281–290 of 348 posts
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I pay my telecom for 500mbit up and down, what other infrastructure must be paid for to support torrenting?
Each individual seeder is paying for electricity, storage, and internet access to make those torrents available to you.
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> The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can. It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down. All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax…
It's not a problem if you don't go to the parts of the web that have ads. I spend my time online on places like GitHub that operate as ad-free commission-free gift economies. Environments that have ads, have nothing that I want. I don't care about what happens in them any more than I care about what happens in shantytowns. Why do you care? What pulls you into those dark Internet spaces?
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That's a fair point, but I care also care a great deal about society as a whole, and I feel like the ad model is damaging to those around me. I quite frankly don't get why TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook and others are allow to manipulate people to spend hours doom scrolling, just to show ads. TikTok even knows this is bad, because that's not how they operate in China apparently. I see very few ads, my da…
Society is full of predators. In the beginning, people got eaten in the jungle, and today they get monitored to learn their desires and then shown pictures of things they want. How do you know you're not being manipulated? Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you. Power is focus which means people are disempowered by getting them to focus their attenti…
I'm not sure "you should stop caring about other people" is the right message to take from...anything, really.
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Please be aware that at least one of these settings will log you out of all your accounts (I suspect it may be the one related to fingerprinting, though I am not certain). If, as I am, you are signed into 10-20 essential accounts, including work accounts, it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state, even after you have reversed some of the settings outlined h…
> it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state Creating a backup before making any changes would solve that.
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This is equivalent to about:config and works on the regular firefox mobile version too: chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
Didn't work for me just now. When there have been ways in the past the non-nightly version wipes the changes each restart unless they are already exposed in settings I think.
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He doesn't explain how it works though, or why it is private. Only that we should trust them.
Incidentally this was published just now! https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/ He also linked to this technical explainer, though I don't think that's necessarily written for a broader audience: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...
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Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising. Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content. That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all. If it doesn't stay opt…
> If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to cla…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...
Here's the Firefox CTO explaining the motivation behind the experiment controlled by this setting, and the measures taken to ensure that it actually is private: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...
And unsurprisingly, he just lies. Here's the crux of the bullshit: "It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting." No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago. What the advertisers want is all sorts of ot…
Conceptually, it's similar to cutting out a coupon from a newspaper to get a discount; the store then knows that that newspaper ad led to the sale. (Though of course, in the coupon case they can also see which customers saw those ads.)
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Wouldn't this be a case where the iron law of bureaucracy applies? Meaning that the people who are already there and are invested in their 'mission' would resist any kind of reform of the organization because the primary task of any such organization is protecting itself from outsiders?
Yes, but only because the Mozilla Foundation has the same problem. If it was just the corporation then the foundation could decide to replace it entirely.
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I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.
HN does not have extensive server costs. Last I saw (~10 years ago) it was running off a single machine in a closet. Apparently they've since moved to two machines at a hosting company.