Bad advice. Donations to Mozilla go to the Foundation to fulfill it’s ‘mission’, whatever it is, whereas FF development is done by Mozilla Corp. which can’t legally take donations. Don’t waste your money.
I’m not overthinking. It is what it is. You can’t donate directly to impulse FF development. But you may buy subscriptions to Pocket/Relay or Mozilla VPN.
That said, I frankly don’t know what Mozilla is up these days, nor I am interested in their survival. As far as I am concerned, they could disappear today and my life wouldn’t change a single bit. I’d prefer to donate money to really useful ORGs on the likes of archive, wikipedia, OSM, Arch Linux, EFF and so on. Today’s Mozilla is just a cash-grab mismanaged scam.
I get it about the corporation issues but do you even dislike firefox? Do you think it would be positive to have one less alternative to chrome? What browser do you use?
I have been using FF for almost 20 years. Left it in 2021. The crappy redesign has been the last straw for me, after few years of seriuos UX/UI decline. And no, I’m not going to waste my time unfucking it using about:config or CSS.
I use Brave and pretty like it. I don’t care what people may think of it or its CEO. It’s a fine browser and the community is way less toxic than Mozilla’s one. I’ll keep using it.
I don’t care (anymore) if Firefox lives or die (it’s doomed anyway, thanks to Mozilla).
It would be better if you could set your preference on the browser once and never have to mess with it again unless you want to have exceptions for specific sites
AFAIK the regulation already says that the “only necessary” should be available with one click. I think the issue is that it’s difficult to go after all the small pages that are breaking the law. The big ones like YT of Google already have the ‘disable all’ button on top, I’m guessing because EU complained.
It doesn’t say that it should be available with one click.
It says that accepting should be just as easy as declining. Which also includes things like not being allowed to have a “greyed out” button to reject while the accept button is big and sparkly.
Yes, I think you’re right. And everything should be disabled by default, right? So the pages that make you do ‘configure -> disable all -> save’ definitely don’t follow the rules.
It depends on the country. GDPR is not a law. It's a framework that countries use to implement national laws. GDPR doesn't say anything about one-click rejection, but some countries added it to their national law.
That headline misses the big problem. It’s not that Google was forced to give up search history data. If Google gets a warrant, they will comply. The real problem is that the justices acknowledged that the warrant was unconstitutional and permitted the evidence anyway. They claim the police “acted in good faith” while violating the constitution, which is a horrifying precedent.
If you’re thinking “alls well that ends well,” because they caught the arsonists who murdered a family of five, I can sympathize with that feeling, but consider that the murderer may have his conviction overturned on subsequent appeals.
The police obtained a warrant for everyone who searched for a thing from Google, and the search information was used against the accused in court. 14 states currently outlaw abortion, and there’s some cousin-fucking conservative prosecutor in Dipshit, Alabama, just salivating over the prospect of obtaining the IP addresses of every person looking up directions to clinics.
I wonder how many companies like Cambridge analytica or TPUSA just have access to these. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some social engineering dark arts underground of pretending to be police and getting this data to study
Not long after Dobbs, someone posted a guide on r/WitchesVsPatriarchy on how to securely find* this information without opening yourself up to potential harm. Terrifying that that’s even a thing that needs to exist.
Can we boycot the companies that do this already. I get the AC IP is nice, I’ve certainly enjoyed my fair share of their games.
But the ad industry is completely getting derailed. What’s next ? Watch a 15s promo video every time you want to open te fridge? Watch a promo video before you can open the door?
Have your walls randomly show you ads?
Stop buying their shit. Regardless of how decent the game is. Punish them for the predatory practices. Demand refunds.
But no. People will likely be outraged, and then next game angry and then the next game they’ll suck it all up and complain about the good all days.
Companies should focus on making in-game advertising appear ‘diegetic’ as opposed to the low hanging fruit of inserting it like a sore thumb.
Had Ubisoft scattered a number of graffiti or town criers in Odyssey’s cities talking about visiting a foreign land for less money the next few days only, where the art direction looked and felt perfectly at home in the world itself and interacting with the hooks alerted users to the promotion details, this would have been way less disgusting to players.
You didn’t have players revolting when Cyberpunk’s 2.0 update suddenly had characters talking about Dogtown which then hooked into trying to upsell the DLC. It fit the world and was something that could be ignored or engaged with as desired.
GTA: Online’s phone calls hooking into paid or new content are another example of doing it better (though their frequency is tuned really poorly).
The problem is most publishers don’t want to spend the extra time and money to fit ads into the worlds players are in. Which is dumb, as testing a really terrible UX that players will revolt on and press will cover negatively is going to shoot in the foot an initiative that would have gone much smoother with a bit of elbow grease and respect for the players.
Especially with the increase in in-game commerce I expect that we will see a spike in in-game advertising over the next few years, and with advances in generative AI that might even end up being tailored to the in game world as well much more often.
But the reactivity of the audience here means that the publishers who do a good job on limiting the degree to which moving in that direction abuses the playerbase are going to end up much better off than the ones that think dumb shit like a popup ad in the game UI during play is a good idea.
Yeah, unfortunately, it is hard for me to hurt their bottom line because I checked out of the series after Origins.
That said, I’ve never sought a refund on a digital copy of a game, but I wouldn’t hesitate if I paid full price for a game only to find out there were in game ads
Same. I checked out of the series back when they started enforcing U-Play use. I can’t understand why anyone would buy any of their games. Ubisoft went mask off a long time ago.
I got the package deal with all of them over the summer and loved origins 😅 been working my way through them all to get ready for the new one. I was thinking I’d go this route of getting it and returning if I saw ads, but based on comments about the company having rape apologists I might need to do some more research before even bothering to take that risk
Haven’t bought an AC since the American revolution one, last thing I bought from them was watchdogs for $5 and it was dogshit so reinforced my no Ubishit rule
I’m pretty certain that I read a comment like this back in 2010 to 2012 on Reddit. Hell it may have been on Slashdot or Digg back in 2008.
As you’ve said, the only way to stop this is for everyone to stop feeding the beast. The problem is that F2P works now in 2023 as a business model, and clearly worked back in 2010 as DDO, and SW:TOR are still chugging along.
I don’t think it is feasible to end these predatory practices unless one can manage to get every single government in the world to outlaw them. Good luck on that.
Well, for one I think we’ve played the sum total of what Assassin’s Creed has to offer, at this point. I haven’t seen Ubisoft bring anything much new or compelling to the table since… AC3? I think? I’ve been doing just fine without it for all these years.
IIRC there were some racing games that actually did show you real ads on billboards and pit walls and so forth, which were updated over the internet. Need For Speed: Carbon did this, I think. I’m certain there are already other similar examples, and you’ll probably find them in something published by EA.
I’m all for giving the finger to the megacorporate publishers who do this, though. I have got so many fuckin’ indie games in my Steam library still, many of which I haven’t played much or at all, a large portion of which are great, and all of which will give me something to do other than put up with what the predatory behavior du jour is (advertisements, subscriptions, lootboxes, battle passes, microtransactions, or whatever the fuck else).
Battlefield games also had billboards. Granted they were torn up, but they were advertisements. Tbh I’m okay with ads if they fit into the game.
Have a game with a TV? I’m okay with ads getting inserted into the fake-TV programming so long as they’re in the style of the game.
Have a game with billboards? Okay, but again, it needs to be in the style of the game.
I’m willing to forgive some level of advertising in games, especially if they’re from smaller studios, they just need to be non-intrusive and fit the style of the game. I’m more forgiving if you’ve put the work and effort into making the ad look and feel like it’s part of the world. An example is if GTA VI had radio ads that were self-depricating and/or self-parodies of the real-world companies advertising in-game.
I’ve been boycotting ubisoft, EA, blizzard, and the like for years. 🤷♂️
(I mean, technically I’ve been avoiding denuvo malware, microtransactions, always online DRM bullshit, and the like, plus bad and / or uninteresting games… but that’s effectively equivalent to boycotting those assholes.)
The movement for free and open source software has not achieved a world in which most people use only FOSS. But it has achieved a world where there is a lot of diversity in technology, including many Android smartphone brands you haven’t heard of.
That does make a compelling campaign slogan. While I assume Musk’s statement should not be taken literally, IIRC he made similar statements about Twitter. Shortly after, there were countless reports of how awful it suddenly became to work at Twitter.
The CEO role is mostly about doing what you are told by shareholders. Last thing you want to do is remove the final limitations of a conscience from the position. An AI for ceo’ing will be optimised to be evil. More evil than the average psychopathic/narcissistic/Machiavellian CEO.
edit: Downvoters might wanna learn to read more thoroughly. I’m saying CEOs have almost no conscience. I’m not saying they have more than a narc/psycho/machi level of conscience, I’m saying they have a tiny tiny scrap of it(rarely), which the AI will not have.
Free, you can serve me ads, I’ll try to avoid them but ok. But the minute I pay for something and you try to give me ads on top, we’re gonna have a problem.
The first cable TV system in the U.S. was built in the late 1940s and had ads from day one since it was created to bring network television to communities with poor reception. Cable has always had ads.
Probably the same case for newspapers, radio, the internet, movies in theatres, gas station pumps etc. Though each new medium we create has a shorter and shorter Time-To-Ad-Platform runway it seems
My parents might have handed me some change to operate the box of newspapers outside the grocery store when I was three or four so I could try opening it. But I’m not even sure if I got to do that.
Newspapers are a long metro ride thing for me. Just never got the hang of smartphones, not in that way that is. Also the interaction is different, and I don’t mean the physical aspects but the way you browse through something with a) a finite amount of information and b) with very few (if any) links. A physical paper comes with an included progress bar. You know, sense of pride and accomplishment and all.
I’d love to buy and read newspaper. Really do. And I don’t even have to commute. But newspaper here are just trash. It’s all about which celebrity cheated who with whom, political propaganda, garbage about crime and some other things. Rarely anything interesting. So I just skip.
“To the extent a response is deemed required, Meta denies that its use of copyrighted works to train Llama required consent, credit, or compensation,” Meta writes.
The authors further stated that, as far as their books appear in the Books3 database, they are referred to as “infringed works”. This prompted Meta to respond with yet another denial. “Meta denies that it infringed Plaintiffs’ alleged copyrights,” the company writes.
When you compare the attitudes on this and compare them to how people treated The Pirate Bay, it becomes pretty fucking clear that we live in a society with an entirely different set of rules for established corporations.
The main reason they were able to prosecute TPB admins was the claim they were making money. Arguably, they made very little, but the copyright cabal tried to prove that they were making just oodles of money off of piracy.
Meta knew that these files were pirated. Everyone did. The page where you could download Books3 literally referenced Bibliotik, the private torrent tracker where they were all downloaded. Bibliotik also provides tools to strip DRM from ebooks, something that is a DMCA violation.
This dataset contains all of bibliotik in plain .txt form, aka 197,000 books processed in exactly the same way as did for bookcorpusopen (a.k.a. books1)
They knew full well the provenance of this data, and they didn’t give a flying fuck. They are making money off of what they’ve done with the data. How are we so willing to let Meta get away with this while we were literally willing to let US lawyers turn Swedish law upside-down to prosecute a bunch of fucking nerds with hardly any money? Probably because money.
Trump wasn’t wrong, when you’re famous enough, they let you do it.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you’re suggesting we side with Meta to put a precedence in which pirating content is legal and allows websites like TPB to keep existing but legitimally? Or are you rather taking the opposite stand, which would further entrench the illegality of TPB activities and in the same swoop prevent meta from performing these actions?
I don’t know if we can simultaneously oppose meta while protecting TPB, is there?
I’m advocating that if we’re going to have copyright laws (or laws in general) that they’re applied consistently and not just siding with who has the most money.
When it’s small artists needing their copyright to be defended? They’re crushed, ignored, and lose their copyright.
Even when Sony was suing individuals for music piracy in the early 2000’s, artists had to Those lawsuits were ostensibly brought by Sony for the artists, because the artists were being stolen from. Interesting that none of that money made it to artists without the artists having to sue Sony.
Sony was also behind the rootkit disaster and has been sued many times for using unlicensed music in their films.
It is well documented that copyright owners copyright to make money, and because they have so much fucking money, it’s easy for them to just weather the lawsuits. (“If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes.”)
We literally brought US courtroom tactics to a foreign country and bought one of their judges to get The Pirate Bay case out the fucking door. It was corruption through and through.
We prosecute people who can’t afford to defend themselves, and we just let those who have tons of money do whatever the fuck they want.
The entire legal system is a joke of “who has the most money wins” and this is just one of many symptoms of it.
It certainly feels like the laws don’t matter. We’re willing to put down people just trying to share information, but people trying to profit off of it insanely, nah that’s fine.
I’m just asking for things to be applied evenly and realistically. Because right now corporations just make up their own fucking rules as they go along, stealing from the commons and claiming it was always theirs. While individuals just trying to share are treated like fucking villains.
Look at how they treat Meta versus how they treat Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub exists only to promote and improve science by giving people access to scientific data. The entire copyright world is trying to fucking destroy them, and take them offline. But Facebook pirating to make money? Totes fucking okay! If it’s selfish, it’s fine, if it’s selfless, sue the fuck out of them!
Of course we should have consistent laws, but which way should we have it? We can either defend pirates and Meta, or none of them, so what are you saying? Unless there’s a third option I’m missing?
Are you really so naive that you think suddenly when Meta is let off the hook governments worldwide will change tack and let Sci-Hub/Libgen/etc off the hook as well?
Like I said elsewhere, I’d be happy to defend Meta in a world where governments aren’t trying to kick altruistic sharing sites off the internet, while allowing selfish greedy sites to proliferate and make money off their piracy.
However, that won’t change if Meta wins this case, it will just mean big corporations can get away with it and individuals and altruistic groups will still be prosecuted.
We are in agreement, but I was attempting to launch a discussion about how we want the laws to actually be applied and possibly how they should be reformulated.
He also said as much in their documentary TPB AFK.
Maybe the issue was they didn’t make enough money? If they had truly been greedy bastards they could have used that money to win the court case? What a joke.
They’re the same issue tho. Piracy and using books for corporate AI training both should be fine. The same people going after data freedom are pushing this AI drama too. There’s too much money in copyright holding and it’s not being held by your favorite deviantart artists.
So why are Meta, and say, Sci-Hub are treated so differently? I don’t necessarily disagree, but it’s interesting that we legally attack people who are sharing data altruistically (Sci-Hub gives research away for free so more research can be done, scientific research should be free to the world, because it benefits all of mankind), but when it comes to companies who break the same laws to just make more money, that’s fine somehow.
It’s like trying to improve the world is punished, and being a selfish greedy fucking pig is celebrated and rewarded.
Sci-Hub is so villified, it can be blocked at an ISP level (depending on where you live) and politicians are pushing for DNS-level blocking. Similar can be said for Libgen or Annas-Archive. Is anything like that happening to Meta? No? Huh, interesting. I wonder why Meta gets different treatment for similar behavior.
I am willing to defend Meta’s use of this kind of data after the world has changed how they treat entities like Sci-Hub.Until that changes, all you are advocating for is for corporations to be able to break the law and for altruistic people to be punished. I agree they’re the same, but until the law treats them the same, you’re just giving freebies to giant corporations while fucking yourself in the ass.
To me it always seems to come back to nobility. Big corpo is the new nobility and they have certain privileges not available to the common folk. In theory it shouldn’t exist but in practice it most certainly does.
The aristocracy never died, it just got a new name.
I mean the US is literally built on the fact that the aristocracy in the US didn’t actually want to lose station, so they built a democracy that included many anti-democratic measures from the Senate to the Electoral College to only allowing land-owning white men to vote. The US was purpose built to serve the rich while paying lip-service to the poor.
“Conservatives” were literally always those who wanted to conserve the monarchy and aristocracy. Those were the things they originally wanted to conserve, and plainly still fucking do.
So why are Meta, and say, Sci-Hub treated so differently?
They are not. Meta is being sued, just like Sci-Hub was sued. So, one difference is that the suit involving Meta is still ongoing.
In any case, Meta did not create the dataset. IDK if they even shared it. The researcher who did is also being sued. The dataset has been taken down in response to a copyright complaint. IDK if it is available anywhere anymore. So the dataset was treated just like Sci-Hub. The sharing of the copyrighted material was stopped.
Meta downloading these books for AI training seems fairly straight-forward fair use to me. I don’t see how what Meta did is anything like what Sci-Hub did.
So ISPs are blocking Meta for their breaking of copyright?
Because ISPs block Sci-Hub.
No, one of them is having governments trying to kick off the internet, and the other is allowed to continue doing what they’re doing and the worst they’ll face is a fine. Not even close to the same, completely disproportionate. If they were blocking all Meta LLMs until they had removed all copyrighted material, maybe we could say the same.
ISPs may block sites to prevent unauthorized copying. It’s not a punishment for past wrong-doing. I’m not sure about the details, I think this differs a lot between jurisdictions. But basically, as ISPs they are involved in the unauthorized act of copying. Their servers copy the data to the end user/customer. So, they may be on the hook for infringement themselves if they don’t act.
Again, I am not aware of Meta sharing the copyrighted books in question. So, I don’t know what the legal basis for blocking Meta would be. If ISPs block a site without a legal basis, they are probably on the hook for breach of contract.
IDK on what basis the sharing of Meta’s LLMs could be stopped. If anyone could claim copyright it would be Meta itself and they allow sharing them. (I have doubts if AI models are copyrightable under current US law.)
In its lawsuit Wednesday, the Times accused Microsoft and OpenAI of creating a business model based on “mass copyright infringement,” stating that the companies’ AI systems were “used to create multiple reproductions of The Times’s intellectual property for the purpose of creating the GPT models that exploit and, in many cases, retain large portions of the copyrightable expression contained in those works.”
Publishers are concerned that, with the advent of generative AI chatbots, fewer people will click through to news sites, resulting in shrinking traffic and revenues.
The Times included numerous examples in the suit of instances where GPT-4 produced altered versions of material published by the newspaper.
In one example, the filing shows OpenAI’s software producing almost identical text to a Times article about predatory lending practices in New York City’s taxi industry.
But in OpenAI’s version, GPT-4 excludes a critical piece of context about the sum of money the city made selling taxi medallions and collecting taxes on private sales.
In its suit, the Times said Microsoft and OpenAI’s GPT models “directly compete with Times content.”
If the New York Times’ evidence is true (I haven’t seen the evidence, so I can’t comment on veracity), then you can recreate copyrighted works with LLMs, and as such, they’re doing the same thing as the Pirate Bay, distributing copyrighted works without authorization and making money off the venture.
I expect ISPs would get into a lot of legal trouble if they did.
The NYT sued OpenAI and MS. a) That doesn’t involve Meta. b) It’s a claim by the NYT.
Why should ISPs deny their paying customers access to Meta sites or sites hosting LLMs released by Meta? These customers have contracts with their service providers. On what grounds, would ISPs be in the right to stop providing these internet services?
Both Meta and ChatGPT used books3, it’s functionally the same type of case.
Why should ISPs deny their paying customers access to Meta sites or sites hosting LLMs released by Meta? These customers have contracts with their service providers. On what grounds, would ISPs be in the right to stop providing these internet services?
In the countries where ISP blocking happens, its usually because a copyright holder has sued and demanded blocking at the ISP level and has won in court. Then, the government begins the path of working with ISPs to block the site.
Unless you think most governments that do this do it arbitrarily? No, they do it because a copyright holder sued, like the New York Times has. The NYT has not demanded ISP-level blocking, but that does not mean that they couldn’t. I can’t speak to their choice not to do so other than it seems that companies only save that for truly altruistic groups, and rarely do it for other big corporations.
IDK why you believe this. Breaking contracts is illegal. You get sued and have to pay damages. Some contracts, in some jurisdictions, may allow such arbitrary decisions. In other jurisdictions such clauses may be unenforceable.
altruistic groups
Well, that’s not something that copyright law cares about very much. Unfortunately, this community seems very pro-copyright; very Ayn Rand even. You’re not likely to get much agreement for any sensible reforms; quite the opposite. I don’t think arguing that Meta is doing the same as TPB is going to win anyone over. It’s more likely to get people here to call for more onerous and more harmful IP laws.
Both Meta and ChatGPT used books3, it’s functionally the same type of case.
FWIW, no. the NYT case and this is different in some crucial ways.
“Straight-forward” may be too strong regarding these books. If they inadvertently picked up unauthorized copies while scraping the web, that would definitely not be a problem. That’s what search engines do.
The question is if it is a problem that the researchers knowingly downloaded these copyrighted texts. Owners don’t seem to go after downloaders. IDK if there is case law establishing that the mere act of downloading copyrighted material is infringement. I don’t think there’s anything to suggest that knowing about the copyright status should make a difference in civil law.
In any case, researchers must be able to share copyrighted material, not just for AI training but also any other purpose that needs it. If this is not fair use, then common crawl may not be fair use either. IDK if there is case law regarding the sharing of copyrighted materials as research material, rather than for their content. But I find it hard to see how it could not be fair use, as the alternative would be extremely destructive. So even if the download would normally be infringement, I doubt that it is in this case.
Eventually, we are only talking about a single copy of each book. So, even if researchers were forced to purchase these books, all of AI training would yield only a few extra sales for each title. The benefit to the owners would be very small in relation to the damage to the public.
Piracy distributes power. It allows disenfranchised or marginalized people to access information and participate in culture, no matter where they live or how much money they have. It subverts a top-down read-only culture by enabling read-write access for anyone.
Large-scale computing services like these so-called AIs consolidate power. They displace access to the original information and the headwaters of culture. They are for-profit services, tuned to the interests of specific American companies. They suppress read-write channels between author and audience.
One gives power to the people. One gives power to 5 massive corporations.
I wish we could be talking about the power imbalances of corporate bodies exercised through the use of capital ownership, instead of squabbling about how that differential is manifested through a specific act of piracy.
The reason we view acts of piracy different when they are committed by corporate bodies is because of the power of their capital, not because the act itself is any different. The issue with Meta and OpenAI using pirated data in the production of LMM’s is that they maintain ownership of the final product to be profited from, not that the LMM comes to exist in the first place (even if it is through questionable means). Had they come to create these models from data that they already owned (I need not remind you that they have already claimed their right to a truly sickening amount of it, without having paid a cent), their profiting from it wouldn’t be any less problematic - LLM’s will still undermine the security of the working class and consolidate wealth into fewer and fewer hands. If we were to apply copyright here as it’s being advocated, nothing fundamental will change in that dynamic; in fact, it will only reinforce the basis of that power imbalance (ownership over capital being the primary vehicle) and delay the inevitable (continued consolidation).
If you’re really concerned with these corporations growing larger and their influence spreading further, then you should be directing your efforts at disrupting that vehicle of influence, not legitimizing it. I understand there’s an enraging double-standard at play here, but the solution isn’t to double down on private ownership, it should be to undermine and seize it for common ownership so that everyone benefits from the advancement.
It’s the opposite. Closing down public resources would be regulatory capture and that would be consolidation of power.
Who do you think can afford to pay billions in copyright to produce models? Only mega corporations and pirates. No more small AI companies. No more open source models.
I wonder if piracy could even benefit these corporations in the long term? Do people who pirate games and movies in their teens and twenties frequently go on to purchase such things when they’re older? I honestly don’t know, but I would love to see a study. I certainly have seen people make that claim.
There you go. Piracy helps. I’m sure game companies and TV producers and so on feel the same way quite often. People who pirate are free marketing for them because they’ll tell other people about the product.
Further, piracy can be reduced or made to not impact you as much if you have the right business model.
Louis CK (before he wrecked his career) famously made millions selling his comedy special through his website for $5 a pop with no Digital Rights Management. You were able to download a copy and keep it forever.
With no DRM, this meant that copies of his special were able to be pirated easily. Prior to releasing this way, he had previously gone on piracy websites and made comments under his pirated specials politely asking people not to pirate, but understanding if they did it because they were too poor.
Despite massive piracy of his special, enough people were happy to pay $5 for a DRM-free copy of his comedy special and if I recall correctly me made $5 million+ on that first special he released like that. It was a massive hit and people were encouraging each other to buy a copy since it was so cheap and respected you as a consumer.
Gabe Newell wasn’t wrong, a big part of piracy always was a service problem.
On December 10, 2011, C.K. released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Like Hilarious, it was produced independently and directed by C.K. However, unlike his earlier work, it was distributed digitally on his website, foregoing both physical and broadcast media. C.K. released the special for $5.00 and without DRM, hoping that these factors and the direct relationship between the artist and consumer would effectively deter illegal downloading.
Also, it’s important to point out that the one that empowers people is the one that is consistently punished far more egregiously.
We have governments blocking the likes of Sci-Hub, Libgen, and Annas-Archive, but nobody is blocking Meta’s LLMs for the same.
If they were treated similarly, I would be far less upset about Meta’s arguments. However it’s clear that governments prioritize the success of business over the success of humanity.
“To the extent a response is deemed required, Meta denies that its use of copyrighted works to train Llama required consent, credit, or compensation,” Meta writes.
Cool, so I can train my AI on Facebook and Instagram posts and you’re fine if I don’t consent, credit or compensate you either, right Meta? It’s not even copyrighted in the first place, so you shouldn’t have a single complaint.
These the guys that notoriously violated emissions standards and created software to hide the fact from testers? Some pretty spectacular claims you got there. Would be a shame if someone… doubted your reputation.
Oh dang, apologies to the hive mind. Volkswagen bad, evil employees, actively attempting to destroy the earth, cannot be deterred or corrected. We good now?
Do you really think the people in charge and responsible for that decision are the ones who got fired? Do you really think that’s how accountability works in giant mega corporations?
Yeah, I actually went and looked it up and found that many of the executives responsible resigned or got fired, and some went to prison, but let’s not let that interrupt our circle jerk.
Not only that, a lot of the board ended up in prison, which didn’t happen for the other automakers that also had illegally high emissions (all of them).
VW was pretty much the only automaker who got held accountable for their crimes, and took the wrap for everyone both in terms of the law and public opinion.
Some others broke emissions standards by a much greater amount (cough, FIAT-Chrysler cough Toyota cough Hyundai/KIA).
TV never targeted commercials directly at “Dave Smith, likes fishing and interracial porn, lives in Chesterfield, searched for new cameras recently”, but they still operated.
Sure, but also beside the point? I’m talking about the effects of changing an underlying mechanism of a live system, not of comparing two different systems that developed over time.
Here are my guesses: sites that have enough unique visitor count and data to work directly with advertisers may not fall. Small sites that rely on Adsense networks for revenue would no longer have revenue. A small (though non-zero) number of people/groups would continue on and seek alternative funding. Without ad networks, many tech companies fall.
I’m not saying that I’m against any of this, either. In my view, there’s a large chance that nothing of real value (to a society) would be lost. Maybe we can bring web rings back.
Ad networks could still work, they just wouldn’t have the targeting data to work with or the usage data they can sell as an entirely unrelated business model. They were profitable before the current big data push, there’s no reason they couldn’t continue to be profitable without that big data again
Do you think our economy has changed since big data targeted advertising? Your example is the same as Blackmists’, essentially. We’re 30 years down a path and flipping a switch like that would have widespread repercussions. Again, I’m not saying the repercussions shouldn’t happen.
There’s no reason they can’t just use the page you’re on and a very rough “location from IP address” (e.g. just the country, and sometimes not even that), to give the advertisers something to aim at. If you’re on a camera website, you’d see camera shops in the UK, etc, rather than a load of weird buttplug shaped things from Temu.
How would the advertisers get location IP if they can’t have the data?
Edit: whoops, got trigger happy. Anyway, I’m totally behind taking back control from advertisers. They have an outsized influence in society. I also think there are unforeseen consequences of your blanket statement suggestion that haven’t been considered, hence wishing for a simulation. Again, if advertising is less targeted, cost of customer acquisition goes up and most business models break.
Your browser would technically have to request the advert anyway. So they’d have your IP regardless if they served you an ad. They just wouldn’t be allowed to push it and your browser fingerprint to 1000+ “data partners”.
A better addition might be to have a dedicated advert tag in HTML, that disables any JS within that block, so the only thing they can do is give you a chunk of HTML/CSS/images with no ability to fingerprint.
Free sites already operating out of the goodwill of some random admin and making single-digit ad revenue anyway <– you are here
Porn aggregators
SEO filler
SEO filler
Wikipedia
End of list
The only ones whose business model would truly be threatened and whose loss would be problematic are newspapers.
OTOH newspapers accidentally cornering themselves in a “freemium” business model has fucked journalism over so bad I’m not sure how it could even be worse.
Free websites like the ones we are on barely exist anymore anyway, because how the fuck do you “compete” in the “free marketplace of search indexing” when some russian troll is burying you to page 5 of google’s search results and you can’t reach anyone via facebook or twitter without paying thousands?
Craigslist struck the first blow against newspapers by taking away classified ad revenue. The death blow came when Silicon Valley taught people that “information wants to be free,” which meant that no one wanted to pay for local news anymore. That led most local newspapers to collapse, while the few that managed to survive --apart from a handful of “legacy” papers-- mostly did so at the cost of turning into click-bait sites or outrage machines.
We have to bring back the idea that people should be happy to pay for local news.
They can just run ads without all the tracking bullshit and data collection like they do on every other medium with free ad supported content like radio and television. Somehow I can watch TV and listen to the radio for free and they manage to stay running without monitoring my every move.
Might be less profitable for them but so be it. Just because tracking helps their business doesn’t mean it is justified.
The name/address of the terrorism suspect was actually given to police by Apple, not Proton. The terror suspect added their real-life Apple email as an optional recovery address in Proton Mail. Proton can’t decrypt data, but in terror cases Swiss courts can obtain recovery email.
Thanks for posting this, it’s important people catch more than just the headline. This is clearly another example of proton delivering on their promise. Fucking headlines gonna headline.
I mean, Proton was the necessary link. Not even like I fault them, people should realize email or any other 2-sided activity has 2 (or in this case, 3(+?)points of weakness.
Dunno, just hate the way we lie without even lying nowadays. Mot sorry that Rubes get rubed
There is no lying here. Adding real world identification that can be correlated to other accounts is the fault of the user. That’s being said, I’m glad Proton follows the letter of the law.
I mean… If Proton had no way of knowing your recovery email, it would be pretty pointless to set one up. If they do have a way of knowing it, they are bound by swiss law to give it up. No company is above the law, they have always been very transparent on that matter.
I would upgrade to windows 11 if it wasn’t full of ads, I had two computers accidentally upgrade after mis-clicking an upgrade prompt and the experience was bad enough I reloaded the whole computer.
Not only that, but it doesn’t make sense to have a task bar on the bottom of an ultrawide display. I’ve been putting my taskbar on the left side for over a decade, and now you just can’t do that for some reason…
That’s what confuses me. There are absolutely ads, it’s just fake installed apps. But amount of ads are exactly the same as windows 10. They’re in all the same places, same types (mostly the start menu). Shit you could say 10 has more since that awful edge desktop widget doesn’t exist by default on 11 as far as I’m aware.
Do people just have such deeply debloated windows 10 installs that they’ve forgotten what windows 10 is actually like? Maybe it’s because it’s been 1.5 years without a major update that reinstalls all the garbage automatically?
My start menu is a glorious thing with zero ads. No programs are listen in those shite block tile things. Removed them all and shrank the start menu to be the same size and feel as ptevious windows versions. In fact, I never even use the start menu for anything anymore but typing CMD.
They killed it for me the day it started searching the web instead of the system. I just navigate to the install folders like I always have years and run programs with the actual exe.
I think the key is I simply never interact with the OS outside of opening the search bar or PowerToys Run to type in the program I want to open, clicking on desktop shortcuts, or going into Control Panel. All the places they try to sneak ads in I literally just don’t use because there are other, faster ways to get there.
There aren’t more ads than 10 because MS has added those ads to 10 with each update over the years.
Weather bug in taskbar is an ad server. You click on it and it brings up bing stories to get you to click them and see ads. The search bar now has a little daily decoration. Click it for ads. The search menu has bing news- again to bait you into clicking one and seeing an ad.
Ah, that likely explains it. I know when installing I hit “no” on anything that sounds remotely marketing related and I turned off search and weather because they just don’t add any value and I like a clean screen. So I think the only ads I get are the small, unobtrusive ones on the lock screen, which I can’t say I’m bothered by in the slightest. I barely even notice them since it isn’t like I stare at the lock screen.
What? I was expecting registry edits from your description. Actually hidden shit. Those examples are all right where you should expect those settings to be.
That really isn’t that many settings, and while it would be nice to have a collected “ads” settings page, those are all located sanely. You just need to pay a modicum of attention to where the ads are on your system, then go to the associated settings page.
Do people in general just not ever go through the settings when they first get something new? I feel like that’s the equivalent of buying some flat packed Ikea furniture and complaining about how shit it is after you throw away the instructions and can’t figure out how it needs to be put together.
Do people in general just not ever go through the settings when they first get something new?
Basically, yeah. Lots of people just mindlessly click next to be finished as fast as possible instead of looking at the page and seeing what it turns on by default.
This was my thought as well. Pretty sure I already have all of that turned off but I would have done that as part of the install and brief customizing of the UI. Can’t say I ever used a guide or anything, or even considered it unusual for modern software.
I had to purchase new computers for my wife and son. So W11 home edition it is. $12 for for the family pack of startallback and the PC’s run as they should. It’s so stupid that I have to do it, but it clears out all the annoying shit so it’s worth the few bucks.
I have been using classic shell/open shell since Win8 anyways. My screens look the close to the same since Win7 and I am not changing anytime soon.
They successfully reverted adding a custom toolbar to the taskbar. I create one for each of my cloud drives and one for the desktop. It turns a folder into a menu.
I organize my files in nested folders. It allows me to open files/programs much faster than searching using the mouse hover on the folders
For example:
Clouddrive^research/2023/ file.
Older files or less frequently used ones are buried deeper in a folder tree. Actives ones are very shallow so it’s fast to find them.
They (finally) changed this in a patch a few months ago. W11 still sucks, but at least it can now do this one thing that all the previous versions could do.
You can move the “start” button to the left but you can’t move the entire taskbar to the right or left to be a vertical stripe going down the side. I don’t do it but a right or left vertical bar makes much more sense than horizontal given today’s wide and ultra wide monitors.
Good catch. I somehow missed the second part of the comment I was replying to - I was referring to the ability to finally ungroup taskbar items in W11.
For that matter, they said the reason for the new centered taskbar was to be better for touch screens. Centered on the left or right, sure, but centered on the bottom? That’s probably the least convenient spot for a touch interface, especially on a laptop.
I don’t like start button being on the center when using mouse, but come on, when using touch screen on my laptop I don’t really care where it’s at exactly, as it takes roughly the same amount of time to move my finger to any place on the screen.
The keyboard gets in the way a bit for me when things are lower on the screen. Haven’t tried it with a tablet, but I would assume that keeping controls near the sides, where you’re already holding the device, would be beneficial there, too.
The update for grouping just came out a few weeks ago on 11. I know this because when I started a job 5 months ago as a regional analyst it was pure hell with windows 11 until grouping became available. I swear it knocked 10% productivity off the top.
you can now set taskbar to ungrouped (unless full) now in win11, as of one of the recent monthly updates. still can't move the taskbar to the left side (my preference on wide screen displays), though.
And honestly the never combined feature is really really buggy, and just downright ugly with the way it resizes the bars based on the amount of text in the window’s name, even when there’s empty space left on the taskbar. If you have your file explorer open to c:/ the bar for the File Explorer is ridiculously tiny, for no good reason. If you want uniform, clean, consistently sized tasks that only shrink to make room when the taskbar is full, forget it.
It also just gets stuck. A lot. If you have a full bar and it needs to combine, then close a couple windows to free space, a lot of times it won’t do what it’s supposed to do and “ungroup” the remaining windows. It’s very inconsistent about when and how it chooses to combine, uncombine, and shrink things.
It just barely works well enough that I’ll grit my teeth with it on my work computer, because I don’t have a choice about that, but I’m not abandoning the Windows 10 taskbar for this at home.
This is also my main reason for not switching and let me tell you this issue is NOT fixed. Do not upgrade to 11. You don’t have an option to use small taskbar icons, making the ungrouped tabs massive. Plus they resize themselves constantly. I use 11 at work and the only workaround as of now is third party stuff that either costs money, is a resource hog, or both.
Windows 10 came with Candy Crush ads in the start menu (on my machine), it’s not any better than W11. Don’t get me wrong, I use W11 and think it sucks more overall, but W10 does the same crap.
Your company is abusing it’s employees. Imagine if it was something other than exercise how abusive it would be.
Except it’s not, because it’s exclusively about health. It’s a discount health insurance companies offer to companies, and the company uses that money to encourage employees to be healthier.
Next up they will be forcing you to a plant based diet or maybe straight to veganism. Slippery slope towards forced sterilization or some other Radical procedure that saves them money but is not necessary.
Your insurance benefit offered after health milestones isn’t 30-130% of your salary though
Running 30km (18.6 miles) in a month earns a bonus equivalent to 30% of their monthly salary. Moving up to 40km (24.8 miles) pushes that to 40%. Hitting 50km (31 miles) earns 100%, and the top tier of 100km (62 miles) is 130%
If the company is operating in good faith, they will be making “reasonable accommodations” for disabled workers.
The top tier of this program requires about 30 minutes of running per day. I’m sure we can find a similarly intensive workout to meet the needs and capabilities of disabled workers, numbnuts.
Nothing in the article even suggests they are operating in bad faith.
The company is basically asking them to voluntarily extend their work day by 15 to 30 minutes, but instead of offering time-and-a-half they would be entitled to as “overtime”, they will double, or more than double their wages.
That roughly 30 minute period of activity is worth about 16 times their hourly pay.
The year end bonus was canceled in order to enforce this “healthy” change during the coming months. The workers lost something they were supposed to get because some asshole wanted them to be “healthier”. There’s a considerable chance that the company will distribute less money to the workers that way.
It’s not about keeping workers healthy, it’s about saving money, that’s bad faith.
Not all of these programs explicitly require running with no alternatives for people who can’t run.
Most that I’ve seen are usually just based on “exercise minutes” depending on how your device tracks those. The Apple watch is really lenient and I get 50% of my daily goal just walking to work.
Bonuses should not be expected, or they’re not bonuses. I get that. But making them available only to those able to do some physical test is discrimination.
Because it is a transparent attempt to pay less bonuses and I am betting exploits some condition in the insurance and/or tax code to get a better deal for the corporation.
How about companies just pay the end of the year bonus and not make a big deal about it?
I’m not attempting to excuse the behavior by any means (no matter how much it sounds otherwise).
Just explaining that this is behavior we can and should expect from an authoritarian state with no regard for human rights. Hopefully that clarifies things a little bit.
Or it’s because insurance companies offer discounts for companies that offer these programs. The employer uses some (or all) of that money to encourage employees to be healthier which A. makes them healthier. B. saves the insurance company/insurance money. C. helps boost productivity. and D. makes everyone overall happier.
As reported by Guangzhou Daily, Lin Zhiyong, the chairman of a company that makes paper for various devices, told his workers that their year-end bonuses had been canceled. Instead, the money will be distributed across each coming month, and how much employees receive will depend on how far they run.
He literally canceled their bonuses and said “lol go run for it dipshit”
Imagine getting your bonus cancelled and told to go do more work to get it back.
You don’t have to run. My lazy ass clears 6k steps each day just living life. That’s counts as walking, which is worth 1/3rd steps but still makes it a mile a day. I would be getting 100% bonus with literally no life change. Sign me up! Meanwhile, I never bonused working retail because people stealing carts crushed my EBITA every quarter.
Go work in a fucking Chinese paper factory all day for not enough money to live, and then go have part of your salary taken away and be told to do more work.
Maybe after having a second of fucking realisation you won’t come back and spout such dumbarse nonsense.
You obviously are a fucking idiot because a bonus isn’t your salary shithead. Also this is the most trivial nonsense I’ve ever heard of to bonus 100%. I live in America where I’ve never once gotten 100% of my goddammit bonus fuckface. Being told that you get all of it for wearing a pedometer is literal childs play to me. Get the fuck out of here with this bullshit baby agression and jerk off or something instead.
I fucking wish I worked in a Chinese paper factory and got bonuses! Like seriously, get a goddammit clue. If that sounds like hard work to you, then you’ve literally never seen one, and you must have baby soft keyboard hands.
Looks much nicer than my workplace. I also work with Chinese manufacturers and know how many holidays they get off too, so unlike you, I’m not actually ignorant to your average Chinese persons working environment and make believe its some hellscape. Our middle class is collapsing while theirs has grown substantially. Their government does some crazy shit but we’re no exception.
It’s the only explanation for why you came in acting like a piece of rank shit in a polite conversation, then believed telling someone to work in a Chinese paper mill would be an insult. Now that I know it’s because you are a hateful bigot, I just feel sad for you.
If they want to be a part of employees health and well-being they can pay health insurance or start the day with a hit sessions or yoga or tai chi.
They absolutely shouldn’t be encouraging, through their bonus scheme, people to do work associated activities in their spare time.
I understand your view I just don’t like that this is how they’ve chosen to encourage such a thing.
My work has a marathon every year, during work hours on a voluntary basis and logs training miles for competition. Never affects earnings or personal time.
techspot.com
Top