Calling Their Bluff
anguscheng.com
anguscheng.com
Fun story:
Once I was traveling to a country X that I was familiar enough with to know that thir governmental services web sites were awfully designed. We're talking about web design that would easily put Geocities to shame.
They had recently introduced an eVisa scheme that I have to complete.
Out of tirednes and being in a rush, I clicked at the wrong link. It gets me into a shiny, modern web page with nice graphics and a form to complete.
I instinctively think "WAIT! This is TOO nice for an official site!".
Then I look at the address bar, see an obvious scam-SEO URL, realize my mistake, and go back to search for the real one.
Which was as terribly designed as expected.
I don't know how there is an excuse for this that's acceptable to any authority. It's their own platform that they seem unable to control.
Take some responsibility Google, you are profiting by facilitating evil (even moreso than by regular advertising).
The thing I don't understand is why people keep expecting them to. Who even wants Google to be the police? To actually act as a deterrent you need the ability to impose penalties, and for that you need the actual police.
All Google can do is close their account, and then there are no real penalties so they just make new ones until they figure out how to beat the fraud detection system.
And if you try to impose penalties on third parties for not being able to solve a problem they're structurally unable to solve, all they can do is crank up the false positive rate and mess things up for innocent people.
Stop even asking for this. It's a dystopia. Put the actual scammers in prison instead.
My reasoning is:
Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.
They built the half that allows anyone with the money to put something on their platform. They didn't build the half that makes sure that they're not helping scammers, con artists, and outright criminals from reaching the global audience that their wonderful, profitable, scalable platform enables.
They should be policing it on their own to an extent that obvious scams and fake banking websites and clickbait should be detected. Even just to appear to not be a crime-facilitation platform, which they currently are.
To me it feels analogous to Microsoft and their commitment to security of Windows. It's not a priority because it's counter to profitability. Privatise the profits and socialise the costs.
If they can't control their own platform, they should not have the platform. It is not a mature enough product to be released upon the world. It is Frankenstein's monster, left to roam.
I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.
Which three letter agency said that an ad blocker was a required layer of security when browsing the web? There's a good reason: Google. If the Internet is full of scams, who is most responsible for its proliferation?
(I have a massive bias against advertising, so that heavily colours my opinion. I also understand that advertising is inevitable, but it should be held to a much higher standard than, well, the none that exists)
Google has enough of a near-monopoly in ads that there aren't rivals scaled enough to defend the public good out of the greed of their pocket books if not the good of everyone else. Google's competitors are too busy selling ad space to the same and similar lowest common denominator polluters and scammers than to police Google enough to hope to put it out of business.
The FCC gave up on policing anything on the internet ages ago. Between Congressional protections and multiple administrations trying to keep the FCC weak, it doesn't seem to have enough power to do anything towards Google.
I suppose that leaves consumer advocacy groups. I don't know how we build and scale a Consumers Against Predatory Google Ads to the point that it can force Google to reconsider their approach to advertising for the consumer good instead of evil. But then I also don't understand how Google isn't already doing tremendous enough damage to their brand that there isn't already enough of a sentiment that Google is actively engaged in evil and needs to stop, five or six years ago at least (or maybe at least as far back as when Google bought/merged Doubleclick). Their brand, too, seems too big to fail at this point, and it is weird to me.
Baked into this is the assumption that the "responsible, difficult half" is something that they, rather than law enforcement, should be doing to begin with. Which they can't do effectively because they don't have the ability to impose significant penalties and we certainly don't want to give them that.
Consider how this is even supposed to work. There is often no conclusive way to tell ex ante whether some website is a scam; the premise of them is to look like a real site. Google doesn't know if it's a scammer or some third party contractor who has be commissioned by the actual entity to set up a new site, and real sites are often full of bad UI choices and weird bugs, or open up to nothing more than a login page which the ad network has no credentials to get past.
The way this works with actual law enforcement is that someone suspects a site of being a scam, or a victim files a police report, and then officers investigate. They spend significant resources to figure out if it's actually a scam or just e.g. a competitor trying to have their competition removed from visibility. They have special powers to conduct searches with probable cause. And then if it is a scam, they arrest the scammers, and if it's a false report, they charge that person for filing a false police report, which are necessary in order to provide a deterrent and prevent both of those misbehaviors from proliferating.
Otherwise you get untold numbers of false reports from people trying to grief their rivals, it takes just as much work to do a thorough investigation for each one, and then even if you catch the actual scammers, they just immediately reappear under a different name.
So then they get zillions of reports, many of them fraudulent, and you're proposing to put them in jail if they ever fail to do something they there is no apparent way for them to consistently do.
> I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.
Consider how this would apply to anything other than advertising. Some bank robbers buy Halloween masks to hide their faces. Drug dealers sell drugs over the internet and a normal mail/package carrier delivers the packages. A hitman rides the bus on the way to a hit. These are felonies! But we don't expect UPS to cut open everyone's packages or the bus driver to strip search every passenger to check for a vial of polonium, and punish them if they ever fail, because that isn't their job. They're not the police.
Respectfully, however, I still disagree in this case, although I'm struggling how to articulate why - beyond admitting it could just be my bias against advertising.
My best attempt at articulation is:
Google have built a private road over the top of the public road, that is then spilling sewage and toxic materials onto the public road. Google's private road purely serves to profit Google. There's no public good it is serving, not like a public road or electricity infrastructure.
In writing that, yes, it's a government policy / legislation / regulation failure. But also, Google should be doing better. However, as WorldMaker said above, their brand seems somewhat confusingly, unaffected, so Google has incentive to do better than bottom-of-the-barrel.
As such I can't lay no blame, or anything less than majority blame, at Google's feet. Yes, government's around the world should be doing better at containing the spilling of toxic waste into public spaces that Google both facilitates and turns a blind eye to. Google are too profitable to fail since they can buy the continued regulation vacuum.
I'm not sure how far that went off the rails, I may have just continued ranting a bit there.
Thank you for your replies, though, I do see it from a slightly different angle.
So is UPS or FedEx or USPS. Are you saying they should be responsible for the contents of every package? How are they even supposed to know what the contents is? They can ask the sender but the sender can just lie.
> Somehow, Google manages to not openly advertise CSAM buttthey can’t shutdown obvious scams?
CSAM is a lot more obvious than most scams, because CSAM looks like CSAM whereas a fake login form just looks like a any other login form.
> In the age of LLMs , you can’t tell me that is impossible.
LLMs are exactly the thing that doesn't work for this.
An advertisement is the exact opposite of private, and Google absolutely can review every single ad that runs on their system.
I’m talking about ads, things they take money in order to make public, not encrypted data they move from point a to point b.
The ad itself doesn't tell you anything. The ad copy can look legitimate. Even for many real websites, the link will commonly go through a third party redirect for tracking purposes, but then the ad network has no way to know if the third party server changes where the link redirects after they reviewed it. They also have no way to know if the site the link points to is affiliated with the entity it claims to be or not.
> Google absolutely can review every single ad that runs on their system.
You can't spend $1000 investigating an ad someone is paying you $10 to run, and spending a small fraction of $10 to review an ad is not going to be thorough enough catch most of the offenders.
The problem isn’t that sometimes Google screws up and lets a bad actor advertise on its platform, it’s that Google (and others) have made it their business model to allow bad actors to advertise on their platform. They knowingly profit from fraud.
Out of curiosity I have followed up on some of the most blatantly ridiculous ads. They typically are a first tier filter for gullibility, and never actually lead to the promised product, but rather diverting into a web of identity theft fishing, investing fraud, cryptocurrency theft, malware droppers, etc. These are funnels into real harm. And the sucker pitch is intentionally an obviously impossible product that any decent 7B LLM would tell you is probably fraudulent.
Now that I followed a few up to see where they went, that account gets shown hundreds of ads of this type from Google, and especially on YouTube. I did some AdWords research to see what those click throughs would sell for and they are very high priced exposures and clicks.
This would be trivial for Google to flag if they wanted to, but it’s a significant and growing revenue generator.
Does this url match the government website in question?
9/10 my local 7B LLM answers correctly.
Yes, it is, because it causes 10% of the whole ocean to end up needing manual review for an appeal.
> The problem is that the fraudulent ads fetch much higher than average CPV and CPC.
They're sold at auction. They only have to outbid the next highest bidder by a hair.
How would you feel about your local tv station(as if that was a thing anymore) running an ad for senior citizens to invest in free energy generators to reduce their electricity bills?
There are so many blatant scams on Google’s platform that it is simply inexcusable. They are structurally unable to solve it because they have built a business out of being structurally unable to solve it.
That’s like saying that a wildly unsafe amusement park that allows just anyone to come in and set up whatever they want and charge for it is “structurally unable to protect their customers from harm” should just be allowed to keep throwing kids down a cliff in potato sacks just because someone figured out how to make money doing it.
There is no way for me to legally penalize some company in Croatia trying to trick people into paying 600 dollars for access to “free energy from the ground that they can sell to their neighbors”.
In the age of LLMs there is no way you can tell me that they can’t detect these kinds of scam advertisements , or that they can’t detect that country.gov.it.me isn’t probably not an official government site.
If they can’t, they should be put out of business, because they are a public nuisance at best.
They don’t do anything about it because they make money from having no ethical standards for the businesses they promote. No normal business is allowed to operate with a reckless disregard for the harms that they create.
Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Visiting the US from the UK I used to have to fill in the green "Visa waiver" form, but it was free, short, and blanks were handed out on the flight in. Now I must file an ESTA ahead of time and pay a fee. Visitors to the EU and UK (and even between the EU and UK) will have similar advance paperwork.
It feels like a huge step backwards with very dubious advantages compared to the unwelcoming "fuck you pay me" feel of the encounter. There's nothing I like more when choosing a holiday destination than filling in a multi page bureaucrat-designed form and paying a fee for the pleasure.
A minor blip in the greater scheme of things, but it saddens me.
Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.
Austrian ASFINAG would only sell you one that is valid in ~2 week at the earliest, since that’s the time you are guaranteed by law to return it. Not very handy if you are already on the road, and don’t want to stop to buy a physical vignette.
In other cases, you pay people to save yourself the hassle of fighting for an appointment slot, and to save a trip across town in the middle of a work day. These fixers become the somewhat digital layer to a famously analog bureaucracy.
That aside, Germany is a federation and every state, city, office and employee adds a layer of variance for a given process.
As a result, German bureaucracy tends to rely solely on paper and in-person appointments. With every state, every city, every office and every employee having their own interpretation of a procesd, you get an unpredictable, opaque, drawn out process that drives people mad.
There is a famous Asterix and Obelix scene about an office that drives people mad with bureaucracy. The protagonists are hunting for the Pass A38. This scene is better known in German than in its original French for a reason.
Perhaps the two are even related. American companies will reach 3 9's of reliability for a device, call it sufficient, and ship a product. German companies will be engaged with not only internal stakeholders, but also various levels of government for weeks to months just to come to an agreement about what the acceptable threshold is (it's the highest asked for by the combined pool of stakeholders), and 18 months after the Americans hit the market, you'll have a wristwatch with 7 9's of reliability that costs 3x as much as the American one.
Schreibtischpingpong where you are the ball being table tennised from desk to desk :)
I never heard 'Büroflipper', which comes to mind when thinking about this. Being the ball in a pin ball machine.
Probably because it's too fast, compared to the latencies in real life. But that would apply to Schreibtischpingpong, too.
But fear not, its last disciples will die out soon.
By then we'll be fully digital, hold in check by Electrons bloated thrall, solely.
What a boon.
For offcice equipment, like fax, phones, copiers, printers...
They were everywhere, around 2000.
Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues.
The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)?
Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them.
Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.
Honestly never seen this issue in any other EU country.
German health system is a mess, but mainly because Germans are (probably rightly) suspicious of having electronic health records.
Or if spun around, it's incredible what can be done by a single motivated person, and sad that the entire bureaucratic apparatus is incapable of doing it.
If their SEO ranking beats the official site, they could confuse the hell out of people. (And I am told people do not use uBlock or Pihole everywhere, so paid ads would work, too.)
They seem to leave the market, perhaps due to being sued they cannot make a profit: https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/kauf...
At first I thought you were talking about GEZ itself.
Sometimes they would also submit the forms / get the response back for you, which could be a real service in places where normally you would wait for a couple hours in a governmental office just to submit a form.
I used to work for an online retailer that sold high-ticket machinery parts. It wasn’t uncommon for us to face chargebacks on orders worth around $20,000. Eventually, we had to get chargeback insurance, because the only way to contest a chargeback was through a mercantile court.
Basically, is it a service or an unlicensed toll booth?
(The concept seems outdated, and I've successfully rented cars abroad without an IDP at all. Also, isn't it weird that authority to issue these is delegated to AAA, and them only?)
You get used to it after a few minutes. It takes a bit more concentration, especially when turning out of one-way streets, but it's otherwise fine.
There are mutual recognition agreements between many pairs of countries. The UK, for example, will allow you to directly exchange a licence from an EU or EEA, a British Crown Dependency, or a 'designated country' (Andorra, Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Japan, Moldova, Monaco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Republic of North Macedonia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe) for a British licence with no need for a retest. Most of those countries drive on the 'wrong' side of the road.
Really though, the actual driving part is pretty easy to pick up. You get accustommed to it quickly. You're more likely to have problems crossing the street on foot (you'll look the wrong way for traffic) than driving.
This is something to learn the very first time when getting into a (new/unfamiliar) car before getting the vehicle moving.
Come to India and drive a few cars from different brands. [1] The rule is to drive on the left side of the road (so the driver is on the right side of the vehicle). But the sticks/levers to turn on the windshield wiper may be on the right side of the steering wheel or on the left side (and vice versa for the turn indicator sticks/levers), depending on the manufacturer. If you don’t check it in advance, you may end up wiping the windshield when you want to signal a turn or end up signaling a turn when you want to get water off the windshield.
[1]: Actually, it’s not recommended for foreigners to attempt to drive in India. The traffic is chaotic and one needs a different way of thinking to drive.
The funny thing is e.g. in Canada, if you move there from certain countries, you can drive for 6 months on your foreign license, but then you have to take a road test to get a Canadian license!
That's pretty normal, a lot of countries do something similar. They want to permit tourists and people on temporary work assignments to drive, but if you're actually moving to Canada for the long term they expect you to take a proper test.
But anyway, IDPs will never be required in the EU.
excluding all the time i'd have to spend and documents I'd have to collect