anonymousab

Humans are not treated the same as machines and business ventures. Many things are illegal for the latter and are not thought crimes for the former.

> I think copyright law is a cudgel

It is interesting to me that we are finally seeing a case where many smaller, independent artists and creators are using these laws to assert their rights against the encroachment of the moneyed tech interests, and of course now all of the powerful corpos are singing another tune. Rules for thee, not for me.

> bought digital content

The fundamental problem lies here: you haven't actually bought anything useful. You didn't buy content, you bought a license, and that license is merely "you might be able to view content in a very specific way for an unspecified amount of time that is completely at our discretion".

You still have what you bought when they revoke the license, it's just in a different and less useful state.

That whole system needs to be crushed into dust to make a real difference. Make it so that buying a license to content isn't a thing - that you are now actually buying content - and all of the things that come with ownership will follow.

But I don't see any viable path to that happening. A sightly more possible outcome would be to have a minimum standards/requirements for digital content purposes - a set of required rights/restrictions/components for any digital purchase the all licenses must incorporate or cannot compromise on.

> I have never had mobile FF crash on me

A few months ago they released a version of Nightly that would crash for most users on startup every time. It was up on the Play store for several days.

That would normally be a buyer-beware situation as with any dev build, but Mozilla had purposely locked several important features - such as about:config configuration and loading any extension - behind the Nightly version, forcing users into that kind of experience.

One thing I've noticed is that sticky divs of most kinds (e.g. the bar at the bottom of Twitter.com, sidebars on news sites, etc.) horrendously crush the performance.

But if you kill them, by zapping with ublock or using another extension or bookmarklet, the performance is instantly a lot closer to something like the Chrome or Brave apps

It has been like this since Fenix launched, so at this point it makes me need to assume that it's some sort of fundamental limitation of their architecture. It is rather unfortunate.

These are not natural fixtures, they are active creations and constructions of a business. If a business on main street was actively putting up illegal hazards to the pubic then it is fair to shut that crud down.

I think newspapers received an explicit carve out a little while back, which is where I think it's quite fair to call out the EU on a bit of hypocrisy.

It is safe to assume that Meta will absolutely have tracking and data collection to the nines on this, because they have glibly been pleading ignorance and shock every step of the way as they've wrenched things towards the most anti-privacy interpretation possible whenever they get the obvious door in the face.

They just don't get any benefit of the doubt anymore.

People are going to read "Jewish communties" as "the Jews" with posts like this. The posters know it, we know it, and the advertisers know it.

In positions like his, Musk should damn well know it too. It doesn't matter how unreasonable that is or isn't, it's clear how advertisers are going to react to something like this.

My guess would be that Musk thinks they did some cajoling to get the ads to appear. That X probably has some sort of surface-level systems in place to avoid the problem, but that it falls apart for, say, your ad-friendly account follows a borderline ad-friendly account, and that likes or retweets ad-unfriendly content, so that content now appears in views further down the line that don't get filtered correctly.

But the point of media matters' article is that this still fails the test. It doesn't matter how contrived the situation is, because the scale of Twitter and Musk's actions to greatly increase ad-unfriendly posters have created a more advertiser-hostile environment.

There's also the issue of the ad-unfriendly accounts themselves. If I only follow ad-unfriendly accounts, then my timeline will only be ad-unfriendly content, so there is nowhere for ads to be placed except next to that content. Or else you just can't show an ad for that provider next to me, and I bet that conflicts in a hard and unpredictable way with a bunch of ad targeting heuristics and mechanisms in Twitter.

Can it actually be used to buy a car, unlike dealer sites, which lie about inventory and are a heavy handed laborious way of just getting put on a waitlist and getting a salesman to call you?

That'd be a pretty direct improvement in the modern car market.

> Despite losing a small part of their functionality, ad blockers will still be able to offer nearly the same quality of filtering that they demonstrated with Manifest V2.

If some mechanism or capability is no longer possible or is made infeasible for adblockers to control, then ads will simply switch to using that mechanism. It's a pretty obvious outcome. You cannot simply give just an inch with adtech.

The nuclear option will eventually be to just ban Google accounts for using any ad blocking.

The question is whether that atmosphere would simply cause people to quit Google services vs. turn off Adblock altogether to continue using them. I would wager that the latter would be far more likely and common for the average person.

Based on the leaks in the Ars article, it seems like their real focus is to use Unity and Unity changes to bolster the ironSource ads side of things, and they were/are? willing to slash and burn a lot of the core Unity engine business to do so.

Isn't the problem de facto solved by matchmaking? The player that aims better will quickly win more and be elevated to the level of opponents on par with them. From the perspective of the player that loses to them, it's no different than losing to a regular player who aimed really well; you're quickly separated from them in the queue.

This wouldn't apply to games with only a few hundred active players but I think most proponents of this change aren't really thinking of those games.

Like those entitled tv viewers who switch the channel.

For the drivers inside, but not for everyone else. In fact, they just had getting bigger and bigger, an arms race prompted by bad regulation but kicked into perpetual high gear by standard market and consumer forces.

At first glance, it does not appear to have support for game consoles. I'd wager that the kind of teams that are looking at making heavier or advanced 3D games are more likely to also need to take that into consideration.

> What's so bad about typing in

From any browser window and any context, I can use CMD+Shift+M and either open a new window in a different profile, or switch to the first available window for that profile. The browser then clearly indicates which profile I am in and has some UI elements for it as well.

So it's just like any other core browser feature: having it being integrated into the experience directly, and being able to use it from anywhere, with a shortcut or clear UI element, is a much better experience than having to navigate to a settings page or use a bespoke application shortcut.

If having to open a bookmark always required opening a bookmark webpage, instead of the bookmark list or the url bar integrations, then that would be a much worse experience and certainly a reason to prefer one browser over another.

The in-browser support/UX - the ever present menu options and keyboard shortcuts - are what make Profiles so much better to use in Chrome than in Firefox. The extension attempts to bridge that gap.

Having to use about:profiles or an external application shortcut is a much worse experience overall.

How is this any different from using TiVo to avoid tv ads? Just the fact that TV advertisers are more easily tricked/misled by the platform/viewers?

> Stockholm syndrome?

It's more that the problem of cheating in online matchmade FPS games is just that bad. Even when you're not running into obvious cheaters, it makes you suspicious of anyone who happens to be a bit too quick on the draw, or a bit too intuitive, or a bit too lucky with a guess. That mindset overall makes a game much less fun to play.

So they accept the anticheat as a necessary evil, something mostly out of sight and out of mind.

I don't particularly agree with that approach but I see their point of view.

It's hard to define consciousness itself. It may be something wholly apart from sentience and sapience.

So it's kinda already setup to be something arbitrary. It may very well be a case of "it's conscious if it's sufficiently indistinguishable" from human consciousness.

Anywhere something is arbitrary, it's just going to be endless arguments from every "side".

Musk's argument is that not showing any of the content other than the image will force people to instead put the article text content in the Twitter post itself, next to the image. By showing almost no context for a link, it will force posters to manually include more context, and thus people will stay on Twitter longer than when they were generating a bit of context for the embeds (e.g. article title).

> You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product

The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself. Or... iOS?

It is a major inconvenience for users of Google to lose access to Google services, especially if you have years and years of stuff in Gmail or drive or photos or YouTube.

Regardless of the fact that you can find some sort of replacement for any of those things individually, it would be a major stumbling block and disruption for most users to suddenly no longer have access to their email/history.

The average person does not have forwarding or mirroring of all that stuff set up. I posit that that disruption is enough of a deterrent to get users to stop using ad blocking on Google services once the consequences start being applied.

Though that reminds me, I don't quite know what happens to your chrome bookmarks and settings if Google obliterates your profile's account. I assume that merely syncing will stop working, but perhaps more might be disrupted.

There are different kinds of unbearable.

If Musk had simply cranked up the ads to increase revenue, it would have worked / probably wouldn't have hurt the platform like all his other changes. The problem at Twitter (from a short term profit perspective) is that his changes - or rather, what he wanted to do - were not all so simple.

The result will eventually be a mixture of trusted hardware and software, from server to client to GPU to display, that will not display the content if any of that locked down blobby chain is not perfectly as it should be.

Even the concept of "changing the channel" is something to eventually lock down in this way; don't let the users change tabs or modify the window or display state at all until trusted ad content has verifiably finished.

The saving grace is that you'll probably be able to just get up and walk away until it's done, at least for some time.

Given how a Google account or IP address ban or punishment on any of their services can basically annihilate your ability to use any of their services forevermore, including never being able to touch your emails or files ever again, I can see YouTube being very effective with this crackdown.

Especially since they can/do also target any of your secondary accounts, and can also hit family members depending on various backend circumstances that users can't really know about.

> and nothing is stopping them.

Imminent collapse and bankruptcy when they leave due to Amazon's dominant market position. That you can set up a shop anywhere does not mean anything when all of your potential customers are only going to the Amazon digital strip mall.