It's spooky, I tell ya!
50% of adverts are a waste of money, the problem for people wanting to advertise is nobody knows which 50%
I wish that were true. Although uBlock Origin does a good job, some ads definitely still make it through. There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable it. There are workarounds for some of these, but it's still a bit of a mess.
I have yet to come across a site that offered something so unique or compelling that I decided to turn off my ad blocker to use it.
That, and when there's an email subscription popup, is when the one-click JS toggle extension comes out. Can't detect anything if it can't run any code in your browser.
You can object to being targeted based on your browsing habits, but don't stop ads altogether.
There is no level these people will not stoop to, and we're sick of their shit. They brought this on themselves.
Overall FF has been incredibly user friendly making all sort of plugins that focus on privacy possible, while Chrome has been as hostile to it as possible.
Along with some marketing drivel about how its important advertisers get their ad revenue.
Each tab group then has its own cookie container, so I can have multiple groups open and they don't share anything - I can login to different google (or any other service) accounts in different contains and it works like I want it to.
For the sites that I want to use logged in, I either create a special container for that site only, or I just use a password manager to log me in each time I need to visit it.
The added privacy is great, the peace of mind in just clicking I agree is great.
I really feel today having different devices with different browsers, connected to different providers is only working solution.
document.querySelectorAll('input[type=checkbox]').forEach(el => el.removeAttribute('checked'))
This app hides the popup :)
I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under the age of what, 35?
There was a single telephone company (or it was shortly after there were plural "baby-bells") and the telephone network was a completely private, isolated, network that only the phone company (or baby-bells) even had access to. It was also a network that was heavily regulated such that the possibility of a random attacker from half a world away being able to tap into a phone call as it happened simply did not exist.
In that environment, placing a phone call was considered "secure" (or at least as secure as network isolation and regulation could cause it to become [I'm ignoring NSA style 'state secret' taps, those have likely always been available to NSA style agencies]). So it would have been seen, at that time, as reasonable to use fax machines for document exchange, because the "phone network" was considered to be secure against having a man-in-the-middle tapping off one's communications.
Wind the clock forward thirty years, and have the once isolated and highly regulated telephone network more or less become just another packet protocol on the general Internet, and the choice of using "fax" for secure document exchange sounds ludicrous.
The issue is that the regulations those environments operate under have not been updated in the ensuing thirty years to account for the fact that "phone network" is no longer the once isolated, mostly secure, network it once was. And if the regulations don't get updated, no lowly clerk at the front lines is going to lose their job by _not_ using the comm. system called for by the regulations.
This is such a meaningless statement.
Better?
On linux you can use [efax](https://linux.die.net/man/1/efax) and a modem and... ooops, good luck finding a modem.
I did this for real ~10 years ago when a stupid company didn't accept a scanned PDF by email and required a fax of the actual document "because security". The difference is that I had a modem in an old laptop at that time, so I just send them the same scanned PDF.
Now I'm wondering if there is a provision for sending faxes somewhere in the GSM/3G/4G rabbit hole of standards.
I have bookmarked them from long ago.
Every other credit agency had no problem with my SSN + address then Equifax throws a flag, locks my account and says I have to validate my identity by faxing them identity documents.
Fat chance, idiots.
I should also point to non-Unitedstatians that checks (that physical paper worth as much money as you write and sign on it) are still in use in the USA.
That's leaving out the "automatic bill pay" function of my bank's web site, which, for most payees, at the end of the day results in physical paper checks being printed and sent in envelopes.
That varies a lot by jurisdiction. I'm 50 and I haven't written a single check in my entire life. (Sweden.)
I pay contractors with checks because almost none accept credit cards and cash gets cumbersome once you start getting into 4 and 5 digits.
My local utilities all charge a "convenience fee" of a few dollars when paying online or with a credit card. Sending a check in the mail costs me only $0.50. (Even though it costs them some employee's wages to handle my envelope and cash the check. Go figure.)
Checks are also convenient for transferring small amounts of money to friends and family. Yes, there is Paypal and the like and some of them don't even charge fees but I trust my bank way more than I trust a random company with direct access to my bank account. (Paypal in particular have proven over and over again to be untrustworthy in this regard, which is why not only do I have two Paypal accounts--one for buying and one for selling--but I also have a special "firewall" account between PayPal and my main checking account. This is so that the most they can grab is a couple hundred dollars on average, rather than some arbitrary fraction of my life's savings.)
Checks are sometimes the easiest (or only) way to move large amounts of money between my own accounts. There was a time where most online bank accounts would let you make ACH ("electronic checks") transfers to any other account, but they seem to be moving away from this, I presume due to its high use in fraud.
Writing a check is the fastest way for me to transfer between two accounts. :(
Wire transfers are expensive here; my credit union which doesn't generally have high fees, charges $29 to send a wire (they don't charge for incomming wires, but some banks do). I've had some brokerages with free wires, but usually that's tied to a balance requirement or in connection with a company sponsored account (for stock based compensation or retirement accounts).
The US does have some electronic networks for instant, no-cost p2p payments. https://www.zellepay.com/ has a large number of participating major banks with some major exceptions. A lot of people use https://venmo.com/ or https://cash.app/ which are not directly integrated with banks but then offer electronic transfer of funds to bank accounts.
I'm guessing this is why several US payment companys and start-ups just don't make any sense to me: "make payments easier!"
but it's hard for me to understand how to make it easier than just typing in someone's phone number or email and sending them money, or purchasing via tap and go with your card/ phone. Don't you at least have electronic transfers if not those other newfangled technologies? are you (seriously) suggesting you can't transfer money between your accounts?
Because of how and when it got computerized, it's hard to move it forward again. There's no desire for sweeping changes, everything has to move slowly now.
There are several personal transfer services (PayPal is ancient and fits the mold), but none have a lot of penetration. I think Zelle? is deployed through bank integration, and may end up with a lot of users as a result; possibly critical mass.
There was a lot of backlash on rf payments the first go round, a few issuers gave me cards with it, but then they removed it. Then they started issuing cards with chips, and now most of them are putting rf payments back in. A lot of payment terminals have the hardware for it, but a lot of them also have signs that say don't tap to pay.
I can easily do electronic (ACH) between my accounts, as long as I've gone through setup, which takes days for test deposits to show up. But to transfer to a friend or a relative is tricky.
US banks suck for a lot of reasons but part of it is that culturally and regulatorily the entire financial/banking/commercial environment in the US is very conservative. And there's not much in the way of pressure to make changes either - whether internally from competition and regulation or externally from the need to interact with other countries. Like broadband, consumer banking is basically an oligopoly that will quite happily plod along providing the same service as long as it can.
Many shops don’t accept them, some banks have already stopped using them altogether, and the rest of the major banks are phasing them out this year.
A cheque is a rare thing to see (I haven’t handled one for a decade or so?)
At least for those of us that were late adopters of text messages.
I still laugh about how he got several cease and desist letters and still continued sending the same businesses stuff.
Ahhhhhhh yeah, the good old days.
It’s more like complaining that your sole of your shoes is being worn out more because grocery stores put the milk in the back forcing you to walk past items you don’t intend to buy. You can always go to a different store just like you no one is forcing you to browse websites that are ad supported.
It's profitable because a few people want to influence and spy on a lot of people.
Most people don't want ads they just tolerate them for getting actual services. Most these people don't even know how much tracking is involved and how nefarious this industry really is.
Perhaps you’re invested in the ad industry. No one else wants ads buddy.
Most of that VC cash startups raise is spent on marketing. I don’t understand why people have such negative perception of ads especially on a VC run news site. All the ycomb companies drops tens of millions on digital advertising.