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

Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 329 posts

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#51

Post by kzrdude »

L_226 wrote: post #35
galuggus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made fuckOff.yt to make people feel better about this. Ublock or pihole are better solutions though

FWIW I have a pihole running on my local, but my Samsung TV still shows YT ads because I cannot disable cdn.samsung.com or the TV will not work, and I think the ads are being served via this domain to my TV....

Connect your own media center. I use an RPi 4. It can play netflix and youtube in Kodi, for example. Admittedly there are many minor compat issues, of course.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#52

Post by kzrdude »

Kelteseth wrote: post #41
L_226 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I have a pihole running on my local, but my Samsung TV still shows YT ads because I cannot disable cdn.samsung.com or the TV will not work, and I think the ads are being served via this domain to my TV....

Get yourself a Nvidia shield. It has no advertisement build in and even can turn on and off the host TV. Also, I would advise you to disconnect your smart TV entirely.

I just have an RPi 4. The protocol that can turn off and on the tv there is just called CEC and you can make simple scripts with cec-client to trigger it. (Kodi also already uses it.)

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#53

Post by samhh »

oytis wrote: post #23
sydthrowaway wrote: post #13

Has anyone noticed 2-3 ads per YouTube video (especially midstream)? It’s getting ridiculous. There’s got to be a stop to this madness.

On an Android phone you can use NewPipe app from FDroid repository, it gives you YT without ads (and you can use it in background for free too)

Vanced is also really good. Supports YT Music too.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#55

Post by tchalla »

johnchristopher wrote: post #43
Red_Tarsius wrote: post #17

They are kind of doing it already e.g. I hate when ads exploit classical music for trivial purposes. Whenever I hear Libiamo ne' lieti calici now my mind instantly fills with pizza ads. And once an association is made, it doesn't go away. Ads attach themselves to positive memories like parasites. Whenever you think back to your first kiss, a nice family moment, a cherished memory of going out with friends – here they…

This is something that I had been venting about for years to anybody I met. There's that (Coca-Cola I think) ad that ends up with teenagers watching the sunrise after a party night, they sit on a roof in what I remember could be suburban California. The ad was in the style of All I need from Air. These are very delicate and precious moments when you are a teenager. But now it's Coca-cola telling people how to feel. F…

A movie scene played out repeatedly- “A person dying and his last moments aka for a cigarette”. There are so many of these that go back to manufacturing consent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informat...

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#56

Post by rubatuga »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #13

Has anyone noticed 2-3 ads per YouTube video (especially midstream)? It’s getting ridiculous. There’s got to be a stop to this madness.

Yeah it's called YouTube Premium. Think like a Netflix subscription but for YouTube. Google probably A/B tested different versions of YouTube to see which one generated more YouTube Premium subscribers. It turns out that the higher $$$-generating code (i.e. driving Premium subscriptions) is the one that bypasses Safari's adblocking engine.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#57

Post by csomar »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #13

Has anyone noticed 2-3 ads per YouTube video (especially midstream)? It’s getting ridiculous. There’s got to be a stop to this madness.

I'm getting 3 ads for short (3 minutes) videos, and a dozen for 1 hour videos. Last time before I ditched the Youtube app, many of the ads can't be skipped and some of them were actually two successive ads.

And for some reason, I can't pay for Youtube from my country.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#58

Post by dmacedo »

toxik wrote: post #38
DocTomoe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids want to emulate what they see, especially in "fun" entertainment. My grandfather wanted to become a circus clown. My dad talked about western-style indigenous Americans. My He-Man/GI-Joe-drenched childhood was filled with dreams of becoming a warrior/soldier. And today the heroes of "fun" entertainment are YouTubers and Twitch streamers. The permeation you experience has been happening for a long time, only now…

I absolutely never go around pretending like I'm narrating a movie, no siree, not me.

Narrator's voice: They did!

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#59

Post by filchermcurr »

On the bright side, smart speakers aren't even a little bit essential, so it's easy enough to just not buy them if this starts happening. I don't think the value proposition of an always-on device connected to a vast advertising network is very high to begin with. Throw in subliminal advertising and you'd have to be very... dedicated... to want such a device.

If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into our TVs and phones that are plugged in at night. Those are much harder for people to give up.

Maybe somebody will jump in with pod beds that hide us from our devices at night. Like a giant active noise cancelling headphone cup to sleep in. Smart enough to let us hear little things like fire alarms or panicked screams, of course.

Post reply on HN