Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.

Effectively, the government has outsourced the duty of governance to private corporations – without rules. Under capitalism.

The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.

We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop engaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.

tl;dr: is it a good idea to put Elon Musk in control of who gets to talk to their government?

It’s good news just considering that Peter #Thiel is a stakeholding¹ cofounder of airbnb. This is the same motherfucker who got Trump into power in 2016 by using Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Thiel’s dark money contributions – which more recently got JD Vance into power. Also the same xenophobic scumbag motherfucker behind Palantir. The same piece of shit who cofounded PayPal (a surveillance capitalist). Thiel’s profits are detrimental to the world.

¹ to be clear he was a stakeholder ~10 years ago… not sure if that’s still the case.

As far as we know, Google is not giving up any data. The crawler still must store a copy of the text for the index. The only certainty we have is that Google is no longer sharing it.

Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem:

Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.

From the article:

“was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” (emphasis added)

Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search.

You can also use 12ft.io.

Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the “Google Bot” web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

The pages aren’t necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

“Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we’ll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”

It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world’s webpages.

The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.

Bingo. When I read that part of the article, I felt insulted. People see the web getting increasingly enshitified and less accessible. The increased need for cached pages has justified the existence of 12ft.io.

~40% of my web access is now dependant on archive.org and 12ft.io.

So yes, Google is obviously bullshitting. Clearly there is a real reason for nixing cached pages and Google is concealing that reason.

This is probably an attempt to save money on storage costs.

That’s in fact what the article claims as Google’s reason. But seems irrational. Google still needs to index websites for the search engine. So the storage is still needed since the data collection is still needed. The only difference (AFAICT) is Google is simply not sharing that data. Also, there are bigger pots of money in play than piddly storage costs.

Isn’t this different because there are specifically truth-in-advertising laws? Not even a natural person is immune to truth-in-advertising laws. So it seems like Tesla is making a despirate move.

In addition to its first amendment argument, Tesla also said that the California DMV is violating its rights to have a jury trial, under the US Constitution’s 7th Amendment and Article I, Section 16 of California’s Constitution, both of which cover rights to trial by a jury.

Yikes. What does a jury of Tesla’s peers look like? Representatives from 12 other giant corporations?

I’ve been saying for years that Invidious needs to support comments. Glad there’s finally a free world option.

I’m not keen on browser extensions though. Is there a manual way? Is it a matter of searching a particular Lemmy instance for the video ID?

Ungoogled Chromium indeed reproduces the issue. But so does the public library, which likely was Firefox in Windows. So i guess it might be hasty to conclude that it’s browser specific, particularly when other videos on the same instance behave differently in the same browser.

It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.

Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped – just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd… Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?

I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.

You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.

Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?

If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.

That’s is how I got around it in the past. For some reason that was not an option where I needed it (perhaps the browser I was using was locked down in some way). In any case, I’m wondering why the variation in behavior. Is this a bug in Invidious?

Why would a browser handle it incorrectly for one video on one invidious instance, but not for most other videos and other instances?

Note that I’ve seen this broken behavior both in my own Chromium installation as well as Firefox in Windows as a public library.

Thanks for pointing that out. It works for me too. I just happened to select a different instance where it actually works. Here’s the instance where it’s broken:

https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

First time I’ve seen this bot. I would be interested in learning how to cross-post from #kbin to #Lemmy in a way that preserves the original username the way this bot did. Is that possible without 3rd party tools? I can login to a Lemmy instance and then crosspost any Kbin thread to a Lemmy community, but then the author becomes myself, not the original Kbin author.

#askFedi

The difference is that grabbing it pre-FTA is also grabbing a perfect copy. The quality may not matter to many of us, but to some it does. And because it matters to some, major copyright holders have started to treat unlicensed exchanges as “competition” from a business PoV (which is a concession from strictly seeing it as crime). So their business strategy is to compete with the unlicensed channels by offering perfect quality media at a price (they hope) people are willing to pay (also in part to avoid the inconvenience and dodgyness of the black market).

FWiW, that’s their take and it’s why they get extra aggressive when the unlicensed version is perfect.

I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.

Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.

We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.

1. I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).

I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.

A VPN is only as secure as the endpoints. You have to figure cyber criminals are seeing countless opportunities. Breaking into the right insecure home network could get you into fortune 500 servers.

Not sure people are finding meeting-free gigs. I read about someone holding down 4 jobs who once had to attend 3 meetings at once (that story might have been in Wired mag, not sure). Like a DJ he had multiple audio streams going with headphones and made a skill of focusing where his name would most likely come up. I’m sure there’s also a long list of excuses like “had to run to stop the burning food” or whatever. Presumabely a long list of excuses to wholly nix a meeting in the first place as well.

Some people are secretly outsourcing some of their work as well, which works for workload but not for meetings.