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A comment on Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever. Parent comment

Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by seanw444 on Friday March 04, 2022 @09:41AM (#30555445)
It was definitely a serious-toned joke. Bravo from me as well. I don't know how people navigate the web without an ad blocker anymore. Do people actually do that? it's unbearable. Slows pages down, clutters the actual content, wastes more battery on phones and laptops, generally rewards companies for spying on you... it's awful.

Can we go back to when people weren't so lazy as to do everything in their power to not have to give their cash directly to someone? Sure, you don't have to hand your money to a content maker on YouTube anymore, for example, but I wonder how much the lifespan of your device is decreased by the added processing that comes from advertising, and how much that adds up in the end. You may as well just have paid them money directly in the first place.

Apply that thought to any "free-but-only-because-it's-ad-ridden" software/service.

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by hirako2000 on Friday March 04, 2022 @10:04AM (#30555793)
interesting point of comparison. the much bigger cost of ads is probably the attention loss. we don't have much attention capacity. ads increasingly syphon it. I guestimate that attention loss for an average person is worth order of magnitude more than the extra cpu tearing + bandwidth costs required to run ads. but like for your comparison, most users aren't even realising they are paying a significant mental cost by accepting those ads.
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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by Nextgrid on Friday March 04, 2022 @11:25AM (#30556842)
It's not just a mental cost - someone has to pay for those ads and all the machinery & various middlemen that make it possible. That someone is all of us; the prices we pay for most goods include the overhead of polluting society with ads. You end up paying a double tax - a monetary one and an attention one.
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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by hirako2000 on Friday March 04, 2022 @11:32AM (#30556936)
agreed. it's multiple costs. and we all pay for that waste and the long term consequences of it.
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