporate donors, talk about change, do nothing. This is a dead-end, zombie party.
Not really. Look how they fail to stop corruption and actively participate in it. They also do their best to tank any third party left of center. They tried to primary AOC and it really looks like they’re going to split the vote for NYC mayor bc Mamdani doesn’t toe the line.
One party is disgustingly heinous but that doesn’t mean the other is good. Do I prefer one if I only have two choices? Yes. But they should both go away and take their anti-working class bs with them.
Your party is guilty of genocide. Stop playing lucy football and pointing fingers at others. Murderers don't get pardoned because other people committed murder.
The parties are not the same. One is an openly fascist party and the other is full of meek center-right neoliberals trying to keep the status quo for their wealthy donors. However neither is trying to "fix the damage" or "make it good again", except perhaps for the top 0.001%. Most working-class people are shafted either way. If the republicans get their way, most non-whites will be deported on enslaved in prisons, women will be enslaved at home, and the remaining working-class white men will struggle to sustain themselves and their (non-working) wives and families under the christofascist dictatorship of the capital. If the democrats somehow claw back from that, there will be less abject racism and sexism but the working class will still struggle to survive in an increasingly monopolized dictatorship of the capital.
Ask yourself this question: which democrat policies from the last decade directly benefit the working class? I can name maybe 3 very compromised policies that are about 60 years behind most of the world.
To paraphrase an old meme, republicans want 100 rich white men to rule over the entire world with an iron fist; democrats want 30 of those people to be LGBTQ+ women of color.
Are democrats better? Sure, a bit better. But it's not like just electing them will save you.
Yeah, but only if it's no inconvenience to you and other westerners. You certainly don't care about them enough to remember that the Democrats are all in on their wholesale extermination.
Yup, another reminder that you literally don't consider foreigners to be human.
And how about you explain how - even if we accepted it as true - "the other choice was worse for everyone" justifies you just completely not even bothering to remember the Democrats committing genocide, or you being more concerned with the comfort of domestic Americans than with your country committing genocide?
How the fuck are you going to justify this one without straight up admitting you only care about white lives (which is the answer, of course, but I thought you'd at least try to hide your monstrous bigotry)
how about you explain how - even if we accepted it as true - “the other choice was worse for everyone” justifies you just completely not even bothering to remember the Democrats committing genocide, or you being more concerned with the comfort of domestic Americans than with your country committing genocide?
how about you explain how - even if we accepted it as true - “the other choice was worse for everyone” justifies you just completely not even bothering to remember the Democrats committing genocide, or you being more concerned with the comfort of domestic Americans than with your country committing genocide?
Republicans snarl and growl, so you're not shocked when they bite you. Democrats walk up wagging their tail and acting friendly before they bite you. In the end, you still end up bitten.
The rapid rise in global rocket launches could slow the recovery of the vital ozone layer, says Sandro Vattioni. The problem is being underestimated—yet it could be mitigated by forward-looking, coordinated action.
Space launches disrupt ozone layer, contribute to air pollution and global warming, waste a lot of resources, and produce tons upon tons of space debris.
We should be careful with this industry and technology, and use it when it makes sense. But hey, why not launch billionaires and their cars into space for leisure and launch hundreds of satellites under different brandings all promising the best Internet ever or whatnot?
Also, massive launches such as Starlink should be approved by international bodies, not national organizations. Cool, US has greenlit the launch, but now it's a global headache.
Yes, but in today's geopolitical landscape, some countries would tie the allowance of such launches to weird requests.
Israel denies the launch of European rockets, until support for Palestine is outlawed as "antisemitism", and pledge to donate weapons to IDF for free.
Russia doesn't allow rocket launches to other countries as long as said countries not outlaw "Russophobia", which includes "recognition of Ukraine, the Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian people, as separate from Russia in any way of form".
China demands the returning of its political refugees, or they will not allow rocket launches.
yeah that's what we want a companion that tells us everything we want to hear with its only goal to keep us engaged to the platform. i just picture it now your having a conversation with your AI lover and it starts selling you "this new Mococoa drink? All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners." just like in the Truman show. but it will be worse because it won't do it as transparent as that. it will slowly influence you to the wishes of its corporate masters.
you also have a situation where if you dont pay your monthly bill your lover dies. talk about a revenue stream. they will use all the details they learn about you to set the price to as high as you can afford without breakings you.
Yeah, I am not opposed to this because it's unhealthy (that's the user's choice, like smoking). I'm opposed because this is going to become abusive very quickly in the ways you describe. Not to mention the climate impact.
🔍 La fine degli hashtag su Mastodon e l'evoluzione verso i gruppi lemmy
Con l’ultima versione si #Mastodon, cliccando su un hashtag da browser non si accede più alla pagina dedicata: il sistema ora propone solo un filtro che limita ai post dell’utente che lo ha utilizzato oppure come secona scelta alla pagina completa con tutti gli interventi del #fediverso.
Perché?
Troppe persone abusavano e spammano hashtag per ottenere visibilità ovunque: una vera enshittification di mastodon che sfruttavano il sistema senza algoritmi.
L’impossibilità di filtrare per lingua rende molti hashtag un caos ingestibile ma si è scelta di poterl filtrare solo per utente
Le piccole istanze, inoltre, hanno pagine hashtag ridotte o inesistenti perché non riescono a feerarsi con tutti e crearsi uno stream significativo. Il risultato? Gli #hashtag è un posto dove ogni contenuto finisce perso nel flusso.
💡 Analisi dei rischi e conseguenze
Perdita di visibilità tematica Senza una pagina hashtag funzionante, post interessanti rischiano di rimanere sepolti dal rumore i fondo.
Depotenziamento delle istanze minori Senza hashtag usabili, piccole community faticano a costruire audience e rilevanza.
Semplificazione dell’abuso individuale Con il filtro utente, ogni post diventa un’occasione per l'autopromozione individuale, e l’hashtag smette di essere utile.
🛠️ Soluzione: gruppi tematici sul fediverso
Il futuro non sono gli hashtag, ma i gruppi tematici:
#Lemmy dimostra che le community organizzate in gruppi (tematici) permettono:
contenuti pertinenti
moderazione attiva
crescita organizzata e senza spam
Diggita.com, pioniere dello social bookmarking in Italia, ha migrato su Lemmy e ha creato circa 20 gruppi tematici, ciascuno con centinaia di seguaci federati: mastodon.uno/@diggita/11367942…
ogni post raggiunge davvero chi è interessato
la moderazione mantiene la qualità
si evita la saturazione e l’enshittification degli hashtag
🚀 Vantaggi di lemmy e Diggita
Beneficio
Descrizione
🎯 Targeting reale
Ogni messaggio arriva a utenti realmente interessati
🔐 Controllo e qualità
Moderatori possono prevenire spam e abusi
🌐 Federazione attiva
I gruppi su Diggita/Lemmy raggiungono istanze diverse in modo diretto
📈 Crescita sostenibile
Le community crescono per interesse e non per rumorosità
✅ Cosa puoi fare ora
Abbandona l’uso compulsivo di hashtag su Mastodon 🛑 Usa ancora hashtag per il tagging, ma non contare sulla scoperta tramite browser.
Entra nei gruppi tematici su Diggita/Lemmy
Trovi i gruppi locali italiani su Diggita: quelli che ti interessa seguire:
Aggiungi i tuoi post condivisi su Diggita anche in quei gruppi: visibilità e moderazione garantite.
Fai attivismo guidato, non rumore Condividere in comunità tematizzate crea conversazioni strutturate, migliora le discussioni e aumenta l’impatto.
🌟 In sintesi
L'utilità degli hashtag sta fineno su mastodon, sono ormai inutili e le piccole istanze sono tagliate fuori. La soluzione? Spostare i contenuti nei gruppi tematici federati, come quelli nati su Diggita/Lemmy, dove c’è moderazione e vero coinvolgimento. È così che si vince la battaglia contro chi spamma troppo: con comunità vere, visibilità reale e qualità.
È possibile aggiungere Diggita in Openvibe? Mi sembra che comunque tra tutti questi fediversi ci sia un po' troppa frammentazione, alla fine non si capisce più nulla.
Ok. Ma se ci clicco sopra si apre una finestra di Chrome, dalla quale posso scegliere se seguire quel gruppo tematico. Ma se lo voglio fare da Openvibe è possibile?
L'unico problema che vedo su questa cosa è che l'hashtag se lo può inventare un creativo al momento, mentre il gruppo tematico va richiesto, organizzato, moderato eccetera. Sbaglio?
Esatto, l’hashtag può essere creato da chiunque — e questo, di per sé, non è un male. Il problema è che può facilmente degenerare o essere usato in modo improprio da un momento all’altro.
Al contrario, un gruppo è moderato, e quindi (almeno in teoria) offre maggiore affidabilità e sicurezza, evitando derive indesiderate o contenuti fuori tema.
Sì. Ma c'è un ma. Io sono interessata a ciò che capita nella mia città, a quello che si dice a proposito della scuola, alle novità in ambito IT, a ciò di cui si parla in merito a diritti LGBT, all'alimentazione biologica, cambiamento climatico, ai diritti dell'infanzia, alle discussioni in merito ai bambini/ragazzi BES, e ogni tanto anche a finanza ed economia politica. Non posso iscrivermi a mille gruppi tematici e visitarli una volta ogni sei mesi. Ma cliccare un hashtag..
Con questo, non voglio assolutamente intendere che il gruppo tematico sia una brutta cosa eh. Solo, riflettevo su ciò che ci si lascia dietro, insomma.
a livello.di singola istanza si hanno sicuramente dei benefici, ma se qualcuno necessita di maggiore "spazio" gli hashtag d'istanza sono limitanti. Penso per esempio a #music per un musicista che vuole.farsi conoscere e deve raggiungere più pubblico possibile. Discorso simile per i gruppi che comunque trovo molto funzionali. Imho sono un po' le opzioni di ricerca che andrebbero affinate con la possibilità di query più precise, indirizzate e combinate, fermo restando che il caos resta
Yeah, no profits means no business! Down with businesses! We don’t need them for paychecks or healthcare! 🤣
Edit: I feel like this comment went over some heads. Socialism is support by higher taxes on businesses. If business doesn’t make money they Will close the business and social programs will not be supported. So basically socialism cannot exist without the business.
Capitalism is not the only mode of production in existence. We can collectivize production and run it in a planned manner. We can't do that all at once, but in socialism we can gradually wrest capital from the capitalists and collectively run and plan the economy.
Edit: responding to your edit, socialism is not "welfare in capitalist systems." Your comment didn't go over anyone's heads, you just don't know what socialism and capitalism are.
Neither system is perfect. Pure capitalism can lead to inequality and under-provided public services, while pure socialism can stifle innovation and create inefficiency. The best-performing countries today typically combine elements of both.
So as anything in life too much of one thing can be bad. It would be nice for everyone to receive free healthcare and higher education in US. I often watch various global news networks. It is odd to see US, Canada, UK all struggling with same issues economically.
UK has 28 million people on assistance out of work. It also has 28 million people employed. So half the UK is paying to support the other half. That is wild to think about.
There's no such thing as "pure capitalism" or "pure socialism." Every socialist system has elements of private property, and every capitalist system has elements of public property. A system is capitalist if the large firms and key industries are private, and socialist if the large firms and key industries are public. This is all nonsense on your part, socialist systems have been at the peak of innovation throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
I'm not sure why you brought up a bunch of capitalist countries failing because of issues systemic to capitalism at the end, it didn't really help your point. Moreover, there is no "combining the best of both," the system is determined by what is principle, meaning you can't be both. Furthermore, I think you're alluding to the Nordic Countries, but those are capitalist, deteriorating, and depend on imperialism like the rest of the global north.
I think you should do a bit more reading on what socialism and communism even are to begin with before trying to have discussions about them, same with capitalism.
Scandinavian Social Democratic countries, like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, have much higher standards of living, better quality universal healthcare, and more economic, political, and social freedoms than Marxist-Leninist states have ever had. I'll need a citation for these countries deteriorating. You saying that these countries are still imperialist doesn't negate how much better they are to live in. @Cowbee @salty_chief #socialism #communism #capitalism #socialdemocracy
Unfortunately, you don't understand what you're talking about. These Social Democracies (really capitalistic states with strong worker protections) still benefit from imperialism on the Global South.
The contradictions inherent to capitalism still exist within these states as well. There are proletarians and there are bourgeoisie. The cost of living within these states is rapidly increasing, and reactionary sentiment is booming because people from the (1)
(2) countries that these states, which you almost call utopian, have been destabilizing, are immigrating to these states en masse.
"[Scandinavian states] have much higher standards of living, better quality universal healthcare, and more economic, political, and social freedoms than Marxist-Leninist states have ever had."
What a ridiculous statement. China and the USSR went from backwater peasant countries to world superpowers in less than a century.
(3) Their citizens pay very little for housing, healthcare, food, transportation, and education, all without the colonization and terrorism that these Scandinavian states do.
When the proletariat is the ruling class of the state, the state will work within the proletariat's self interest, and crush bourgeois oppression.
Bourgeois democracies like these Scandinavian states only work in the interest of the bourgeoisie, and placate the proletariat.
(4) All states you have mentioned permit lobbying (bribing of parliamentary representatives), and they bail out large corporations in times of crisis. This is bourgeois rule. People like you are a consequence of CIA propaganda and illiteracy.
Nordic states aren't utopian or without fault. They provide a better standard of living than Marxist-Leninist states, which do provide free healthcare and housing, but the best of these things are reserved for people with higher social status like party members and their families. There's much better quality housing and healthcare for people in Nordic states than Marxist-Leninist states had/have and distributed more equally. @graythehue @Cowbee @salty_chief #socialism #communism #capitalism
Nordic citizens also have far more social, economic, and political freedoms than their ML counterparts. Life for workers and people in general is clearly better in theee Nordic countries. [END]@graythehue @Cowbee @salty_chief #socialism #communism #capitalism
What a baseless qualitative measurement. Please continue to be a sycophant for these states, while their cadre terrorize people in the Global South, hitlerite.
The qualities I'm measuring are things like individual freedoms and the quality of healthcare and housing, but apparently, these means of measuring are "baseless" to you, so why don't you tell me what means of measuring you used to conclude that ML states are better than Nordic states
Don't waste your time arguing with these sorts of people. They refuse to do preliminary research and parrot the latest AmeriKKKan talking points. They have their heads up their asses while socialist countries like China and Vietnam rapidly advance their standard of living. Genuinely sad how blind these people are.
I don't deny that China and Vietnam's standards of living are improving, but what are their standards of living currently, what criteria are you using when measuring standards of living, and are their standards of living better than the best capitalism has produced? @graythehue @Cowbee @salty_chief
It could be a case of intentional word play but the wording of the article makes it seem like it's more than just usenet. Specifically the line: "inciting serious sexual abuse of children via a messenger service and producing child pornography content"
It doesn't read as though it's simply CSAM traffic through his network and if that were the case, I'd imagine the other 2 would be looking at similar charges, but news media notoriously bad a properly representing tech so that's what gives me caution.
Heise is a German specifically tech news outlet, so they are generally quite good with facts about tech.
These arrests are targeted at an illegal IPTV provider which restreams channels from licensed TV providers (Sky, DAZN, RTL+). These illegal IPTV services usually also provide on-demand content like Netflix shows, movies etc.
The CSAM incident is definitely an additional charge for a single individual and not part of the prior investigation about an illegal IPTV service which provides customers with otherwise legal TV.
True, but only one of the suspects is alleged to be involved with CSAM. Also, it seems like that wasn't the original lead the police were pursuing, given that the charges were added post-arrest. This seems very much like an anti-piracy operation that just happened to catch a pedophile as well.
Reserve judgements until there is some real evidence. Think of the children narratives open a lot of doors for intrusive actions and advance a pirate=criminal narrative.
If this is true, they need to prove it in court... It seems like they are just throwing out pedo shit to distract from idiotic waste of resources to protect some US parasites "property"
What a sloppy way to write this article. Header text to indicate CSAM then just naming people liberating netflix. Does german netflix stream CSAM? Or is this news outlet just kind of implying these people are sex criminals for fun?
On a different note, would love to hear from/about the 15 out of 18 people who were searched in Feb and apparently got away. Either being targeted for harassment by authorities, huge false positive fuckups, or have amazing opsec.
The arrest warrant for a 25-year-old from Hamburg has since been extended because he is now suspected of inciting serious sexual abuse of children via a messenger service and producing child pornography content, among other things.
A project in Co Mayo is generating renewable electricity through the flying of kites, which its operator has described as a potential "game changer" in the wind energy sector.
It is being conducted on a bogland just outside Bangor Erris, located on a landscape one might expect in a Star Wars.
The site, which is the first designated airborne wind energy test site in the world is being operated by Kitepower, a zero emissions energy solutions spin-off from Delft University in the Netherlands.
Kitepower's system employs a yo-yo effect, where a kite, measuring 60sq/m is flown at altitudes of up to 425m attached to a rope that is wound around a drum - which itself is connected to a ground-based generator.
The kites can generate 2.5 to 4 tonnes of force on the tether.
Researchers in the U.S. and Germany have tested a global earthquake detection and alert system that makes use of a device many people already own, including in less developed countries—Android smartphones. According to their study, published today in the journal Science, the Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA) system’s efficacy rivaled traditional seismic networks in its ability to detect seismic activity and deliver alerts.
“The global adoption of smartphone technology places sophisticated sensing and alerting capabilities in people’s hands, in both the wealthy and less-wealthy portions of the planet,” the researchers, including Richard Allen from the University of California in Berkeley’s Seismological Laboratory, wrote in the study. “Although the accelerometers in these phones are less sensitive than the permanent instrumentation used in traditional seismic networks, they can still detect the ground motions and building response in hazardous earthquakes.”
⚠️ Warning: This morning, some accounts are using the platform for #phishing attempts. ‼️ DO NOT click on "verification" links ‼️ DO NOT follow prompts to switch instances ‼️ Report any suspicious accounts immediately
📢 Share this alert quickly—let's help Fediverse stay safe!
Pour celles et ceux qui ne seraient pas partis loin en vacances, le MastApéro a lieu comme toujours le second vendredi du mois, toujours au même endroit, toujours avec les mêmes personnes sympathiques !
Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad, a key humanitarian aid hub, suffers hellish night and morning of Russian strikes — Russia is weaponizing deportation — Ukraine proposes peace talks with Russia next week — [vlog/video blog] 24 hours inside Pokrovsk as Russia c
Medical Supplies for Ukraine’s Hospitals. Partnering for global health equity.
Russia’s war against Ukraine
Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk and his team celebrate defeating Britain’s Daniel Dubois in their undisputed world heavyweight boxing title bout at Wembley Stadium in London on July 19, 2025. (Adrian Dennis / AFP via Getty Images)
Fire, flight diversions reported near Moscow as Ukraine launches droneattackon Russia’s capital. A fire broke out in Moscow Oblast overnight on July 20 as Ukraine reportedly launched a drone attack targeting the Russian capital, local Telegram channels reported.
Ukrainian hackerswipedatabases at Russia’s Gazprom in major cyberattack, intelligence source says. The cyberattack allegedly destroyed large volumes of data and installed custom software designed to further damage the company’s information systems.
Ukraineproposespeace talks with Russia next week, Zelensky says. President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on July 19 that Ukraine has proposed new peace talks with Russia for next week, with National Security Council Secretary Rustem Umerov extending the offer and signaling readiness for high-level discussions.
Ukraine considerseasingtravel ban for men ages 18-24, parliament speaker says. Ukrainian lawmakers are considering whether to allow men ages 18 to 24 to travel abroad, a move that would ease current wartime restrictions, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk said on July 19.
Ukraine moves toreclaimUkrainian names for foreign places in official use. A new initiative will examine how the Ukrainian language describes foreign locations while at home, with the aim of standardizing and promoting a Ukrainian spelling, said Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.
Russia aims tolaunch2,000 drones towards Ukraine at once, German general says. The staggering figure described by German Major General Christian Freuding, who heads the Ukraine task force at the German Defense Ministry, comes as Russia continues to expand its drone production.
Human cost of Russia’s war
1killed, 6 injured in Russian drone attack on Odesa. At least one person was killed and three were injured as a fire engulfed a residential building amid a Russian drone attack on Odesa overnight on July 19.
Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad suffers ‘hellishnight and morning’ of Russian strikes. Pavlohrad, a city in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast that has become a key humanitarian aid hub for those evacuating the front lines, suffered one of its most severe attacks of the war, Governor Serhii Lysak said on July 19.
24 hours inside Pokrovsk as Russia closes in on key Ukrainian city
International response
‘Russia isweaponizingdeportation’ — Ukraine evacuates 43 deportees from Russia-Georgia border. Instead of being brought to the Ukrainian border, 56 Ukrainian deportees were taken to a basement facility in Georgia where they were being held in a transit zone, aid group Volunteers Tbilisi reported.
In other news
Ukrainian boxer UsykdefeatsDubois, retains world heavyweight championship. Oleksandr Usyk retained his heavyweight title and preserved his unbeaten record with a commanding fifth-round knockout of Daniel Dubois on July 19 at Wembley Stadium.
Zelenskyunveilsnew composition of Ukraine’s Security Council. President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 19 announced the updated composition of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, following the country’s latest government reshuffle. While most members remain the same, one notable change is the appointment of Rustem Umerov as the council’s new secretary.
Ukraine’s defense, digital ministriescoordinateto scale drone solutions. Newly appointed Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal met with Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on July 19 to discuss scaling up battlefield technologies, with a focus on interceptor drones and anti-Shahed systems.
The Kyiv Independent delivers urgent, independent journalism from the ground, from breaking news to investigations into war crimes. Your support helps us keep telling the truth. Become a member today.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) rejected the EU's unilateral move, reaffirming that India does not recognise sanctions imposed outside the United Nations framework.
the sanctions target Nayara Energy’s 20-million-tonne-per-year refinery in Gujarat’s Vadinar, where Russian energy firm Rosneft holds a 49.13 per cent stake.
India condemned the quotunilateral sanctionsquot by the European Union targeting a oil refinery in Gujarat and urged the EU to avoid quotdouble standardsquot in energy trade
I mean India does enjoy the energy sovereignty by trading with Russia, the same way EU exercises their authority to sanction them because of it. Seems fair.
Musing out loud some casaul philosophical reflection on fedi and tech ethics, related to this toot:
In our FOSS movement and the social impact movements that favor the fediverse we value a set of principles we think are essential to improve all the things that need fixing, in order to move to a better world.
Fediverse as no other other online space can be considered a "humane technology field lab". People care about the features of their app, and the impact it has on fedizens that use it. This focus on the human side, ethics, and externalities is highly laudible and much needed to become the norm everywhere. The only future of mankind is the one where we find equilibrium of our exploitation with what our planet can provide. Holistic sustainability.
But do we take all the externalities into account fairly? Or are we fooling ourselves that app-centric humane tech focus is enough. We aren't able to collaborate at scale in our grassroots environment, as Big Industry™ under hypercapitalism is able to do. Yet we do work in public and give all our innovation away, also to the bad actors. Is that responsible? Are we really creating "humane technology" then?
Are we able to control what we create, as we introduce it into society in real-time?
Will our work remains commons based, for the people by the people? Or won't we be able to avoid corporate capture of our tech followed by 'business as usual'? Maybe the way we work together now is the best we can muster. But who is pondering if that is the case, and looking into better ways to work ethical and responsible in large-scale grassroots commons that keep sustainable technology ecosystems afloat?
FOSS: "Nice! I bridged all the social web protocols"
FOSS: "And I made service development dead easy, intuitive and productive"
Fedizen: "This is so wonderful. What a cozy place we have"
Meta: "We agree! We embraced the technology and today announce free fediverse access for anyone. Our datacenters are primed and ready for a billion more fedizens. That's not all! With Service Mart you're in full control!"
Due to a bug in the #Discourse #ActivityPub plugin the image is included twice and with the wrong alt-text (the one that auto-generated on image upload).
The #ALT4you alt-text is the exact text of my toot at this location:
FOSS: "Nice! I bridged all the social web protocols"
FOSS: "And I made service development dead easy, intuitive and productive"
Fedizen: "This is so wonderful. What a cozy place we have"
Meta: "We agree! We embraced the technology and today announce free fediverse access for anyone. Our datacenters are primed and ready for a billion more fedizens. That's not all! With Service Mart you're in full control!"
Dopo una pausa di quasi quattro anni (il suo ultimo lavoro "Red Letter Year" è del 2008) dovuti al matrimonio e alla maternità, la quarantunenne Ani DiFranco ritorna con un nuovo disco, il diciannovesimo: ¿Which Side Are You On?.. Leggi e ascolta...
Dopo una pausa di quasi quattro anni (il suo ultimo lavoro “Red Letter Year” è del 2008) dovuti al matrimonio e alla maternità, la quarantunenne Ani DiFranco ritorna con un nuovo disco, il diciannovesimo: ¿Which Side Are You On? Sono presenti alla realizzazione di questo album Pete Seeger, i Neville Brothers, il compagno e produttore del disco Mike Napolitano e molti altri musicisti di New Orleans, città di residenza della DiFranco. Il “marchio” che ha sempre contraddistinto la folksinger americana è l'impegno politico, la libertà e l'autonomia di pensiero e di azione, proprio per questo non ha mai accettato compromessi con le major, pagando di persona l'esclusione dalle radio e dai riflettori mass-mediatici... artesuono.blogspot.com/2014/07…
Embark on an epic journey through PlayStation history! See "every PlayStation ever," from the iconic PS1, PS2, and PS3 to the powerful PS4 and PS5. Discover rare variants like the Net Yaroze and PSX, and explore unique accessories. We compare console performance, discuss generational leaps, and recommend the best models for your collection, whether you're a hardcore collector or a casual gamer. See classic games like Parappa the Rapper, God of War, and Motorstorm played on period-accurate displays. Uncover the evolution of controllers, from Dualshock to Dual Sense, and learn which PlayStation is right for YOU!
„Vor 28 Jahren ist ein Raumschiff mit Außerirdischen über Johannesburg gestrandet. Seitdem werden die Aliens in einem slumartigen Flüchtlingslager isoliert – dem District 9.“ – Ein südafrikanischer Science-Fiction-Film, der es in sich hat, uns mal wieder wirklich nachdenklich werden zu lassen. (ZDF, Wh)
"Vor 28 Jahren ist ein Raumschiff mit Außerirdischen über Johannesburg gestrandet. Seitdem werden die Aliens in einem slumartigen Flüchtlingslager isoliert - dem District 9.
Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems knowingly or unknowingly rely on a key from Microsoft that is set to expire in September. After that point, Microsoft will no longer use that key to sign the shim first-stage UEFI bootloader that is used by Linux distributions to boot the kernel with Secure Boot. But the replacement key, which has been available since 2023, may not be installed on many systems; worse yet, it may require the hardware vendor to issue an update for the system firmware, which may or may not happen. It seems that the vast majority of systems will not be lost in the shuffle, but it may require extra work from distributors and users.
Small companies which use old laptops with Windows might be bitten hard by this because they can become locked out of their hardware with no way to update it, or even make a backup!
And by the way, Intel motherboards which are running your Linux system may contain a copy of Minix - yes, the Minix from the historic Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds debate - which runs below the OS in the system management mode engine and is controlled by the vendor, which can e.g. update firmware via the network. SMM is normally not visible by the user but it can cause problems e.g. for real-time applications because it has higher privileges than the kernel and can interrupt all of the kernel at any time.
For a home desktop that's never left unattended with anyone untrustworthy, I don't see that Secure Boot is worth the effort in setting up.
Given that you have to re-sign the boot image every time you upgrade, any malware already running with root privileges on the machine could easily slip itself into the new signed image.
The best security is not running untrusted software to begin with.
Can you explain the detailed reason why you think that? Voicing opinions is nice of course but explaining the thought process and logic is, I think, almost always more interesting to other people.
To start with, what do you think is the "normal users" threath model? And, for example, if one happens to be a member of any of the various minorities that authoritarian governments of every color happen to single out and persecute in your countries case, what would you want to protect from? Or if you are, say, a lawyer, and have a professional obligation to protect sensitive data from theft?
Actually, I would love for you to explain to me how Secure Boot alone would protect someone from any of that. If you want to protect files, you need full disk encryption, not Secure Boot.
Or are you seriously expecting a government-level threat actor to bother to:
Sneak into your home while you're away or asleep;
Overwrite your bootloader or UEFI with a rootkitted image of the same version so it's impossible to tell;
Wait for you to boot your computer and enter your disk encryption password, then:
Use the rootkit to read the decrypted files off your disk?
That's the great thing about fascist governments, is they have no need to be that sneaky. They can just change the laws to make whatever you're doing illegal and jail you until you agree to give up your documents, or simply hit you with a $5 wrench until you tell them the password.
You need both FDE and Secure Boot, ideally with FDE using a TPM with PIN and PCR 7+15=0. FDE without SB can be trivially boot-kitted and obviously SB without FDE is mostly pointless. Maybe for a server/desktop behind locked doors you don't worry as much, but for a laptop you absolutely should. Also it's really easy in Arch to resign the UKI with sbctl via a pacman hook whenever the kernel is updated so there's no good reason not to use it.
If you're relying on a LUKS password only, it can be brute-forced. To protect against that you need a decently long password which is annoying to type every boot. A short TPM PIN sealed by SB protecting LUKS is both more convent and more secure.
Finally, if an attacker or malware gets root, FDE isn't protecting you either.
Even having no pre-boot PIN with SB on is nice, then you only need your user space login where you could even use fingerprint reader if you like. For servers they can already start serving without anyone having to intervene manually (which is nice after power outage, for example).
So yeah, SB, TPM and FDE are a very nice bundle that heavily secures against the most relevant attack vectors.
Yep that's how my desktops and servers are set up. I only recently started adding the TPM PIN to my laptops for a bit of extra protection from cold boot / evil maid attacks.
Secure Boot is a really contrived and, frankly, bad defense against an attack that is extremely difficult to execute in reality and does not happen often (are there any examples of a bootloader replacement against a home desktop in the wild?).
An actually good solution would be firmware support for LUKS-style FDE (with a password-encrypted key which then encrypts the rest of the disk), so that your bootloader is encrypted with the rest of your system and impossible to substitute without erasing the rest of the disk, until you enter the password. This way there's no need for key enrolment into firmware, and firmware manufacturers don't have to just trust MS. (the firmware of course needs to be protected too, by signing it with the manufacturer's key; if you flash something unsigned, a warning pops up Android-style before every boot).
If you are hiding something from the state (like your sexual orientation or something), your energy is much better spent encrypting your communications online and keeping your identities anonymous. If you are already suspicious enough to try and pull a bootloader replacement attack on you, any authoritarian state which would do that in the first place will just throw you in jail and fabricate evidence as needed.
The main advantage of SB is TPM. At runtime the key isn't available and unlocking your disk works automatically as long as nothing has been tampered with (which is then also a nice canary: if you suddenly have to enter your password during boot, something's off).
There's nothing technically preventing using TPM without secure boot. This is a limitation imposed by OEMs. In fact I have a separate hardware encryption key that I encrypt my (laptop) drive with, and even I don't (can't) know the private key. I only know the pin that is needed to unlock it. If motherboard OEMs implemented something like this on the motherboard, with the ability to decrypt the bootloader partition before booting into it, this would solve everything.
If secure boot is off, and you run malware on your pc, it can change the boot process to escalate privileges.
This probably requires root or admin in the first place, but if they can install a malware loader, they can establish persistence so that even if you remove the os-level components, they'll be reinstalled on reboot.
Yeah, but the malware can just wait for a system upgrade where you sign a new boot image and slip itself in then.
It works for Windows because theoretically only Microsoft would have the signing key and it's not just sitting on disk somewhere. But then you're just trusting Microsoft, and also subject to vendor lock-in.
If secure boot is off, and you run malware on your pc, it can change the boot process to escalate privileges.
This is technically correct, but on a desktop system, malware executing in user space is normally already game over. It can exfiltrate and send your passwords or ssh private keys, change browser certificates or browser software, add user systemd sessions or crontab entries and can generally e.g. do everything a banking trojan would like to do.
As commenters on the LWN thread said, I doubt that many firmwares even bother to check anyway. My motherboard happens to have had a bug where you can corrupt the RTC and end up in 2031 if you overclock it wrong. I didn't use secure boot then though so I don't know if it would have still booted Windows. But I imagine it would.
That said, I've always just enrolled my own keys. I know some other distros that make you enroll their keys as well like Bazzite. At least that way you don't depend on Microsoft's keys and shim or anything, clean proper secure boot straight into UKI.
As commenters on the LWN thread said, I doubt that many firmwares even bother to check anyway. My motherboard happens to have had a bug where you can corrupt the RTC and end up in 2031 if you overclock it wrong.
Seems it compares the expiration date of the UEFI key with the signature date of the bootloader / OS keys. (See the comments on the LWN article, some are far more knowledgeable than I am.) So, no, it does not require a working on-board clock to lock you out if you are not extremely careful and fully understand each part.
That does not help if the master key in the key chain is expired.
Sure you can disable Secure Boot. But a password-protected BIOS is secured by TPM again. High levels of security always carry a risk of locking oneself out.
I don't think you understand what "enrolling your own keys" means in the context of Secure Boot.
The key affected here is specifically for the Linux shim signed by Microsoft. It is used by GRUB and some distros to work with Secure Boot.
Enrolling your own key means you add a new certificate to the key store. This is completely separate from the one provided by Microsoft and controlled only by you. The common recommendation is to remove all built-in keys and only add your own, to make this system as secure as possible.
OK, now you are talking about something a bit different - registering own keys in the UEFI system, which is significantly more involved than updating the BIOS, and also requires firmware support, and the firmware also needs to match the motherboard. And the whole issue with ACPI support for Linux shows clearly that having reams of specufications is not enough, the implementation of the BIOS needs to match that specification which whether thsz's the case you will only learn after you bought the hardware.
That said, I've always just enrolled my own keys. I know some other distros that make you enroll their keys as well like Bazzite. At least that way you don't depend on Microsoft's keys and shim or anything, clean proper secure boot straight into UKI.
I didn't start talking about it, this was many comments above
At least that way you don't depend on Microsoft's keys and shim or anything,
The whole point of the article is that you do depend on their expired root key. You have produced a lot of text without even understanding the key issue. At that point I am wondering whether all that text was produced by an LLM?
I don't know that you've understood the issue either, and you're being kind of a jerk? My understanding is this mainly affects installation media. If you disable Secure Boot, install a Linux distro, enrol that distro's keys and then reenable it, you're fine. That seems to be what the commenter you're replying too is suggesting.
Please don't troll and come back to the topic. GP was completely missing the topic, do you want to avoid it?
. If you disable Secure Boot, install a Linux distro, enrol that distro's keys and then reenable it, you're fine.
Um, given that Secure Boot prevents any modification of your computer's boot chain - including installing another boot loader or OS - that's not how it works.
given that Secure Boot prevents any modification of your computer's boot chain
Secure Boot does no such thing. All it does it require that everything in the boot chain is signed by a trusted cert.
Binding TPM PCR7 to FDE (or more brittle options like 0+2+4) is really what protects against boot chain modifications but that's another topic.
Disabling SB to install the distro, then re-enabling it once installed with either maintainer-signed shim or self-signed UKI/bootloader is perfectly fine.
I'm not trolling, you called them an LLM, they clearly aren't, you're being a jerk. I'm not going to engage with someone who thinks they're the smartest person in the room.
That's the whole point of enrolling your own keys in the firmware. You can even wipe the Microsoft keys if you want. You do that from the firmware setup, or within any OS while secure boot is off (such as sbctl on Linux).
That's a feature that is explicitly part of the spec. The expectation is you password protect the BIOS to make sure unauthorized users can't just wipe your keys. But also most importantly that's all measured by the TPM so the OS knows the boot chain is bad and can bail, and the TPM also won't unwrap BitLocker/LUKS keys either.
Secure boot is to prevent unauthorized tampering of the boot chain. It doesn't enforce that the computer will only ever boot Microsoft-approved software, that's a massive liability for an antitrust lawsuit.
Yeah this is an issue but not a big one. Most distro's installation media don't use shim so you have to disable SB during install anyway.
And installing the 2023 KEK and db certs can be done via firmware without much trouble or you can use sbctl in setup mode which I believe has both the 2011 and 2023 keys.
If you dual boot Windows you'll want to update it to the new bootmgr signed with the 2023 keys and add the 2011 certs to dbx to protect against BlackLotus or let Windows do it via patches+regfixes.
Also know that any changes to PK, KEK, dB, or dbx will change the PCR 7 measurement so handle that accordingly if you use TPM unlock for FDE.
That is far more complex than a firmware update and also depends on a correct implementation of the spec in the BIOS - which, given the experiences with ACPI for Linux, is not at all something one can rely on.
I just tried to distro-hop and found my BIOS had been locked with a password. Assuming I didn't set a password that I subsequently forgot (and that isn't one of the many I have memorized), I figured this might have something to do with the age of the laptop (I have a HP 4540s). If certificate expiration is already affecting people then this might be it.
EDIT: I just forgot I set a password, and it took me 2 days to realize that I was stupid enough to have set the password that I used for everything when I was 12 years old.
Not OP, but BIOSes often give you a specific error code after a few wrong password attempts. You can put the code in here to recover the password: bios-pw.org/
You can self-sign and self-enroll secure boot keys. Can’t say it’s an easy process, though - I had a lot of misery with it on my Surface Go 1st Gen. Might be better on my Thinkpad.
Microsoft's keys are pre-installed to all motherboards, so boot binaries signed by Microsoft are trusted by default. afaik Microsoft keys often can't be removed, but not because it's not possible, but because it can brick devices. you can create your own MOK or Machine Owner Keys and set up your linux system to sign your bootloader and kernel with it, but that is in addition to Microsoft keys.
That's bullshit. ARM is an architecture and by itself does not specify secure boot any more than x86 does. Raspberry Pis don't have secure boot. You can unlock the bootloader on a Pixel, install GrapheneOS, and relock the bootloader just fine. Several other manufacturers allow bootloader unlocks no problem. The main reason you can't on some popular phones is US carriers, even international Samsungs you can unlock the bootloader and flash whatever you want on it.
I'm literally typing this comment on a phone running a custom OS (LineageOS on a OnePlus 8T). I'm literally 2 versions of Android ahead of the latest supported version. I also have a Galaxy S7 running Android 15, a phone that officially tops out at Android 8 and launched with Android 6. Both you literally just toggle the bootloader unlock option in the settings, no hacks no craziness, it's literally a feature.
At this point you're just straight up making shit up.
The only one I can't find for sure is whether there's any lockdown on the firmware for the Microsoft Surface and Copilot+ laptops, but I'm also not finding any sources pointing that it would be. But at this point you're buying Microsoft hardware, what do you expect.
Some people argue that one can work around such locking down of PC hardware. Do this or that to avoid issues with substantial tinkering.
But that is not a bug but a feature. Sure, as a technical Linux user you can work around some nastiness. Like working around privacy invasion on Facebook or Linkedin by "adjusting" settings, or "adjust" settings in Wimdows to make it more private and so on. The thing is: working against the platform becomes quickly a losing game, because you don't control the platform - Microsoft does. And it does not help you if you manage to re-gain control of your device after some hours of tinkering if 99.9% of people around you don't have the knowledge and time and store your data, photos, Emails on OneDrive and so on. Freedom is very much a collective thing and software freedom is no exception.
And this does not mean that the thinkering and hacking is in vain - but it is not enough. We need the practical right to control our devices.
Nello scenario di guerra contemporaneo, dove sono le informazioni a farla da padrone, con la possibilità di attaccare da distanze chilometriche mediante l’utilizzo di razzi ed artiglieria, piuttosto che l’impiego di semplici droni radiocomandati, le …
07. United States 274.16 Mbit/s
19. Japan 212.06 Mbit/s
According to this page, seemingly sourced from Ookla, US has way higher average speeds these days.
Japan had way faster internet on average than the US like twenty years ago, but the US actually did a decent amount of broadband growth even if it still doesn't cover rural areas well.
Most DOCSIS (cable tv) systems are pushing gigabit speeds these days, especially in Los Angeles. That said, it is a bit of a misnomer considering CATV's upload speeds are still doodie compared to fiber.
I feel they may have been something of a catalyst that got other providers to start upping the speed. At this point, a lot of service providers offer at least 1 gig download speeds, with fiber being synchronous often. Some places offer up to 10 gigs to residential.
This is yet another thing the Republicans have been attacking (funding for rural broadband providers). Our rural areas are actually extremely well covered. Most of the midwest is fibered up. My local co-op’s minimum offered speed is 350x350.
I have 75 mbps and it's plenty enough except maybe for that one time once in a while where I'm downloading a game on Steam and would like it a little quicker. I see no point of paying three times what I'm paying right now per month to get 300 mbps. Even if it's available, even if I can afford it. I'd need to download a whole bunch of stuff at the same time to ever make use of that kind of bandwidth.
I can tell some ISPs are blatantly preying on ignorant people, selling them 300 mbps connections at a premium while all they do is google stuff, check their e-mails and browse their social media. They'll never use more than a tenth of what they're paying for, the rest is just wasted money. But they don't know that.
Average internet speeds in a country can be a very misleading stat as a result.
Edit: Looks like two people don't like that they've realized they're overpaying for their internet.
An international research team led by the Photonic Network Laboratory at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki Ph.D.), and including Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd.
🥳
![L'immagine mostra una notifica automatica da parte di Mastodon, un'applicazione di microblogging. La notifica è indirizzata a "[@]UndisScot" e indica che l'account è stato sospeso. Per evitare una completa bloccatura dell'account, è necessario completare una verifica urgente, che dovrebbe richiedere solo pochi minuti. Il limite di tempo per la verifica è di 30 minuti. La notifica include un link per la verifica: "apprivalm.com/x/1829916180". Se la verifica non viene completata entro il tempo assegnato, l'account rimarrà bloccato fino a ulteriori valutazioni. La notifica è firmata dal "Mastodon Support Team".](https://poliverso.org/photo/preview/640/53597957 "L'immagine mostra una notifica automatica da parte di Mastodon, un'applicazione di microblogging. La notifica è indirizzata a \"[@]UndisScot\" e indica che l'account è stato sospeso. Per evitare una completa bloccatura dell'account, è necessario completare una verifica urgente, che dovrebbe richiedere solo pochi minuti. Il limite di tempo per la verifica è di 30 minuti. La notifica include un link per la verifica: \"apprivalm.com/x/1829916180\". Se la verifica non viene completata entro il tempo assegnato, l'account rimarrà bloccato fino a ulteriori valutazioni. La notifica è firmata dal \"Mastodon Support Team\".")
some_guy
in reply to 1984 • • •Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That's like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.
sandwich.make(bathing_in_bismuth)
in reply to some_guy • • •Ebber
in reply to some_guy • • •some_guy
in reply to Ebber • • •JackbyDev
in reply to some_guy • • •Binturong
in reply to 1984 • • •some_guy
in reply to Binturong • • •forwhomthecattolls
in reply to 1984 • • •gasp you mean to tell me you DON'T like 20 million videos playing over the top of the recipe that you're trying to read while trying not to burn dinner? unbelievable.
smh these motherfuckers are so brazen
Scolding7300
in reply to forwhomthecattolls • • •Speaking of cooking and not wanting to see 20 videos playing over the recipe:
based.cooking/
No ad blockers needed
Based Cooking
based.cookingKorhaka
in reply to Scolding7300 • • •Scolding7300
in reply to Korhaka • • •Korhaka
in reply to Scolding7300 • • •forwhomthecattolls
in reply to Scolding7300 • • •Jimmycakes
in reply to 1984 • • •teuto
in reply to Jimmycakes • • •Jimmycakes
in reply to teuto • • •DicJacobus
in reply to Jimmycakes • • •Not even a linux guy, but I had a Pi from a decade ago that I never opened, decided to set it up and use it for something useful, friends suggested Pihole. pained myself for 2 days getting everything working (most of my trouble had to do with peripherals and IP addresses not the device itself) but after the grief, got it working and it was well worth it.
I even printed a sticker for it that said "where ads go to die"
sorry doubleclick, but you're toast
NutWrench
in reply to 1984 • • •Me: "You appear to be correct."
normalexit
in reply to NutWrench • • •m3t00🌎
in reply to NutWrench • • •Jolteon
in reply to m3t00🌎 • • •m3t00🌎
in reply to Jolteon • • •J52
in reply to 1984 • • •I will rather throw it away!
Almacca
in reply to 1984 • • •Lol. Fuck off.
zerofk
in reply to Almacca • • •Almacca
in reply to zerofk • • •Itsamelemmy
in reply to Almacca • • •Almacca
in reply to Itsamelemmy • • •BrianTheeBiscuiteer
in reply to Almacca • • •Taldan
in reply to BrianTheeBiscuiteer • • •Vinstaal0
in reply to 1984 • • •Blackmist
in reply to Vinstaal0 • • •Before I used Firefox on Android, any search about a game I'm playing would result in a half page video ad in the top half of the screen, accompanied by the bottom half being a request to share your data with 1496 trusted data partners.
Now I use Firefox with add ons, and I get the results I requested. The modern web is basically unusable in it's raw form.
Vinstaal0
in reply to Blackmist • • •AlteredEgo
in reply to Vinstaal0 • • •There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.
And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you "don't even mind" it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people's brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.
Vinstaal0
in reply to AlteredEgo • • •There is nothing like a free lunch.
You either have to directly pay for something or indirectly pay for it by selling your time or data.
Companies need to get their name out there and in the past you did that with a banner on your building, a space in the phone book and maybe your name on the side of the vans. Now we live in the digital world and we use digital advertisement. Heck a lot of companies sponsor certain event including charity events.
If we would totally remove advertisement, your local mom-and-pop shops will get more traffic, but in a lot of countries they would have basically a monopoly unless another competitor exists in the same region.
I don't really mind watching a bit of advertisement on something like a YouTube video or a banner ad on a site. Heck, buildings or vans with logos etc are fine as well in my opinion. My issue is more with the tracking and some forced advertisement (putting your logo on my clothing, vehicle etc).
AlteredEgo
in reply to Vinstaal0 • • •Ok, it's obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.
But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don't get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn't serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.
And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can't have democracy without free press, and currently we don't have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.
Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.
Vinstaal0
in reply to AlteredEgo • • •Independent reviews are a good thing yes and they shouldn't be sponsored by a related company to keep their integrity, that doesn't mean they can't get paid from a different form of advertising.
Heck you can even check on the integrity of professionals differently. In the accountancy, we are paid by the clients who we need to audit or need to advice etc. Using things like third party audits and a high accountability for professionals.
Ratings aren't that great especially on platforms like Amazon/AliExpress and other crap offering dropshipping platforms from corrupt countries.
Corporations generally don't do anything for free, but a lot of companies do, but that is generally to get their name out there or because the owner wants to decuct his private life from his company profit ...
Even governments can't spend money or personal all they want, in the end it is money from the people. People here in NL are pissed that the government spend money on things like getting the NATO here for the last meeting or for the royal family.
The public broadcasting is also something that is under heat and not just here.
In most countries you have some kind of government funded press heck I think most press aren't even corporations, but more companies except some of the larger once maybe.
Almost nobody is going to work for free for the majority of their life. It would be better if all of us did more work for society, but most people aren't in the position I am in that they just can take an extra week off to do that.
I agree consumerism is killing our planet, but there is a huge difference between the crap a companies like Google are doing and your local plummer who has advertisement on the local radio on their van and make a slightly SEO optimised website. Advertising is often the only way to get your company visable if you are competing with a well established company.
Same reason as that there is nuance between companies and corporations.
Yes we need to promote repairing, reusing, recycling and the circular economy I agree, but somebody like iFixit wouldn't really thrive without their advertisement. We also need more financial transparency by the company we buy from and just skip on companies from China, the US and other obvious corrupt countries.
AlteredEgo
in reply to Vinstaal0 • • •Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it's in their owner's interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.
Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become "min maxed" by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.
For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent "forth estate" or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public's interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.
If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.
TLDR: We don't *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.
Vinstaal0
in reply to AlteredEgo • • •Well I agree we need a better structure to keep people in check I agree with that. Things like social media and a companies like RTL having a massive stake in private television will help to destroy the planet and keep the difference between the lower class, the middle class and the rich.
But I disagree that we should just get rid of all advertisement completely. Again there is nothing wrong with banner ads, websites, vans with logo's and other low stakes form of advertisement.
If governments would start to pay YouTubers instead of YouTubers earning money from adverts and sponsors it would not only allow the government to control the narrative, but people will still abuse the system. Same way as that social security or subsidies are abused currently.
Consdering I work in an accounting firm I do see the amount of cost some companies have with advertisment, but most of them with a lot of costs do it to get more customers. Some of them need to do it to keep their profit rising or the same.
There is an issue with misleading adverts including misleading prices (excluding tax), there is an issue with hidden ads (like logo's).
But personally I think social media (including Lemmy) is just the bane of our existence. Yes a lot of that is funded by adverts, but also by selling your data and the like. Personally I believe that they are brainwashing people more with that, than with a lot of the advertisement.
Ow and the people who keep on defending companies like they are their family are also a big part, people saying they are going to get Domino's instead of pizza f.e.
pachrist
in reply to 1984 • • •The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you'll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.
Nothing new. Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
bargu
in reply to pachrist • • •I disagree, ads today are way more malicious than they used to be, ads are the biggest vector for malware today, they are used to stalk users to an insane level and most ads are porn, gambling, drugs or fascist propaganda.
At least back in the day you would only get sketchy ads on sketchy websites.
Gibibit
in reply to 1984 • • •Seeing static banner ads on 2000s websites without popups or tracking: 🤷♂️
Blocking ads on Firefox after popups and other crap started: 😀
Browsing the internet on Android before I realised the browser supports addons: 🤮
Blocking ads and tracking on Android via uBlock origin and Privacy Badger: 😀👍
My feeling of guilt when scummy megacorporations miss out on ad revenue:
BruisedMoose
in reply to Gibibit • • •lemmeBe
in reply to BruisedMoose • • •BruisedMoose
in reply to lemmeBe • • •lemmeBe
in reply to BruisedMoose • • •Rethink | Fast, secure, configurable, private DNS + Firewall for Android.
rethinkdns.comBruisedMoose
in reply to lemmeBe • • •lemmeBe
in reply to BruisedMoose • • •Gibibit
in reply to BruisedMoose • • •I use a degoogled CalyxOS phone so all those apps that load ads via Google services don't even work, or they work and the ads don't load haha. One caveat is that I can't use paid apps either though, I'm not against those.
But yeah system wide blocking is definitely the most thorough method!
DarkSideOfTheMoon
in reply to 1984 • • •Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much
Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks
StarryPhoenix97
in reply to DarkSideOfTheMoon • • •DarkSideOfTheMoon
in reply to StarryPhoenix97 • • •en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%…
predictive model of human movement
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Randelung
in reply to 1984 • • •Millenials are killing the ad industry!
Good.
StarryPhoenix97
in reply to Randelung • • •StarryPhoenix97
in reply to 1984 • • •GnuLinuxDude
in reply to StarryPhoenix97 • • •reshuffle6655
in reply to StarryPhoenix97 • • •BeBopALouie
in reply to 1984 • • •If there are ads I find an alternative or read a book. Our teen son screams ad every time he sees one that sneaks through ad just to get me going.
Vanilla_PuddinFudge
in reply to BeBopALouie • • •"Son, are those ads in my house!?"
dad, please, it's only a little marketing!
"NO SON OF MINE! GET MY BELT!"
dad, no!
"What's our DNS address!?"
dad, I don't kno-
"Count the licks, boy! I'll teach you the hard way!"
burntbacon
in reply to Vanilla_PuddinFudge • • •Jesus. How are you going to get to 8.8.8.8 belt licks?
(and please, for the love of god, don't use 8.8.8.8!)
Vanilla_PuddinFudge
in reply to burntbacon • • •AntEater
in reply to Vanilla_PuddinFudge • • •pyre
in reply to 1984 • • •Decq
in reply to pyre • • •I'm starting to notice that a lot of people don't even notice what are ads or not. When i installed pihole and enabled it for all devices at home. My gf was complaining why suddenly a loy of pages wouldn't work anymore. Yeah, so she always clicked the ad/sponsored link everywhere and didn't have the slightest clue. And let's not start about social media and how basically 75% of it is (hidden) ads.
Personally I'm of the mentality if some company force feeds me their ads while i was not actively searching out their product type, I'll think 3 times before ever considering their products. Thankfully, i see basically no ads (online) anymore these days.
pyre
in reply to Decq • • •killeronthecorner
in reply to 1984 • • •The use of the term "Dark traffic" here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don't use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.
I propose using the terms "clean traffic", for ad-blocked website traffic, and "dogshit traffic" for everything else.
Oneshot
in reply to killeronthecorner • • •DicJacobus
in reply to killeronthecorner • • •depending on your household's browsing habits, it can be downright insane how much traffic goes through ones network (and the web at large), that is just nothing but dog shit.
I monitored my pihole at my place and my own traffic is usually no more than 15% garbage with about 750,000 domains blocked, but the second grandma or grandpa starts doomscrolling boomer things on their phones and ipads. I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them "what the fuck are you doing on your phone?"
also set up a Region exemption or whatever, blocking russian, chinese, and a whole bunch of other untrustworthy TLDs and im literally showing my grandmother the repeated attempts to communicate with something in fucking China in real time whilst she's playing some solitare game she downloaded.
sfbing
in reply to DicJacobus • • •DicJacobus
in reply to sfbing • • •ShaggySnacks
in reply to DicJacobus • • •Be careful of the answer. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
DicJacobus
in reply to ShaggySnacks • • •rhetorical question, I know what she's doing, clicking on random shit and then blaming other people for her problems.
every intrusive advertisement or popup. "I got hacked"
every wrong website she goes to "this is a scam"
NutWrench
in reply to killeronthecorner • • •Olhonestjim
in reply to 1984 • • •Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them and decide what to allow inside my head. This is war.
"We paid for the right to show you this!"
You paid for the opportunity not the right, but you didn't pay me, motherfucker -- and my price is everything you have or fuck off and die.
Edit: You know what? This is how I really feel about ads.
This is a consent issue, and I will not allow advertisers inside me. They hire psychologists in order to exploit humans' most vulnerable mental blind spots. They don't just brainwash us. They mindfuck the entire human species, and they do not recognize consent. We need to treat advertising as the collective mindr*pe that it is, otherwise they will never stop exploiting us, and we will never be able to build a bright future for humanity and this world. They are manipulating the trajectory of an entire species with zero regard to any future well-being. The butterfly effects are inconceivable. Our minds are sacred. The advertising industry is committing a crime against humanity that we have failed to recognize as such, because money is all that matters today. They must be stopped before Big Tech perfects brain-computer interfaces.
AeonFelis
in reply to 1984 • • •Are they trying to present it as if poor innocent users need to be protected from the vile ad blockers?
Olhonestjim
in reply to AeonFelis • • •JackbyDev
in reply to 1984 • • •What's frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don't have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead "☝️🤓 actually you don't own it." Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that's my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
bigmamoth
in reply to JackbyDev • • •The nuance is that website provinding content can choose to not serve it to you. Or something like that but maybe more complexe.
Captain Aggravated
in reply to 1984 • • •Gibibit
in reply to 1984 • • •squaresinger
in reply to Gibibit • • •"dark" as in "not visible". Adblock users can't be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. "Dark", in this instance, is not a derogatory term.
"Brutal" is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.
Gibibit
in reply to squaresinger • • •logicbomb
in reply to 1984 • • •I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.
Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.
Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.
Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer
in reply to logicbomb • • •shalafi
in reply to BrianTheeBiscuiteer • • •Ex was mad that my PiHole was blocking some FB stuff so I turned it off.
"The internet's slow."
Looked over her shoulder and pointed to her (still loading) screen:
"Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad..."
"FINE! Turn it back on!"
muusemuuse
in reply to shalafi • • •418_im_a_teapot
in reply to muusemuuse • • •muusemuuse
in reply to 418_im_a_teapot • • •418_im_a_teapot
in reply to muusemuuse • • •Unix and lawnmowers are nothing new or exotic either. I’m not stupid for not knowing how to repair a lawnmower, and I wouldn’t presume you’re stupid just because I can run circles around you at the command line.
I would, however, question your intelligence if you lack the ability to perceive the reasons behind different people knowing different things. It’s not that complicated.
- YouTube
youtu.bemuusemuuse
in reply to 418_im_a_teapot • • •m3t00🌎
in reply to 1984 • • •swelter_spark
in reply to m3t00🌎 • • •ZeroOne
in reply to 1984 • • •I'm wondering if Gopher should make a comeback ?
Gemini is a thing so, well you know.....
For those who don't know, they're alternative internet protocols similar to HTTP
internet protocol
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Trainguyrom
in reply to ZeroOne • • •ZeroOne
in reply to Trainguyrom • • •How about this link ?
github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gem…
GitHub - kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini: A collection of awesome things regarding the gemini protocol ecosystem.
GitHubTrainguyrom
in reply to ZeroOne • • •DragonOracleIX
in reply to 1984 • • •