Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Great Cannon has been deployed again

cybersecurity.att.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 470 posts

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#31

Post by csunbird »

andrewprock wrote: post #13
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist. I use Firefox's built Enhanced Tracking Prevention, that some sites call "ad blocking" but in reality it is super easy to have ads that don't get blocked by it, just make them non-creepy.

On the contrary, people pay for Netflix. People also pay for the ad-free upgrade to Hulu. Speaking to text websites, people are also using Brave, though I don't know how that experiment will work out in the end.

When it is reasonably priced, people will pay for legal alternatives. If there was a Netflix for paid websites, which would provide subscriptions in a convenient way to all websites in bulk, people would pay for that. Current options are:

> Manage subscriptions of 10 plus websites manually

> Pay by your privacy

It is clear that both options suck, so people opt in to ad blockers instead. Legal options are just overpriced for the demand.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#32

Post by Waterluvian »

e2le wrote: post #27
myself248 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or "Why should I care about security, I have nothing of value" folks. You do have something of value: Bandwidth.

It always bothers me when I hear people say this, it's everyone's responsibility that their devices don't become part of a botnet or worse used to take part in an attack against infrastructure that we're increasingly dependent upon that either makes for an unpleasant time for people or threatens lives.

99.9% of devices are owned by someone who has absolutely zero technical ability to fulfill this responsibility. So I'd say the responsibility needs to be satisfied another way. Maybe it escalates to the ISP.

I mean, unless we start issuing Internet Licenses the way we do Driver's Licenses.

In the early 2000s my cable provider would outright shut off our Internet if my dumb brother or my dumb self got us all virused up.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#33

Post by nradov »

e2le wrote: post #27
myself248 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or "Why should I care about security, I have nothing of value" folks. You do have something of value: Bandwidth.

It always bothers me when I hear people say this, it's everyone's responsibility that their devices don't become part of a botnet or worse used to take part in an attack against infrastructure that we're increasingly dependent upon that either makes for an unpleasant time for people or threatens lives.

A responsibility is meaningless if most people have no practical means to exercise that responsibility.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#35

Post by mattmanser »

Someone1234 wrote: post #8
brenden2 wrote: post #2

This is a good counter example for whenever you find yourself in an argument with anti-adblocker folks.

But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist. I use Firefox's built Enhanced Tracking Prevention, that some sites call "ad blocking" but in reality it is super easy to have ads that don't get blocked by it, just make them non-creepy.

Most of these sites offered a completely ad-free version for many years, then switched to an advertising model after they'd cornered the market.

There's no ethical reason for us to "pay" these scummy actors, including Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, after they destroyed all viable alternatives by giving away their products free and THEN add advertising.

As you intimate, there's also nothing intrinsically necessary to the advertising model for it to be served by different domains, with 3rd party cookies and third party javascript. Nor is it necessary to have auto-play videos, popups, etc. Even someone fairly benign like the Guardian is now infested with up-sells and adverts if you look at it without an adblocker.

So the sites brought it on themselves.

You want to support their ads, go ahead, but don't ask us to come up with the alternative model. You have no moral high ground to preach to us from, all these sites used a bait and switch to get on top. Right now if I look at facebook every 2 or 3 stories are adverts, where 5 years ago it was far less, and for google a huge chunk of the top of the results page, up to three results worth, are adverts.

None of these are clearly marked imo, nor are they necessary, they're making billions in profit. They can do it because they monopolized the market.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#37

Post by dhimes »

Waterluvian wrote: post #25
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist. I use Firefox's built Enhanced Tracking Prevention, that some sites call "ad blocking" but in reality it is super easy to have ads that don't get blocked by it, just make them non-creepy.

I think the primary argument line is something along: 1. Online ads today are so bad they must be blocked 2. But blocking ads blocks revenue for sites we like 3. So we should pay for them more directly 4. But I'm not about to set up 100 different monthly subscriptions. These corporations are not trustworthy and I cannot monitor this many bills. 5. We need a solution to simplify money -> content -> creator transfer 6.…

Serve content related ads and don't track. I'd be fine with that.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#38

Post by Gh0stRAT »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #15
fredley wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet here you are. I'm interested how you would perceive something that might supercede the internet by being better (than a boiling toilet fueled by greed), ignoring network effects?

Something similar to the web in the late 90s / early 2000s?

The Internet of the early 2000s was consumed by greed. What changes would you make to its replacement to prevent the exact same pattern from repeating?

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#40

Post by lallysingh »

romaaeterna wrote: post #26
fortytw2 wrote: post #6

I didn’t see this anywhere in the article (maybe I missed it), but because this utilizes the Great Firewall, it’s undoubtedly done by the Chinese government, right?

No. "Behind the Great Firewall" is another way of saying "served from China". Perhaps -- or even most likely -- it is the government. But this is hardly a smoking gun. There are plenty of people on the mainland that hate what's going on in HK, and who are not the government.

Also the Great Firewall isn't one box admin'd by a single actor. It's a set of network firewalls managed by different network entities to fulfill legal obligations. It could be one of them acting alone.

Then there's the question of how separate the operating company is from the Party..

Post reply on HN