6 ms·
We accepted surveillance as default
- seydor 7mo agoMilitarism, surveillance, propaganda, statism. Reminds me of something. Are we the baddies now ?
- 1234letshaveatw 7mo ago[flagged]
- wao0uuno 7mo agoAlways have been.
- pydry 7mo agoIve noticed that certain people are chronically incapable of recognizing this.
- QuantumFunnel 7mo agoMany of them in this very forum
- ViscountPenguin 7mo agoHackernews is at its base a forum for startups. It's hardly surprising that people paid to make a thing might find it cognitively difficult to accepts its flaws.
- 8bitsrule 7mo agoStandard quotation applies. It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! — Upton Sinclair I ran into this one just today .... "Let the logician and the Godman show The foolishness, but let the word be spoken. Tim embraced Tom, embarking for Heathrow. Smiling, Christmas-elated, somewhat sad too, Blessing the filthy world. Somebody had to." — Anthony Burgess, Byrne
- enrightened 7mo agoAlright, name one state that is functional and isn’t a baddie in your book.
- lesostep 7mo agoPrincipality of Sealand
- jagged-chisel 7mo agoNow I have to insist on a definition for "functional"
- nickandbro 7mo agoWhenever I read your articles, I get distracted by the space invaders and just play that instead. Maybe this is a problem with me being a bit ADHD, but I feel like I am not the only one
- wao0uuno 7mo agoI just played for a couple of minutes and didn't even finish the article. Also suffering from ADHD but in my defense space invaders is pretty good with mouse controls.
- ASalazarMX 7mo agoAlso played the game, but I'm just easily entertained, prone to procrastination given the chance... and kind of lazy sometimes.
- pineaux 7mo agoPlay and read simultaneously. Its nice.
- asdfman123 7mo agoAre you guys 12
- john_strinlai 7mo agofamously, once you age past 12, you are no longer allowed to find anything fun.
- GolfPopper 7mo ago"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis
- asdfman123 7mo ago
- righthand 7mo agoWHATWG wants to co-mingle document rendering with javascript (this is the real reason they are removing XSLT and not proposing a replacement, it skirts this enforcement) so that when you try to disable javascript or block tracking it breaks the document rendering, leaving the only option to leave Javascript enabled and ad blockers off. Other protocols gemini, gopher etc don’t have the same issues because they’re already excluding Javascript. What is really needed is a hard fork of major browsers by a grass roots community to advance HTML standards to include partial template rendering solutions without the reliance on Javascript. Of course this is a startup forum so the response is just going to be wittled down to observations about economic value. However if users start to change/fight then the economics will too.
- rapnie 7mo agoIt wouldn't be that weird a thought for me that, preferably a group of, nation states cough up some serious money and give this a real start, beginning, and end in the form of a stable release. This already happens with major science and space projects, with budgets of billions. A browser is not simply a bunch'a software, having a modular open browser is a major deal and benefit to society at this point. Perhaps arguably more valuable than pumping yet more energy in a particle accelerator and other of mankind's pet projects in search for the unknown unknowns and deal with more pressing known knowns first.
- marcosdumay 7mo ago> preferably a group of, nation states cough up some serious money and give this a real start, beginning, and end in the form of a stable release It doesn't take serious money. It takes a constant stream of "sub-serious" money, stable for a long time. A large city could pay for that project. It doesn't take a group of nations, what it takes is non-standard politics.
- righthand 7mo agoI love this idea!
- bakugo 7mo agoThe irony of using AI to generate an article on this topic...
- inventor7777 7mo agoWhen Apple first released App Tracking Transparency, I immediately used it to block the trackers and I have not even thought about it since because it is so simple and useful. What a contrast to modern websites which require all sorts of weird clicking gymnastics to disable similar tracking.
- ourmandave 7mo agoWe should pass laws that require the weird clicking gymnastics to opt-in to tracking. Instead of the default opt-in hidden in the terms and conditions nobody reads.
- HWR_14 7mo agoThe EU did that and people still bitch about GDPR banners on websites.
- _factor 7mo agoThey took what should have been a browser on/off switch and turned it into something almost worse.
- troupo 7mo agoGDPR isn't about cookies, or any specific tech. It's a GENERAL Data Protection Regulation. On top of that it literally defines opt-out as the default state As for browsers, imagine if world's largest advertising and tracking company that incidentally builds world's dominant browser and dominates all web standards would implement this as a browser switch instead of inventing new ways of tricking you into surveillance? https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 and https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923
- alt227 7mo agoGDPR didnt do it, lazy site owners that didnt want to read the legislation did. Most sites dont even need those popups, but its easier to just shove one on your site than try to understand the specific situations which do need it.
- morphle 7mo agoPage does not load in Safari and Chrome for various reasons
- esseph 7mo ago> and Chrome Works fine here Version 147.0.7727.101 (Official Build) (64-bit) (.102 is the Mac version) Edit: Based on a comment below, you may have cookies disabled.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rapnie 7mo agoBlog got the hug of death, I think. Archive link: https://archive.is/bpNAw https://archive.is/bpNAw
- _doctor_love 7mo agoThis is all well and good but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web, the surveillance state will persist.
- GolfPopper 7mo agoAt least the solution is obvious, even if the path to an ad-free web is not. And it's a solution that also has the advantage of being a solid public good.
- anovikov 7mo agoThe free internet of the workers and peasants? I mean, how will the websites make money?
- GuinansEyebrows 7mo agomaybe we're better off without websites that only exist to make money.
- colesantiago 7mo agoHow do website owners pay for server costs if you think they shouldn't make money? Should everyone be in a loss when they run a website?
- GuinansEyebrows 7mo agoi manage to do so using money i make elsewhere. the information i put on the internet is either of benefit to people or a matter of vanity. i don't afford special concern to people who want to use the internet for profit.
- colesantiago 7mo agoSo you have never sold anything, or participated with other people or groups that have sold anything online because you believe that they should not use the internet for profit?
- dataflow 7mo agoSorry to nitpick but tracking and surveillance are not the same thing. Go back to the last century for a second, before all this 21st-century tech came along. Just because your cell phone and towers would be able to track what rough region (let's call it "site") you were visiting, that doesn't mean they were surveilling you. Surveillance implies things about bith intended usage and actual usage, etc. that -- simply put -- do not need to hold when you're tracking something. If the argument is genuinely that cookies have genuinely been used to place us under surveillance rather than mere tracking -- I have nothing inherently against it, but you need to support it with evidence. Simply pointing to the fact that they track some fact or metric that indirectly relates to you is not sufficient evidence of that. And to be clear, I'm not saying I like tracking or we should be fine with it. I hate it too. But it's also a turnoff seeing people smearing one thing as another, and I don't think it's a great strategy to help win support for your cause.
- verisimi 7mo agoThe difference is the intention. A corporation maybe tracking. The same data, once given to the governance surveillance teams, is then used to surveil. Same info and mechanisms.
- downrightmike 7mo ago"Sorry to nitpick but tracking and surveillance are not the same thing. Go back to the last century for a second, before all this 21st-century tech came along. Just because your cell phone and towers would be able to track what rough region (let's call it "site") you were visiting, that doesn't mean they were surveilling you." Buddy, that's exactly how they are blowing people up with drones these days
- dataflow 7mo ago> Buddy, that's exactly how they are blowing people up with drones these days And... your point is what? Tracking can't be used to kill people? Anything that kills people is by definition "surveillance"?
- incomingpain 7mo agoThe government is going to surveil. That's not going to change. It's whether or not warrantless searches are admissible; and they generally arent.
- calmbonsai 7mo agoThere's also the issues of geo-fenced warrants and the FISA courts in the U.S. Warrant processes and issuance should not be secret nor generic enough to allow for "blanket" hoovering of Personally Identifiable Information.
- pizzly 7mo agoI tend to agree but fear that people will value 'safety' over personal freedom. If these acts prevent x crimes, allow people to walk the streets, etc then people will think 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear'. We as a society will have to accept more deaths and crimes by not implementing total surveillance. Its going to be hard to convince people of that if governments can demonstrate the benefits.
- downrightmike 7mo agoShow me where these have done any good at stopping crime. Seriously. The prism program director testified infront of congress that they didn't stop any attacks and wouldn't be able to because it was a needle in a hay stack
- taurath 7mo agoWe did not - going to a website nowadays is akin to booting your grandma’s windows 95 PC - popups everywhere, banzai buddy, 20 toolbars, just utterly virus laden filth. The web is a place that used to have amazing views but it’s now only filled with billboards. Someday a new set of internets will come up and they’ll be good - it’s not expensive to make things good, it just needs to not be borne of utter libertarian zero-social-contract profit seeking. Hell, I was shopping for furniture yesterday, and I swear all the popups even with ad blockers were there to prevent me from buying things. It doesn’t seem to be helpful for the stated goal.
- throwaway27448 7mo ago[dead]
- anovikov 7mo agoWell, ever since the ads i see on iPhone Safari are utterly irrelevant bullshit because tracking there is crippled. Was 1996 88x31 banners world that just advertised random stuff, better than what we have today? They gave websites less money taking more space and annoyed users more.
- alt227 7mo agoYes, personally I prefer the concept of random ads over tracked, profiled, and targeted.
- verisimi 7mo agoMy opinion (probably an unpopular one) is that tracking for advertising is merely the excuse to justify widespread surveillance. I don't think all the advertising revenue that is purported to be in play stacks up. I personally do not think advertising directs my purchasing. I don't think it directs others either. I get that this is Google's business, but perhaps a large amount of their 'business' is actually from the government system (directly or indirectly) - they merely have to pretend to be running an advertising business. I'm saying that the whole point of advertising was surveillance from the beginning.
- shevy-java 7mo agoI wanted to read, but my cursor was a hungry monster and so I chased after things to eat. After I played this for a while I had to close the tab. I think if you have something to say, having a cursor with an animation is a bad idea. It distracts from the content.
- pizzly 7mo agoI found it delightful at first then afterwards slightly distracting. The current state of websites on average is very boring even if practical.
- Lerc 7mo agoI once watched a news report about the then tail end of the Ceaușescu regime. One of the indicators of the level of oppression they described was that they had video cameras mounted on street lamps.
- CrzyLngPwd 7mo agoYou watched some propaganda slop, since there is no evidence that the Romanian regime used video cameras on street lamps in the 1980's. Why would they need to invest such insane amounts of money to acquire such tech (video cameras, lol, on street lamps) when they had a thriving population of curtain twitchers and snitches?
- Lerc 7mo agoTo an extent it was propaganda. I'm not sure why you think something I saw some 40 years ago would meet any definition of slop that would still retain enough meaning for the word to be used in that context. Nevertheless, the truth of whether they actually had video cameras on streetlamps is irrelevant to the point I was making. The point is that there was a time when media coverage depicted the notion of it happening as abhorrent.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoI remember Andrei Sakharov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov in Russia writing that he thought there were 30 people in the house across the street from him.
- prima-facie 7mo agoWhat you watched was some sort of propaganda. There was no such thing in 1989's Romania. The country was too poor for such advanced systems. Source: someone who lived through that.
- ymolodtsov 7mo agoComparing digital ads to the Stasi is just peak Western snowflake behavior, I'm sorry. There are many imaginary arguments about harm in the article, with precisely zero actual examples or cases. Data brokers, buy data, stalk somebody. Can you share at least something? No, it's all just hand waving. Because none of these people can offer any. The fact that the author still thinks Cambridge Analytica meant something says a lot as well. This was a scandal out of nothing. I, for one, am extremely grateful that, as I was growing up with not much money, I was still able to access more or less the same Internet as people in the US. I don't care about a black-box algorithm looking at my habits to figure out that I love backpacks and microbrand watches, especially if it enables free platforms for me. Stasi didn't watch you to sell your crap online, you know. They had much worse motives. If anything, we're now going backward because of the enormous marginal costs of inference. With AI, people aren't on the same page (even a $20 subscription is a lot of money in many countries).
- like_any_other 7mo agoDo you think if the Stasi, or someone like them, ever come into power, they'll just ignore all this extra surveillance we've built for free? Not really a hypothetical - look at China and Russia, or Saudi Arabia [1]. I'll let others make the case to add the US and European countries to that list - not because I don't believe they belong on the list, but just because I'm too lazy to meet the higher bar of evidence that goes with going against groupthink. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter#Known_victims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter#...
- ymolodtsov 7mo agoI know exactly what happens to Russia and all of it has nothing to do with targeted ads or anything. Putin's cronies literally own the country's only remaining unblocked social network. They tend to prosecute people for public content, even comments or likes, but there's not a single case where ad targeting data was used. And they have the capacity to locate a person through multiple other ways, primarily cell networks.
- gooseyGander 7mo ago[dead]
- raincole 7mo agoI think this blog won the most unserious design of the year.
- stavros 7mo agoI don't know about design, but I think there was an article there somewhere. In other news, I got a score of 3000 or so.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoI know there is evidence like Apple ATT (iOS 14.5, April 2021). 15-25% opt-in. -$10B Meta revenue in 2022 (CFO David Wehner) But it sure looks to me like personalized ads are a paper tiger. I mean it seems like 30% of the ads I see on Facebook and YouTube are just transparent scams that they could serve me without any profiling. For instance for a week I have been in heavy rotation of an ad on Facebook which obviously looks like a crude attempt to imitate a notification in the Facebook API. After I click on it the page starts playing sound and tries to scare me that my computer has been hacked and I have to take some action. I reported the ad to Facebook but it shouldn't have stayed up a whole week, for all I know somebody is still seeing it. It's so rare that I see an ad that is targeted to me at all so what gives? Am I really so unmarketable to? It's not like i don't buy cameras, food, clothes, video games, and all sorts of things. But all i see is retargeted ads for stuff I already bought.
- sosborn 7mo ago> all i see is retargeted ads for stuff I already bought. IMO, nothing exposes the folly behind targeted ads as much as this.
- johannes1234321 7mo agoThe fact that some people receive badly targeted ads isn't a prove for the surveillance system not working. The question regarding ads is how well targeted campaigns are being paid for. But the ad space is relatively harmless. It becomes relevant when not talking about ads, but surpression of citizens by state actors. If the data is being used to identified potential targets for some measures. These measures can involve drawing election districts, deciding where to build the sewage plant or library or where search for people to deport and how to influence them in political campaigns. Some margin of error has varying impact there, but it can help a lot to reduce manual selection by a lot.
- downrightmike 7mo ago10% of meta earnings last year were from scammers using their AI on meta users through ads. It doesn't make sense that they are allowing it, except it is making them billions. So what if millions of americans lose everything? Shareholder algo bots like the way it looks
- slowhadoken 7mo agoSurveillance has always been baked into consumerism similar to foreign aid. A large part of foreign relations is capital and rhetoric.
- surcap526 7mo ago[dead]
- geldedus 7mo agoNot in the EU
- efilife 7mo agoLLM written article