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How to fight the surveillance economy

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61–70 of 71 posts

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#61
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG. I think you want a browser running on a servet you access over a VNC, which will pipe back just the parts of the screen that have updated.

x2go is perfect for this. I used to run an instance on AWS, but I just keep one at home now. It pipes everything through a PIA vpn.

How does x2go compare with xpra?

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of the surveillance economy stems from the fact that millennials don't really have any extra money to spend. They can't pay for things like the Boomers could, so you have to make money from them in other ways by trying to secretly convince them to buy things with what money they do have. If younger people had money maybe they could pay for quality newspapers and websites. But all the wealth has been…

There's a math inequality here. Mike the Millennial is strapped for cash, and so won't pay for content directly. Alice the Advertiser wants to convince Mike to buy her products, so she places ads with Nick the Newspaper. Nick gets money from Alice, to provide Mike with content for no cost. But doesn't Alice expect a return on that advertising spend? Doesn't Mike ultimately pay Alice more than he would have if he had…

I was with you all the way to the end...subscriptions will always have to be higher than ad revenue to the publisher. Take facebook as an example. In 4Q2018 their average revenue per user in the US was just shy of $35. If no advertisers paid anything to FB and instead lowered the cost of their products accordingly then yes Mike saves some money...BUT, if he wants to continue to use facebook...facebook will have to charge Mike at least as much as what they were getting from the Alices, likely much more. There is no way Nick can provide a newspaper without either advertising or subscription fees. It's the basic rub of the modern internet, at least content providers and as of now advertising for a "free" service is the dominant approach.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#63
post #12

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> The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. This is sad because advertising is a poor monetization scheme. For instance, let's say you make $0.10 per user through ads. Now let's say you want to increase the price to $2.00 per user. Then oops, you can't, because ads don't allow you to make that much for any given user. So depending on your pr…

If you just divide total ad revenue by number of users you’ll find that users are worth on average tens of dollars per year to google or Facebook. For heavy users you might be worth hundreds or thousands.

I don't think that's how ads scale: people can spend their money only once; and the brain's working memory for stuff it sees in ads is also limited.

You can only throw so many ads to a person before conversion starts to saturate.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#65
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x2go is perfect for this. I used to run an instance on AWS, but I just keep one at home now. It pipes everything through a PIA vpn.

How does x2go compare with xpra?

As far as I can tell, xpra uses the X protocol, which is laggy over links under 10 Mb/s.

X2go uses the NX protocol, which is designed for slower links, so it works better across the internet.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#66
post #9

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On my country at least there is a trend that only registered costumers have promotions and discounts, but what really happens is that the price of the things go up and the registered costumers pay the 'normal' price. I'm not buying anymore on theses type of stores (markets and restaurants mostly), but this is keeping growing difficult because every other week more and more business are starting to ask for my 'credent…

Use fakes. In the US there's a famous song called Jenny with the phone number 867-5309 in the lyrics. Everyone over age 30 knows that number by heart, and a fair number younger too. Simply give (your local area-code)-867-5309 and there's a very good chance that someone's already signed up with that number. If not, I'll complete the signup with that number and whatever bogus name comes to mind. Jacob Blues, 1060 W Add…

Shouldn't the first name always be Jenny for 857-5309? Otherwise the next person is screwed when the cashier (potentially) asks for a name.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#67
post #28
post #17

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That is the wrong attitude. Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does. There's nothing wrong pushing links to the article to platforms like HN, Reddit, etc, but the source shouldn't be medium. If you write a piece like this, it deserves to go on a platform without trackers; otherwise it's a bit hard to take it seriously. I'm aware that medium.com might bring in a broader audience and that it's s…

> Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does. Another thing is that we should both educate those who don't know how to shield themselves - and make it easier to be protected. The latter is related to network protocols and processes and to client (and server) software. Can we simplify Internet?

I think think in the future the lightning network will be great for subsidising cost for hosting open source, non profit internet infrastructure. We already have projects like Tor and FreeNet, but without micropayments they are not scalable solutions. Lightning network still needs about 10 years to become practical for every day use though.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#68
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just divide total ad revenue by number of users you’ll find that users are worth on average tens of dollars per year to google or Facebook. For heavy users you might be worth hundreds or thousands.

I don't think that's how ads scale: people can spend their money only once; and the brain's working memory for stuff it sees in ads is also limited. You can only throw so many ads to a person before conversion starts to saturate.

True, the people worth thousands are likely people who have high disposable income or click on ads on searches like "DUI lawyer in flint MI" where clicks cost hundreds.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#69
post #7
post #3

> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider. What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting.

i think they are referring to vpn services that don't require you to create an account with name/contact/etc. For instance, the one I use, they create a bitcoin wallet, once that wallet receives coins, it generates a random string username and random string password, and that is the entire "signup" process.

If it's not too much trouble which VPN would this be? I know of some that offer crypto payments but a real user recommendation is always welcome.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#70
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think they are referring to vpn services that don't require you to create an account with name/contact/etc. For instance, the one I use, they create a bitcoin wallet, once that wallet receives coins, it generates a random string username and random string password, and that is the entire "signup" process.

If it's not too much trouble which VPN would this be? I know of some that offer crypto payments but a real user recommendation is always welcome.

I don't recommend it since it's a security-sensitive topic and I don't know anything about their backend or their exit nodes or their custom vpn client... but to answer the first question i use Private Internet Access.
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