39 ms·

There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small s

There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) and some other groups. This group of critical people figured that out and started to hack into these machines to fake ratings. They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it. I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them). Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia.

erdii 5y ago
You mean something like AdNauseam? https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ Edit: it's an adblocker that is supposed to click on EVERY ad that it blocks.
- divbzero 5y ago
  What GP describes would be stronger than AdNauseum. Instead of sending clicks indiscriminately for every ad, you would send clicks for high quality content.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    That'd just end up costing the high quality content providers money. Ads wouldn't just get cheaper for them. On the contrary, clicking only on trash, and having the high quality content have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio would have the desired effect. Maybe.
    - turbinerneiter 5y ago
      The idea is not so much of clicking on high quality content ads, but sending visits to high quality content pages and click on the ads of those pages, to get them more money. Would obviously stop working if the sales after the ad click are not made. But, hey this isn't a gameplan, this was just a "what if" :D
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        That could work, or indeed it could get them dropped quicker because they have a high fraud rate :) I'm fully on board with the AdNauseam model which fucks about indiscriminately. The ad industry can burn.
        mrjin 5y ago
        Cannot agree more. Since the the advertisers have that much to spend, let's make them to spend more for nothing. Also by doing so, it will literally put enough noise into the data those trackers collect and renders the user profiling useless and effectively protecting us from being tracked. If we only click ads on high quality contents, those content owner might benefit from it in short term but in long run it most likely going to back fire and make them penalized as for sure there is going to be counter measures. If we simply click every ad indiscriminately, there is no way to tell or they have to penalize everyone which almost equals to do nothing.
      - monkpit 5y ago
        > to get them more money Wouldn’t they just lose money? Ad clicks are not valuable to the businesses themselves. Only to the ad companies.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      >That'd just end up costing the high quality content providers money. I always click on Taboola bitcoin scam links for that exact reason. It's like scambaiting an algorithm.
    - ElFitz 5y ago
  - a_imho 5y ago
    Last time I checked you could configured click frequency in AdNauseum.
- cnxsoft 5y ago
  Maybe that's where all the invalid clicks came from last year...
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  I think it wouldn't be about the ads, but the visit tracking. Like, block GA from seeing your visits on trash sites, but allow when it's a high quality post/content/source, so we skew the numbers for high quality content
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    That's actually very interesting. Is there any extension that blocks analytics selectively?
    - FalconSensei 5y ago
      AFAIK, no. You would need to manually add exceptions by domain
gonzo41 5y ago
Untill your last paragraph I was thinking you were going to say "so let's lead from the front and let the trackers see the real internet."
hadrien01 5y ago
What's the name of the movie? I'll add it to my watchlist
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  Free Rainer
  - kyazawa 5y ago
    This movie sounds great and I would love to watch it. It's a shame there's no legal way to watch many international movies like this if you are in the US. I make a point of watching a non-US film on every international flight I take - I find it to be a unique opportunity to watch interesting non-US movies with English subs. I have discovered two excellent oddball comedies from in flight movies (Die Goldfische from Germany and Le Grand Partage from France), but when I tried to rewatch these films with others in the US, I discovered it was basically impossible. There must be so many other great movies from around the world we are missing out on.
    - muglug 5y ago
      It's called "Reclaim Your Brain" in the US and you can buy/rent it via Apple TV.
Semaphor 5y ago
> which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) That is incorrect, they do have to pay (once per household). But if you get BAFÖG (student loan/social benefit mix that require you and your parents to be below a certain income bracket), you don’t.
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  I know that very well, I had to pay it because there is no BAFÖG for foreign students. Just felt it might not be an important enough detail to explain BAFÖG to the international audience.
  - rusticpenn 5y ago
    You could have called them and they would usually give you an exception. Not sure if that situation has changed now.
hkai 5y ago
I can't quite understand this. By "exploiting" you simply mean targeting ads? The real harm seems to be from the tech giants censoring speech and policing payments, but what's the harm that someone targets a pair of shorts that I might like or show an ad for a conference I might be interested in?
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  I.e. ads, facebooks feed, endless scrollers like 9gag -> they like to use dark patterns and exploit tricks against the human mind to keep and guide your attention. The harm if targeted ads depends on your viewpoint. A targeted ad might serve you something you were looking for anyway, or it might manipulate you into spending on something you don't actually need. I.e. look at Instagram influencers, showing off their fake perfect live, making the viewer feel small and then try to buy the same happiness by buying the same product. At best, ads are information that you need, at worst, they use psychology to manipulate you.
  - hkai 5y ago
    Seriously, you're worried about someone spending more time on their phone or spending more money on goods and services? Spending their own money — not the public money? That's what freedom is to you? Not the freedom to talk to whoever you want, say whatever you want or pay whoever you want?
    - turbinerneiter 5y ago
      I have no clue where you derive any of these things from. I certainly never said any of it. I never even made a claim a out freedom. I was talking about how ads, tv programming, trackers and such have a tendency to create a positive feedback loop, which leads people towards less quality and mindless consumption. And about a fun idea from a movie, to break this feedback loop and replace it with another one, that promotes higher quality content. You then started talking about a different topic and are now accusing me of not being interested in free speech.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"large scale AdWords fraud." Be carefull - fraud is a crime. But I am under no obligation to provide AdWords any data, let alone true and reliable data. Considering the tracking and spying, and my legitimate interest in privacy, there is no room for fraud argument here. PS: this would be probably a Hoax
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Fraud would involve financially benefiting from it - if you don't benefit I don't think it would count as fraud in most countries.
  - yunohn 5y ago
    Where did you get this notion from? That’s absolutely not true, and there are many acts that can be illegal without benefitting from them. I don’t think AdNauseum users would be prosecuted, but you’re still wrong. source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud
    - throwaway2048 5y ago
      lots of acts can be illegal, but that does not make them fraud.
  - lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
    In England and Wales, all three types of fraud covered by the 2006 Act have as substantive elements of the offence a requirement that a defendant intends to either "make a gain for himself or another" or "cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss", where gain and loss are defined as only referring to "money or other property". Note also that the offence is framed in terms of intention to gain or cause loss. Even if no material gain or loss happens, the intention is what matters. (The equivalent mental element for theft in England is that one dishonestly intends to permanently deprive someone of the property being taken.) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35 This applies to online ad 'click fraud' in both ways—if a publisher fraudulently clicks on adverts to make money, that'd potentially be fraud to make a gain for themselves. If a competitor clicks on adverts to get their competitor to lose money on pay-per-click, that'd potentially be fraud to cause a loss to another. I can't speak for jurisdictions other than England and Wales but I'd be surprised if a fair number of other jurisdictions didn't also define fraud in a way that covers both gain and loss scenarios.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Is it the Simpsons or Seinfeld where in one episode one of the characters gets a Nielsen box that is used for measuring tv viewership and they can’t leave the house for fear of shows being canceled if they’re not home to watch it.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Happens in Family Guy too.
- hotsauceror 5y ago
  They did something similar in “Roseanne.” The Connors were selected to be a Nielsen family and Roseanne made the family watch nothing but PBS, documentaries, etc the whole time. She wanted to hack the ratings so that over time, regular folks like her family would get exposed to a better class of information.
- marvion 5y ago
  And ALF in 1987 S02E05
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    I want to believe that you just remembered that, like if the top of your head. The idea that some die hard Alf fan just made they way past my post on hacker news really puts a smile on my face.
mortenlarsen 5y ago
The movie is "Who Am I (2014)".
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  I meant Free Rainer, didn't know that who am I had similar themes. Is it good?
  - mortenlarsen 5y ago
    Oh. I must have remembered wrong then. Maybe I mixed those up. I think it is worth watching. Edit: Note: Free Rainer also goes under the name "Reclaim your brain"
belter 5y ago
Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf, or do not have a Radio or TV? Gives you the most boring TV News in the world, plus 600 movies per year nobody wants to watch, because they are horrible? But they collected the tax and they have to spend it, as the German actors guild is worst than a cartel? :-) https://www.german-way.com/germanys-tv-tax-the-debate-over-the-rundfunkbeitrag/ https://www.german-way.com/germanys-tv-tax-the-debate-over-t...
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  Not a big fan of the GIS either, but my stance is not as extreme. I see benefits, but there is problems as well. It could be a good system if there was a proper reform and if you get politicians out of the system.
- MrGilbert 5y ago
  > Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf [...] That's not correct. If you are deaf, you get a reduction - if you are blind, you get a reduction. If you are deaf-blind, you don't pay at all. If you are already receiving financial help because of your blindness, you don't pay at all.
  - belter 5y ago
    You are right about it, did that change recently? According to the reference below it depends on the degree of deafness or blindness...if you can still hear or see something still have to pay... https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/buergerinnen_und_buerger/informationen/menschen_mit_behinderung/index_ger.html https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/buergerinnen_und_buerger/info...
- matzab 5y ago
  Deutschlandfunk alone is worth it imho
- geraneum 5y ago
  I personally prefer boring news backed by quality journalism and funded by people rather than sensational, outrageous and superficially controversial news! If I want the excitement I watch a drama or action movie. I think the news articles/pieces work like clickbait; the more head-turning they get, the more viewers they acquire which results in higher profits.
cblconfederate 5y ago
.
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  What even gives you the idea I am saying that? Did I say it? Nope.
einpoklum 5y ago
Do you remember the name of this movie? Might it have English subtitles?
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  Free Rainer is the one I'm referring to.
viraptor 5y ago
> Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. You may like the "Google will eat itself" idea. https://www.gwei.org/index.php https://www.gwei.org/index.php
- NmAmDa 5y ago
  "202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google." Nice cosmological time scale idea
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Isn't this just investing the results of ad fraud into Google? Probably a profitable idea, but I'm not seeing the "Google eating itself" aspect.
  - byecomputer 5y ago
    According to their numbers they netted $400,000 worth of Google, essentially for free. Mind, that hasn't been updated in close to a decade; nowadays their 819 shares would be worth about $2.4 million.
- vincentmarle 5y ago
  > Google Shares owned by GWEI: 819 Those 819 shares are worth $2,371,005 now
- kzrdude 5y ago
  That's art!
cm2187 5y ago
Don't modern internet-connected TV boxes snitch on what people are watching? Surely we don't need a sampling anymore? Just thinking that the elderly population is probably the least likely to use those boxes (though I am not even sure of that), whereas they constitute the (dying) core of traditional TV viewership.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- conradfr 5y ago
  You know a connected TV / set-top box is on a channel but you don't know how many / which persons in the house is in front of it.
  - yissp 5y ago
    How long until they start putting cameras in them and doing facial recognition?
    - gruez 5y ago
      Put tape over it?
      - jobigoud 5y ago
        They could put an IR camera right next to the remote sensor. Since it's behind a glass that is opaque to visible-light you wouldn't even know the camera's there, and if you put tape on it your remote wouldn't work anymore.
        gruez 5y ago
        >Since it's behind a glass that is opaque to visible-light you wouldn't even know the camera's there If it's opaque to visible light how does the camera produce an image? >if you put tape on it your remote wouldn't work anymore. Not really? You just have to be more careful placing the tape. Besides, nowadays many smart TV have app remote controls, or RF-based remote controls so the IR sensor being blocked is a non-issue
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Closi 5y ago
> They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it. > I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them). I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all. A few personal examples: * On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best, 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime' for this marketing. * One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's core really just targeting women and telling them that they should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares? * While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of death before every youtube video. * My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags, tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be. Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.
- Igelau 5y ago
dreen 5y ago
I think very few actual people click on ads. Ad exchange platforms get majority of their revenue from impressions anyway.
atoav 5y ago
As someone who has been in one or another meeting with German TV stations I can assure you this is not completely far fetched. The people deciding what is running at these stations are of the mindset (a translated quote): > Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them and then they will serenade about how they would "love to have a bit more sophisticated things", but as they are the only ones who really understand their audience, they cannot allow this, although they support the values of the 68 generation etc. pp. From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.
- mattmanser 5y ago
  Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix got rid of ratings? All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them. It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash. I don't want to read about an existential crisis after programming all day, I want someone to hit something with a big sword and get the girl.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    > It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash. I feel the same way. However I force myself to read things that will better me once in a while anyway. I too want to hit things with a big sword (without the pain of getting hit), and get the girl (without cheating on my wife), but the world including me is better if I do something else anyway. Which is why I do sometimes read a complex math book.
  - q-big 5y ago
    > Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix got rid of ratings? > All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them. This rather shows that ratings do work, but are used wrongly for giving recommendations: If you want to create suggestions for a user, in many case the wrong answer is "suggest what has really high ratings", but rather "given the ratings that this user gave and the films that he watched, what will he also like." The fact that these documentaries get high ratings (the same might hold for art house films) shows that there is some (niche?) audience which really loves this kind of films, but not that "John Doe" will love it, too.
jseigj43 5y ago
Do you have any links or references to that? It's fascinating.
kervantas 5y ago
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810868/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810868/
PaulHoule 5y ago
There is the Nielsen system in the US and I wonder if it is the other way around. That is, in reality, nobody has watched MTV since 1994 but Viacom bribed a Nielsen family to tune a TV to it and keep it there.
kin 5y ago
So you want more targeted ads for tech savvy people? I wouldn’t give ad tech that much credit. Many tech savvy people have cut the cord and watch TV through streaming. Anecdotally, I watch Hulu. Hulu knows so so so much about me yet zero of the ads are targeted. They very much have this capability (engineering resources) but due to a number of reasons I can only assume (network contracts, ad bids) it just probably isn’t going to happen. I would love if I could have an ad blocklist cause one more Progressive Ad will drive me bonkers.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  I don't live in the ad tech world, so I only vague know what is interconnected. Do the tech giants just sell info back and forth to each other? For example, When I watch youtube on my Roku, if im not signed in, does roku still aggregate what I watched on youtube, could that be sold to Hulu, for ads when I watch that on the same tv?
  - tyoh 5y ago
    I work in the CTV ad-tech space. Viewership data is highly guarded by every company. It's how every company is trying to differentiate themselves from each other. So, no, YouTube and Hulu etc wouldn't share information. Ad data is known by the DSP that serves the ad (if the company doesn't serve their own ads), but viewership data is secret as a competitive advantage.
Simplicitas 5y ago
What an awesome idea! :-)
ipaddr 5y ago
I don't block ads. I remember what the internet was about to become before ads stepped in. Everything of value was going to be pull behind paywalls. Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase. Those purchases are logged to a real name/address. You end up with bigger privacy leaks. People will still be tracking you the way they are now. And at the credit card level. As an adult in the first world I can afford to pay for adfree solutions. Most people can't. Ads level the playing field.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I don't think the playing field is disleveled without ads. Wikipedia has no ads. If you're willing to handle ads, they should at the least be untargetted.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Agreed.
- hollerith 5y ago
  Your personal prosperity depends on a prosperous online ad industry; doesn't it?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    The last time I worked in adtech was 2012.
- McDyver 5y ago
  While that speculation is plausible, another view would be that companies would offer quality content without tracking users and invading their privacy (how many paid services still flood you with ads?), and possibly free alternatives would start to come up. From your point of view, free open source is something that wouldn't exist
  - ipaddr 5y ago
fnord77 5y ago
What’s the name of the movie?
michaelcampbell 5y ago
> Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Data poisoning for something the scale of Google I fear would be ineffective to the point of laughability, sadly.
lgats 5y ago
Exactly like https://syntheticmessenger.labr.io/ https://syntheticmessenger.labr.io/ Though, I would say this can actually hurt publishers in the long run
hammock 5y ago
Hacking democracy (ratings voting system, whatever) to indirectly effect a supposedly benevolent unilateral outcome? Sounds familiar.
- jedberg 5y ago
  It's not exactly hacking democracy. Democracy implies every gets a vote. This is P hacking small sample sizes.
  - hammock 5y ago
    So it's engineering falsified scientific conclusions then. Still sounds familiar.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them) Believe it’s Scott Galloway who said advertising is a tax on the poor and technologically illiterate.
mdoms 5y ago
There's a Family Guy episode where Peter does the opposite.
smilbandit 5y ago
digital idiocracy
Uhhrrr 5y ago
This is funny to me, because there's an American movie where Danny DeVito manipulates TV ratings to get his own (worse) shows on the air: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087979/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087979/

erdii 5y ago

You mean something like AdNauseam? https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ Edit: it's an adblocker that is supposed to click on EVERY ad that it blocks.

divbzero 5y ago
What GP describes would be stronger than AdNauseum. Instead of sending clicks indiscriminately for every ad, you would send clicks for high quality content.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  That'd just end up costing the high quality content providers money. Ads wouldn't just get cheaper for them. On the contrary, clicking only on trash, and having the high quality content have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio would have the desired effect. Maybe.
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    The idea is not so much of clicking on high quality content ads, but sending visits to high quality content pages and click on the ads of those pages, to get them more money. Would obviously stop working if the sales after the ad click are not made. But, hey this isn't a gameplan, this was just a "what if" :D
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      That could work, or indeed it could get them dropped quicker because they have a high fraud rate :) I'm fully on board with the AdNauseam model which fucks about indiscriminately. The ad industry can burn.
      - mrjin 5y ago
        Cannot agree more. Since the the advertisers have that much to spend, let's make them to spend more for nothing. Also by doing so, it will literally put enough noise into the data those trackers collect and renders the user profiling useless and effectively protecting us from being tracked. If we only click ads on high quality contents, those content owner might benefit from it in short term but in long run it most likely going to back fire and make them penalized as for sure there is going to be counter measures. If we simply click every ad indiscriminately, there is no way to tell or they have to penalize everyone which almost equals to do nothing.
    - monkpit 5y ago
      > to get them more money Wouldn’t they just lose money? Ad clicks are not valuable to the businesses themselves. Only to the ad companies.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >That'd just end up costing the high quality content providers money. I always click on Taboola bitcoin scam links for that exact reason. It's like scambaiting an algorithm.
  - ElFitz 5y ago
- a_imho 5y ago
  Last time I checked you could configured click frequency in AdNauseum.
cnxsoft 5y ago
Maybe that's where all the invalid clicks came from last year...
FalconSensei 5y ago
I think it wouldn't be about the ads, but the visit tracking. Like, block GA from seeing your visits on trash sites, but allow when it's a high quality post/content/source, so we skew the numbers for high quality content
- skinkestek 5y ago
  That's actually very interesting. Is there any extension that blocks analytics selectively?
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    AFAIK, no. You would need to manually add exceptions by domain

gonzo41 5y ago

Untill your last paragraph I was thinking you were going to say "so let's lead from the front and let the trackers see the real internet."

hadrien01 5y ago

What's the name of the movie? I'll add it to my watchlist

turbinerneiter 5y ago
Free Rainer
- kyazawa 5y ago
  This movie sounds great and I would love to watch it. It's a shame there's no legal way to watch many international movies like this if you are in the US. I make a point of watching a non-US film on every international flight I take - I find it to be a unique opportunity to watch interesting non-US movies with English subs. I have discovered two excellent oddball comedies from in flight movies (Die Goldfische from Germany and Le Grand Partage from France), but when I tried to rewatch these films with others in the US, I discovered it was basically impossible. There must be so many other great movies from around the world we are missing out on.
  - muglug 5y ago
    It's called "Reclaim Your Brain" in the US and you can buy/rent it via Apple TV.

Semaphor 5y ago

> which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) That is incorrect, they do have to pay (once per household). But if you get BAFÖG (student loan/social benefit mix that require you and your parents to be below a certain income bracket), you don’t.

turbinerneiter 5y ago
I know that very well, I had to pay it because there is no BAFÖG for foreign students. Just felt it might not be an important enough detail to explain BAFÖG to the international audience.
- rusticpenn 5y ago
  You could have called them and they would usually give you an exception. Not sure if that situation has changed now.

hkai 5y ago

I can't quite understand this. By "exploiting" you simply mean targeting ads? The real harm seems to be from the tech giants censoring speech and policing payments, but what's the harm that someone targets a pair of shorts that I might like or show an ad for a conference I might be interested in?

turbinerneiter 5y ago
I.e. ads, facebooks feed, endless scrollers like 9gag -> they like to use dark patterns and exploit tricks against the human mind to keep and guide your attention. The harm if targeted ads depends on your viewpoint. A targeted ad might serve you something you were looking for anyway, or it might manipulate you into spending on something you don't actually need. I.e. look at Instagram influencers, showing off their fake perfect live, making the viewer feel small and then try to buy the same happiness by buying the same product. At best, ads are information that you need, at worst, they use psychology to manipulate you.
- hkai 5y ago
  Seriously, you're worried about someone spending more time on their phone or spending more money on goods and services? Spending their own money — not the public money? That's what freedom is to you? Not the freedom to talk to whoever you want, say whatever you want or pay whoever you want?
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    I have no clue where you derive any of these things from. I certainly never said any of it. I never even made a claim a out freedom. I was talking about how ads, tv programming, trackers and such have a tendency to create a positive feedback loop, which leads people towards less quality and mindless consumption. And about a fun idea from a movie, to break this feedback loop and replace it with another one, that promotes higher quality content. You then started talking about a different topic and are now accusing me of not being interested in free speech.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"large scale AdWords fraud." Be carefull - fraud is a crime. But I am under no obligation to provide AdWords any data, let alone true and reliable data. Considering the tracking and spying, and my legitimate interest in privacy, there is no room for fraud argument here. PS: this would be probably a Hoax

Nextgrid 5y ago
Fraud would involve financially benefiting from it - if you don't benefit I don't think it would count as fraud in most countries.
- yunohn 5y ago
  Where did you get this notion from? That’s absolutely not true, and there are many acts that can be illegal without benefitting from them. I don’t think AdNauseum users would be prosecuted, but you’re still wrong. source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    lots of acts can be illegal, but that does not make them fraud.
- lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
  In England and Wales, all three types of fraud covered by the 2006 Act have as substantive elements of the offence a requirement that a defendant intends to either "make a gain for himself or another" or "cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss", where gain and loss are defined as only referring to "money or other property". Note also that the offence is framed in terms of intention to gain or cause loss. Even if no material gain or loss happens, the intention is what matters. (The equivalent mental element for theft in England is that one dishonestly intends to permanently deprive someone of the property being taken.) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35 This applies to online ad 'click fraud' in both ways—if a publisher fraudulently clicks on adverts to make money, that'd potentially be fraud to make a gain for themselves. If a competitor clicks on adverts to get their competitor to lose money on pay-per-click, that'd potentially be fraud to cause a loss to another. I can't speak for jurisdictions other than England and Wales but I'd be surprised if a fair number of other jurisdictions didn't also define fraud in a way that covers both gain and loss scenarios.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Is it the Simpsons or Seinfeld where in one episode one of the characters gets a Nielsen box that is used for measuring tv viewership and they can’t leave the house for fear of shows being canceled if they’re not home to watch it.

sofixa 5y ago
Happens in Family Guy too.
hotsauceror 5y ago
They did something similar in “Roseanne.” The Connors were selected to be a Nielsen family and Roseanne made the family watch nothing but PBS, documentaries, etc the whole time. She wanted to hack the ratings so that over time, regular folks like her family would get exposed to a better class of information.
marvion 5y ago
And ALF in 1987 S02E05
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  I want to believe that you just remembered that, like if the top of your head. The idea that some die hard Alf fan just made they way past my post on hacker news really puts a smile on my face.

mortenlarsen 5y ago

The movie is "Who Am I (2014)".

turbinerneiter 5y ago
I meant Free Rainer, didn't know that who am I had similar themes. Is it good?
- mortenlarsen 5y ago
  Oh. I must have remembered wrong then. Maybe I mixed those up. I think it is worth watching. Edit: Note: Free Rainer also goes under the name "Reclaim your brain"

belter 5y ago

Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf, or do not have a Radio or TV? Gives you the most boring TV News in the world, plus 600 movies per year nobody wants to watch, because they are horrible? But they collected the tax and they have to spend it, as the German actors guild is worst than a cartel? :-) https://www.german-way.com/germanys-tv-tax-the-debate-over-the-rundfunkbeitrag/ https://www.german-way.com/germanys-tv-tax-the-debate-over-t...

turbinerneiter 5y ago
Not a big fan of the GIS either, but my stance is not as extreme. I see benefits, but there is problems as well. It could be a good system if there was a proper reform and if you get politicians out of the system.
MrGilbert 5y ago
> Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf [...] That's not correct. If you are deaf, you get a reduction - if you are blind, you get a reduction. If you are deaf-blind, you don't pay at all. If you are already receiving financial help because of your blindness, you don't pay at all.
- belter 5y ago
  You are right about it, did that change recently? According to the reference below it depends on the degree of deafness or blindness...if you can still hear or see something still have to pay... https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/buergerinnen_und_buerger/informationen/menschen_mit_behinderung/index_ger.html https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/buergerinnen_und_buerger/info...
matzab 5y ago
Deutschlandfunk alone is worth it imho
geraneum 5y ago
I personally prefer boring news backed by quality journalism and funded by people rather than sensational, outrageous and superficially controversial news! If I want the excitement I watch a drama or action movie. I think the news articles/pieces work like clickbait; the more head-turning they get, the more viewers they acquire which results in higher profits.

cblconfederate 5y ago

turbinerneiter 5y ago
What even gives you the idea I am saying that? Did I say it? Nope.

einpoklum 5y ago

Do you remember the name of this movie? Might it have English subtitles?

turbinerneiter 5y ago
Free Rainer is the one I'm referring to.

viraptor 5y ago

> Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. You may like the "Google will eat itself" idea. https://www.gwei.org/index.php https://www.gwei.org/index.php

NmAmDa 5y ago
"202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google." Nice cosmological time scale idea
ALittleLight 5y ago
Isn't this just investing the results of ad fraud into Google? Probably a profitable idea, but I'm not seeing the "Google eating itself" aspect.
- byecomputer 5y ago
  According to their numbers they netted $400,000 worth of Google, essentially for free. Mind, that hasn't been updated in close to a decade; nowadays their 819 shares would be worth about $2.4 million.
vincentmarle 5y ago
> Google Shares owned by GWEI: 819 Those 819 shares are worth $2,371,005 now
kzrdude 5y ago
That's art!

cm2187 5y ago

Don't modern internet-connected TV boxes snitch on what people are watching? Surely we don't need a sampling anymore? Just thinking that the elderly population is probably the least likely to use those boxes (though I am not even sure of that), whereas they constitute the (dying) core of traditional TV viewership.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
conradfr 5y ago
You know a connected TV / set-top box is on a channel but you don't know how many / which persons in the house is in front of it.
- yissp 5y ago
  How long until they start putting cameras in them and doing facial recognition?
  - gruez 5y ago
    Put tape over it?
    - jobigoud 5y ago
      They could put an IR camera right next to the remote sensor. Since it's behind a glass that is opaque to visible-light you wouldn't even know the camera's there, and if you put tape on it your remote wouldn't work anymore.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >Since it's behind a glass that is opaque to visible-light you wouldn't even know the camera's there If it's opaque to visible light how does the camera produce an image? >if you put tape on it your remote wouldn't work anymore. Not really? You just have to be more careful placing the tape. Besides, nowadays many smart TV have app remote controls, or RF-based remote controls so the IR sensor being blocked is a non-issue

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Closi 5y ago

> They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it. > I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them). I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all. A few personal examples: * On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best, 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime' for this marketing. * One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's core really just targeting women and telling them that they should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares? * While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of death before every youtube video. * My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags, tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be. Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.

Igelau 5y ago

dreen 5y ago

I think very few actual people click on ads. Ad exchange platforms get majority of their revenue from impressions anyway.

atoav 5y ago

As someone who has been in one or another meeting with German TV stations I can assure you this is not completely far fetched. The people deciding what is running at these stations are of the mindset (a translated quote): > Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them and then they will serenade about how they would "love to have a bit more sophisticated things", but as they are the only ones who really understand their audience, they cannot allow this, although they support the values of the 68 generation etc. pp. From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.

mattmanser 5y ago
Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix got rid of ratings? All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them. It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash. I don't want to read about an existential crisis after programming all day, I want someone to hit something with a big sword and get the girl.
- bluGill 5y ago
  > It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash. I feel the same way. However I force myself to read things that will better me once in a while anyway. I too want to hit things with a big sword (without the pain of getting hit), and get the girl (without cheating on my wife), but the world including me is better if I do something else anyway. Which is why I do sometimes read a complex math book.
- q-big 5y ago
  > Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix got rid of ratings? > All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them. This rather shows that ratings do work, but are used wrongly for giving recommendations: If you want to create suggestions for a user, in many case the wrong answer is "suggest what has really high ratings", but rather "given the ratings that this user gave and the films that he watched, what will he also like." The fact that these documentaries get high ratings (the same might hold for art house films) shows that there is some (niche?) audience which really loves this kind of films, but not that "John Doe" will love it, too.

jseigj43 5y ago

Do you have any links or references to that? It's fascinating.

kervantas 5y ago

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810868/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810868/

PaulHoule 5y ago

There is the Nielsen system in the US and I wonder if it is the other way around. That is, in reality, nobody has watched MTV since 1994 but Viacom bribed a Nielsen family to tune a TV to it and keep it there.

kin 5y ago

So you want more targeted ads for tech savvy people? I wouldn’t give ad tech that much credit. Many tech savvy people have cut the cord and watch TV through streaming. Anecdotally, I watch Hulu. Hulu knows so so so much about me yet zero of the ads are targeted. They very much have this capability (engineering resources) but due to a number of reasons I can only assume (network contracts, ad bids) it just probably isn’t going to happen. I would love if I could have an ad blocklist cause one more Progressive Ad will drive me bonkers.

gmadsen 5y ago
I don't live in the ad tech world, so I only vague know what is interconnected. Do the tech giants just sell info back and forth to each other? For example, When I watch youtube on my Roku, if im not signed in, does roku still aggregate what I watched on youtube, could that be sold to Hulu, for ads when I watch that on the same tv?
- tyoh 5y ago
  I work in the CTV ad-tech space. Viewership data is highly guarded by every company. It's how every company is trying to differentiate themselves from each other. So, no, YouTube and Hulu etc wouldn't share information. Ad data is known by the DSP that serves the ad (if the company doesn't serve their own ads), but viewership data is secret as a competitive advantage.

Simplicitas 5y ago

What an awesome idea! :-)

ipaddr 5y ago

I don't block ads. I remember what the internet was about to become before ads stepped in. Everything of value was going to be pull behind paywalls. Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase. Those purchases are logged to a real name/address. You end up with bigger privacy leaks. People will still be tracking you the way they are now. And at the credit card level. As an adult in the first world I can afford to pay for adfree solutions. Most people can't. Ads level the playing field.

marcodiego 5y ago
I don't think the playing field is disleveled without ads. Wikipedia has no ads. If you're willing to handle ads, they should at the least be untargetted.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Agreed.
hollerith 5y ago
Your personal prosperity depends on a prosperous online ad industry; doesn't it?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The last time I worked in adtech was 2012.
McDyver 5y ago
While that speculation is plausible, another view would be that companies would offer quality content without tracking users and invading their privacy (how many paid services still flood you with ads?), and possibly free alternatives would start to come up. From your point of view, free open source is something that wouldn't exist
- ipaddr 5y ago

fnord77 5y ago

What’s the name of the movie?

michaelcampbell 5y ago

> Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Data poisoning for something the scale of Google I fear would be ineffective to the point of laughability, sadly.

lgats 5y ago

Exactly like https://syntheticmessenger.labr.io/ https://syntheticmessenger.labr.io/ Though, I would say this can actually hurt publishers in the long run

hammock 5y ago

Hacking democracy (ratings voting system, whatever) to indirectly effect a supposedly benevolent unilateral outcome? Sounds familiar.

jedberg 5y ago
It's not exactly hacking democracy. Democracy implies every gets a vote. This is P hacking small sample sizes.
- hammock 5y ago
  So it's engineering falsified scientific conclusions then. Still sounds familiar.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them) Believe it’s Scott Galloway who said advertising is a tax on the poor and technologically illiterate.

mdoms 5y ago

There's a Family Guy episode where Peter does the opposite.

smilbandit 5y ago

digital idiocracy

Uhhrrr 5y ago

This is funny to me, because there's an American movie where Danny DeVito manipulates TV ratings to get his own (worse) shows on the air: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087979/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087979/