We need a hard brake on adtech and a restructuring of business models, not a band-aid that only 5% of the population bothers to apply.

There are two ways that "privacy" can be violated: (1) somebody exploits your data, or (2) somebody violates your space. Something like GDPR addresses (1) and might put an end to those shoes from Zappos that keep following you around, but it does not stop the disincentives that destroyed the world wide web.

Huh? What does this mean? I've been getting the usual "Please consent to let us continue spamming you" emails, but I have no idea what your sentence above means. Can you elaborate as it's not clear what you're talking about.

I run a business directory site, or at least used to until this morning. If I was like many people I would blame GDPR, but really I figured I rather spend the money I was spending on AWS on something else.

The EU has been making moves towards financial transparency largely driven by the UK getting on the open data bandwagon. (Ten years ago they were much worse than the US in terms of seeing government data as a revenue source, now they are far ahead of other countries.)

This is endangered by Brexit and GDPR.

One part of the global governance crisis is that legislators have been captured by a "one dollar one vote" situation and in turn cannot maintain tax rates that produce sufficient government revenues. Thus the bureaucratic sectors have focused on keeping the lights on by trying to get people to pay what they owe. Given massive tax evasion by the rich that has to be a priority so general transparency around cross-border financial transactions has to increase.

Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever.

This seems like a slightly modified version of the old, “if you have nothing to hide...” saw and I don’t like it.

I have an aunt who has a nursing degree, burned down a barn with horses in it and attempted to kill two people (her mother and her sister) by injecting them with insulin. At some point in between all of that she drove a school bus and for some reason decided to slash herself up with razor and claim that she was assaulted.

We heard that she'd gotten a job as a nurse and we we wonder how that happened. My father-in-law was in the hospital (not where she worked) and she changed his IV bag when it ran out and started beeping.

A week later we read in the paper that she was raiding the medicine cabinet at the nursing home she worked at and found out she was also stealing ADHD medication from her grandson.

Turned out she failed to tick the box that asked if she'd ever committed a felony and the employer was too busy to run a background check on her SSN.

Dangerous people are out there.

That kind of behavior is a direct threat to life but I think tax evasion, corruption, rent-seeking, a lack of responsiveness to problems such as global warming, homelessness, and affordable housing and similar behaviors threaten our civilization and one thing we know is that when a civilization goes down the people left behind turn their back on everything that civilization stand for. (Ex. look what happened when the Christians took over Rome)

The main thing our civilization stands for is individualism and if you like the idea of being able to decide anything at all for yourself (or people 50-100 years) you should have been helping turn the ship around 20 years ago and it might be too late now. (Eg. Listening to people like Frederick Hayek is the real "road to serfdom")

An Iranian physicist living in the UK threatened to sue me under the UK libel laws because he thought I brought attention to him that might lead Iranian grad students to come around looking for job. Well, I was chewed up and spit out by that system and I was not going to be intimidated by that -- if you are sitting pretty on a tenured job on the back of young people in an unfair situation you deserve to hear the voices and see the faces of people who are harmed by your privilege. It is not such a big thing.

Somehow your domestic intelligence service, foreign intelligence services, organized criminals, rip-off artists and other people are going to steal your information and the more that information is pushed underground the more impunity that they are going to operate under.

(To paraphrase Heinlein: a transparent society is a going concern)

Yes, and psychopaths like your aunt exist, but if we design society around authoritarian ideals designed to totally eliminate their ability to do harm society breaks every time. A balance has to be struck that acknowledges the presence of a significant minority of criminals, while protecting the rights of the majority. A thousand anecdotes will not change that.

(Loved your initial comment on this thread though.)

How is it a great solution when hacker news has ads that most ad blockers can't block?

What do you think HN is? What do you think dang, sctb and the mods do?

It works pretty well, but requires trusting them to follow their privacy policy (which is good) as with any DNS provider.

I've found it useful and lower maintenance than other approaches, but you trade power and flexibility. And is presumably less performant than preventing the lookups in the first place.

I'm in very early phase of the development of a search engine. I will _not_ index ad serving pages maybe sometimes even whole hosts. Adblock rulesets like easylist will help with this.

I know about Million Short, but it's not that comprehensive and AFAIR uses Google's index.

Also I'm expecting it will result with a significantly smaller index, so maybe I will be able to finance it from my pocket. Small index will enable offline use - download via torrent the whole index and use it offline. With some incremental updates afterwards. However it would still be in the magnitude of tens of gigabytes, on the condition it would really be small enough.

The next level for me would be a HTML-only web browser that would offer permanent reader-mode like behavior. But I have too many projects already.

What tech do you guys plan to use exactly, for a start?

He's an awful person and I'm glad he destroyed his own celebrity.

It is hard to find content which is really worthwhile on the advertising supported web. The very nature of it is that valuable content is devalued relative to spam. Like Gresham's law, bad content drives out good.

but, your comment highlights a kind of surprising reality about ad dollars and Google. i mean, StackOverflow captures a significant quantity of ad money from Android related content because, in the early days of Android development, Google itself directed Android developers to StackOverflow.

1. It's not free. Advertising is a $600 billion industry annually, with online over a sixth of that. This is largely imposed on the wealthier billion global inhabitants, so figure roughly $600 overall or $100 for Internet, per person, per year, if you live in the EU, US, JP, CA, AU, NZ.

2. Good content goes wanting. Advertising seeks to maximise eyeballs, not content quality. Good sites go wanting: LWN, Linux Journal, Nautilus, just off the top of my head. Markets and information are a poor match.

Unless you omitted a sarcasm tag?

Doesn't mean advertising is unproblematic. It clearly isn't. But it's not completely one sided either, not even in terms of privacy.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

Information is a pure public good. Finance it as such.

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.

http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...

I didn't say there were no other options. I just criticised the one option we would very likely end up with by default if advertising were to be curbed somehow.

Allow me to gently disagree. The comment above is dismissive and makes assumptions, both of which the HN guidelines suggest avoiding. It also doesn't offer any supporting evidence.

If the comment had some supporting argument, if it made a strong case that ads are economically necessary, and if it contributed to the discussion in a positive way, it might be upvoted instead.

It's very easy to dismiss downvotes as cliquish disagreement or tribal behavior, but doing that won't help you learn. It's much better to assume votes are being cast for legitimate reasons and ask yourself when you see or get downvotes if the comment in question is really the best way the idea could have been presented. It's very easy in written text to say something in a way that comes off very different and much more negative than you intended.

I encourage you to share your thoughts rather than stay silent, but to also stay positive, and be conscious of assumption and conscious of style.

If you feel like giving a more nuanced opinion with some arguments (eg, free content via ad supported model is better than the others because blah), you might find the downvotes dont come as fast and furious.

You surely don't have an agenda. /s

So much HN comments are also just noise, static or nerve gas as well. And I highly doubt you have a wife.