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Google vs. the Open Web

interpeer.io

181–190 of 207 posts

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to reach official authorities is a good idea. I will quote and extend part of my call to action I did in an other thread - ban Google all together in your personal life. No chrome and no excuses. Stop the bullshit or leave this profession. Use startpage, duckduck or whatever for searching. - develop with and for firefox and friends only, introduce usability problems for chrome - employ the same tactics as goog…

I'm not well versed on scrapers. How do you fill their storage with /dev/random? Did they employ this tactic on competitors at one point as with the rest of your psot?

gmail, google storage, contacts, content farms, Google slurps everything it can find. /dev/random would be something for storage. For other stuff you would fake data. No, not all the tips listed have been take from their playbook.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#182
post #177
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those definitions fit the original blog post. It's not satirical or ironic, it's not aggressive, it's not trolling, it's not off-topic, it's not even a "comment". It's not poor quality (imo). It's an opinion piece. My definition was from urban dictionary btw, the first entry, maybe it sorts differently for different people.

"Google is Attacking The Open Web!" is 100% aggressive. Whether it's trolling or not depends on how people react to it and not its content per se. And here we are in this ridiculous subthread. So, yeah, it was trolling too. Come on. I repeat: it's a complicated subject and a real problem, and a sincere but potentially flawed proposed solution. It deserves serious discussion and not a bunch of yahoo's throwing bombs a…

Seems almost like you just read the headline

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#183

I mentioned this in the other WEI thread and I’ll do it here again: Instead of simply flailing our collective arms around complaining about an evil corporation, has anyone written to the respective competition authorities (such as the FTC in the US or CCI in India) about the potential anticompetitive effects of this proposal?

Trying to reach official authorities is a good idea. I will quote and extend part of my call to action I did in an other thread - ban Google all together in your personal life. No chrome and no excuses. Stop the bullshit or leave this profession. Use startpage, duckduck or whatever for searching. - develop with and for firefox and friends only, introduce usability problems for chrome - employ the same tactics as goog…

> - employ the same tactics as google.

This is incredibly hypocritical. I would never want to work with or for, or employ, or be friends with or associate myself with someone who blatantly displayed this level of hypocrisy and lack of integrity.

This comment is also clearly violating the HN guidelines - it's not intellectually interesting, it's naked political activism.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#184
post #160
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> show a popup urging users to download firefox, provide a link to download or page with more explanation. Tell that you detected that their current chrome has security and privacy risks and that you recommend to take action immediately. Average user is easily scared into action. If I recall correctly, this was Google's approach with Chrome.

Google's approach with Chrome was to pay shareware developers to bundle it in the installer and expect users wouldn't opt-out.

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Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#185
post #35
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just silly, there exist frameworks like selenium that allow you to run any browser of choice and emulate actual user behavior(clicks, keystrokes). If they go further the emulation layer will have to be moved higher, above the virtual machine running the browser for example. The truth is, this has nothing to do with scraping, scrapers will find a way. This is to stop the majority of people from using ad block.

Hi, Selenium & Appium creator here. I've always been on the test automation side of things. The fact that these tools were also useful for scraping was an interesting coincidence to me. These days I make physical robots that are the "real world" equivalent of Selenium or Appium with a stylus that actually taps the screen and presses buttons. To websites and apps, taps and clicks are real, not emulated. Primary use is…

Wow, thank you for the great software :-) And the physical robot approach is very interesting. Of course it introduces physical world limits (you can't run 1k tests in parallel to load test the site unless you have 1k robots), but still it is very cool.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#186
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a win. The fake clicks will not convert to sales, and the advertisers are seeing a lower ROI on their ads and will go and spend their budget elsewhere in the future. All ad networks will try to filter out as many fraudulent clicks as possible, because they are not optimizing for the maximum revenue today but for the revenue in the long run. But yes, of course this is not just about filtering out fake clicks.…

Interesting explanation, I totally agree on the click-per-pay part. But how would you track the benefit of ads with paying-per-impression? I know its less expensive, but according to the article paying per view seems to be a quite big part of the ad business.

The article is just straight out wrong about "Google’s ad network charges per impression". The author clearly doesn't know anything about the area, made up some shit on how things could work, and just wrote it into their article with no fact checking.

You're right that attribution and measuring ROI is way harder and less precise for ads sold by impression than by click. That's why they're not the common form of advertising, especially on these kinds of ad networks. But for cases where the ads are per impression, the concerns about fraud would be exactly the same. It's not about a crawler accidentally generating impressions, it's about bots deliberately doing so.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#188
post #132
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, if it isn't US based and if it isn't using US politics as a guideline (like banning russian patches). I have lost a big part of my former trust and want for writing OSS this last few months and one thing I have learned is that if those two can't be answered with a resounding no it is a project I won't ever contemplate even though I'm neither American nor Russian.

Unless banning Russian patches is somehow required by US law, why would we ban Russian patches? https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/5/22215588/github-iran-sanct... As a side note, many people on our development team that has worked with us since 2013 have spoken Russian, coming from Ukraine, Armenia, Russia, etc. Many of them continue to work together despite the war their governments are conducting. We are for empowerin…

Well, I can't give you a rational answer since it is irrational in my opinion, but denying patches from Russians and Russian companies happen, including on the Linux Kernel mailing list:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/russian_foss_contribu...

But thank you for your reply.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#189
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My semi uninformed theories: 1. Someone could set up a server that proxies WEI required requests to regular clients. The client initiates the process, the request goes to the middleman, the middleman makes the proper WEI authorized request, gets the response, passes the response back to the client. 2. The private key could leak somehow, and so, software can forge the required signature. I'm not holding my breath for…

My guess is that on desktop, the endgame will involve implementing Easy Anti-Cheat levels of anti-tampering into the browser to prevent anyone from proxying through an automated Chrome instance or whatever. On Android, Google already has SafetyNet or Play Integrity, they can already refuse if the app or operating system has been modified

I agree that ultimately, this is what we're going to end up with. This is the only outcome that makes sense politically, and business-wise.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#190
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are this paranoid about someone showing ads or collecting your information, maybe Brave isn't the best choice, with their history of getting caught with both hands in the cookie jar. Especially since you already use Firefox elsewhere. Mozilla also collects information btw.

I almost never see meaningful detail regarding what is collected and what it’s used for. Is Google’s collection equivalent to Brave’s, or to Firefox’s? I’d be very surprised if there were not significant differences between what is collected here. Comments like this draw a false equivalence between the three.

That's a bit of a strawman since I don't compare the three. I only compare Firefox and Brave. Of course Google is collecting the most data out of those and the tracking is worse, especially since they have other data points to compare it with.

However, according to my logic using Brave + Firefox simply must cause more data to be collected than using only one of the two, no?

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