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Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

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Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#401

Post by gosub100 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #355
gosub100 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do they have locks on the doors? They know there are these things called criminals. MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.

Car door locks are wafer locks and can be defeated sometimes with a flathead screwdriver. Security is about "good enough" though so that's usually sufficient. Most of the worms of the early 2000s worked by exploiting vulnerabilities that Microsoft had already found, patched, and deployed , but users, including giant businesses just didn't install the patches. Bonzai Buddy and the days of the toolbar didn't happen bec…

> the only difference between spyware and a perfectly valid and runnable program is intent

This is true if you completely ignore that spyware was impossible to remove without specialized removal apps that were funded by volunteers, not Microsoft.

Telling me that locks are pickable is completely irrelevant and avoids the point I was making.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#402

Post by gosub100 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #123
gosub100 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do they have locks on the doors? They know there are these things called criminals. MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.

Most locks are trivially defeatable and easy to force. Heck, there's often a large window right beside a suburban door. Break the glass, open the door. Locks are only there to deter crimes of opportunity and make it more likely you'll actually notice a theft in a timely fashion.

And Microsoft didn't even bother to do that much. Spyware was able to embed itself in any windows installation for a solid decade, just by visiting a website. removing it required at least 30m of updating and installing specialized tools and was well out of reach of the average user.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#404

Post by colechristensen »

reaperducer wrote: post #307
colechristensen wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for YouTube so all I get is paid creator promotions for VPNs and Squarespace unless it's someone being sent a free thing in exchange for a review Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.

Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder. But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows you creator promotions. You are literally paying to see ads, then telling people not to do the same. Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade. I see no difference between a blogger pushing a VPN and Google showing an ad fo…

>Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here.

I've gotten rid of 90% of the ads by paying for YouTube, the rest of the ads I skip by jumping forward in the video which is annoying but only a little OR by being legitimately interested in what the person has to say if they're reviewing a product which has been in some way paid for. I'm also just fine with someone promoting their own merch or patreon which I am sometimes actually interested in.

The subtlety I don't get why you're missing is I now have very much reduced ad exposure and the rest I do have is entirely controllable.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#405

Post by gosub100 »

9rx wrote: post #131
gosub100 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do they have locks on the doors? They know there are these things called criminals. MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.

> Then why do they have locks on the doors? Because the customer eventually decided it was worth paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years from the first car having optional door locks to locks becoming a standard feature. > MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade. More like half a decade. The first real instance of spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working on their anti-s…

The time they "began" working on it is irrelevant. Were you even alive during that time to experience it?

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#406

Post by terminalshort »

mrguyorama wrote: post #369
bluGill wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago.

The scam in online advertising is far more sinister; Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user who is just about to buy your product and then claim a conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a hundred people to look at your product who weren't already interested. This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy advertisement. A billboa…

If this theory were true companies would see no revenue impact from ad buys on Meta. Then they would stop buying, and Meta would go out of business. You need to face the facts here that no matter how much you hate Meta, it isn't a scam.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#407

Post by SoftTalker »

Noaidi wrote: post #92
fouronnes3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the yearly tech support I do with my parents at Christmas will not one day converge to an outright ban of the internet. I am now demoing the level of sofistication of AI powered scams, telling them that it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice. I am scared and this close to setting u…

> I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me apart from a clone. I have done this already and convinced a friend to do it after her father fell victim to a scam where he was convinced the sheriffs department wanted him to pay off a fine in gift cards. I am also concerned that one might steal a trove of texts from someone and plug it into AI which could mimic the writing…

Your friend set up a passphrase with the sheriff's department?

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#408

Post by terminalshort »

ferguess_k wrote: post #93
macNchz wrote: post #16

Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in reven…

Just curious what password manager I should use? I'm considering using a password manager instead of the Google ones and gradually switch all passwords to generated ones instead the one I usually use. Searched through HN for the last 6 months but found just too many posts about PM.

IMO MFA (or a passkey) is much more important. Most online accounts I have I couldn't give a rats ass if someone got in. (Not that they would because there would be no monetary value to them). Best to focus on those that are important and set MFA on them. If they don't offer MFA, find someone else who does. MFA + crappy password is better than strong PW w/o MFA, because even a PW manager can be leaked. This isn't to say you shouldn't care about secure PWs, but IMO it's the less important factor here.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#409

Post by nostrademons »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #383
nostrademons wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Internet will, sometime in the near future, just get shut down. That's been what actually happens in countries that are undergoing civil unrest or war like Russia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Israel, Myanmar, etc. And it's fairly likely civil unrest or perhaps even war may spread to an increasing fraction of the developed world too. So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything that I thi…

Keeping an offline copy of the Wikipedia is fine, but if "the Internet just get[s] shut down" I would think we'll all be more worried more about not being able to use our bank accounts, have medical providers see our records, etc.

We're back to whatever forms of trade you can source locally in that case, but that should not surprise anyone who observes regions that are actually in crisis, because that is how the economy functions in those regions. You do your best to do something nice for your neighbors and they do their best to do something nice for you, and anything that requires global trade or supply lines simply doesn't happen.

Having a copy of your own medical records could be critically important if suddenly your friend who is a doctor is now your doctor because there's nobody else.

Money tends to be worthless is such situations anyway - it's backed by the full faith and credit of a government that best case no longer cares about you and worst case no longer exists. So you aren't going to worry about your bank account, nobody will accept credit or debit anyway.

There is a whole lot of other data on the Internet that can be very, very useful in such situations. Even just having a few hundred hours of collected kids TV shows means you can sit them down in front of Bluey while the adults do stuff that is critical for survival. Knowing how to build a smelter and bellows out of clay that you can find locally means you can restart metal production in a matter of days rather than thousands of years. Knowing what the local plant species are and which are edible might keep you from starving. Knowing how to scavenge parts and wiring, as well as what their datasheets are and how you need to hook them up, means you can fix broken electronics and potentially create new ones, which gives you continuing access to knowledge.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#410

Post by SoftTalker »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #205
fouronnes3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the yearly tech support I do with my parents at Christmas will not one day converge to an outright ban of the internet. I am now demoing the level of sofistication of AI powered scams, telling them that it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice. I am scared and this close to setting u…

I already setup a secret passphrase with my family. My mother is particularly naive when it comes to what's online. Of course she is going to get abused. A passphrase is cheap. If you never need to use it, so what?

And if she got a desperate, pleading call from "you" and "you" claim you can't remember the passphrase, then what?

These scams are imaginary. Yes they have probably happened but it's far more likely that your mother will get scammed by a "legitimate" financial advisor than some stranger using an AI to impersonate you.

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