On the whole, she was actually pretty admirable in how gracefully she aged. In her 80s she decided on her own to move into an elder living community not because she actually was having any issue doing things on her own, but because she knew that it was inevitable that she would start needing help and wanted to make sure she was somewhere that was equipped to handle it when it happened. She also decided on her own to surrender her license because she didn't think she should be allowed to drive anymore and took advantage of the community's shuttle buses when she needed to go places. I think she would have been the first one to say that she did not think she should not be the one trusted to make sure that she could use her computer safely and that systems that required people like her to know what to click are unethical!
iirc there was a story in The Onion about someone who “accidentally deleted The Internet” on their Windows system and the whole Internet stopped working. They were so sorry, maybe it was in the Recycle Bin, there was still hope for the world, lol
Teacher claimed he hacked the computer because she couldn’t find icon and refused to admit she was wrong. Everyone hated her. Wonder why….
Any way kid became a legend after the suspension.
Sandboxes get better, yeah, but this is akin to leaving your door open in a neighborhood with violent crime and then saying I built this awesome laser guided Kevlar chamber that scans introducers upon entry instead.
In my mind, the entire ad industry is basically not worth enabling. I'm not nearly as concerned with the hypotheticals of "what if literally everyone started using ad blockers and ad-supported content disappeared?"; that's firmly in the "I don't know, but it's a problem I'd definitely prefer to have to what we have right now" bucket.
Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
It's not just malicious software ads, they also sell ads to entities mitming every government service.
Google didn’t have this issue until they bought DoubleClick (text ads and they hosted). And they had pretty good privacy as they didn’t want to share shit.
After DC it all went to hell.
That sounds like a problem that Google should have already solved. Maybe that's why "Don't Be Evil" got the boot.
How is that even allowed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Broadcasting_Network
Sorry, no solution for spam calls/texts.
On the other hand, enabling my Verizon eSIM is a surefire way to receive hourly "Potential Spam" calls, despite giving nobody outside of direct family my US phone number. Thankfully, I've convinced enough of my family to use Signal and we call/text through there instead.
Nowadays, I only turn on the Verizon line if I have to receive an SMS one-time code or call my broker.
Don't think the U.S. will ever solve this problem; people will just say something about privacy, the country's "too big" to combat spam at scale, etc. It's also too easy to get a phone number anonymously. A frequent phenomenon I've witnessed is that when someone blocks a phone number, the same caller contacts them again from a different number with the same area code.
We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
Not with this attitude.
In the US, the government is _owned_ by corporations. To pretend otherwise is naive.
Then the remaining party splinters into groups and you vote out the worst half of those two.
Rinse, repeat.
Are they both bad? Probably.
Are the equally bad? Not even remotely.
Percentage of global gross revenue like the EU's GDPR does seems to work effectively enough for a scare tactic.
If they are caught doing it repeatedly without taking adequate measures to stop it, treat them as an accessory to the crime.
If a newspaper took money to advertise blatant, obvious scams, I assume a judge would consider them at least partially responsible for restitution, if not an accessory to the crime. Looking away really hard (and delegating the task of looking away really hard) shouldn't get you out of this.
Hold the publisher responsible, they can then hold the platform responsible, thus creating a market for platforms that actually fight scams. Right now, there is limited incentive to fight scams, as the scams still drive revenue. If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Fortune_(magazine)#...
If you have to buy a newspaper to publish your info, that is quite a high bar.
At the same time, none of us* want malware scum to use newspaper ads to fleece people.
*OK, some of us write malware scum. I don't count their opinions as valid.
> If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
If they don't want to take responsibility then they should guarantee that the responsible party have provided valid credentials that can result in their being held responsible.
That would clear up the quagmire that is internet advertising pretty darn quick.
In other words, I think the law wants what you and OP said to be true, but seems like it doesn't apply once you get big enough. Anecdotally, Amazon and Walmart and other big retailers seem to not be held responsible when they sell goods that dont work as advertised or even actively harm people.
We managed to get into google ad exchange (via a personal connection as we’d normally be too small to get there directly, it’s essentially adsense with more control and more money), and compared to the other players we saw, they are much better by default already. But then you can also set minimums etc. This will lower your payout, but significantly raise the quality of your ads.
So when a publisher has all those scam ads, it’s either lack of knowledge and care, or a choice.
Every landlord should be directly accountable for all crimes committed by their tenants.
Every telco should be directly accountable for all crimes committed by their customers.
Meta should pay damages when their users stalk and harass people.
You wouldn't hold a landlord accountable if it was a surprise that a crime took place, but if they were aware that some of their tenants were committing crimes and just "choosing not to ask about it," they could reasonably be called "accountable."
Telcos are regularly asked to give up information regarding crimes committed by their customers, see the Patriot Act for details - in some sense, we as a country have decided to hold them accountable for this (though, not spam).
Meta have been involved in a whole list of litigation that is at minimum adjacent to stalking/harassment, if not directly involving those things. I would need to look up to be more specific, though.
You say landlords should only have accountability for the crimes of their tenants if they chose to do nothing to prevent their property from being used for crime.
Google doesn't just ignore bad advertisers, they prevent the vast majority of malicious ads and report the worst offenders to law enforcement. Google is already doing far more than what you say immunizes landlords.
You say telcos are in the clear because they give info to law enforcement on demand.
Google also does this, so according to your goalposts, Google is also in the clear.
You say Meta is in the clear because they have been sued for crimes their platform enabled.
Google has also been sued and paid billions in damages.
The standard I'm asking you to generalize is the one I replied to: "hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network".
If this standard can't generalize to landlords, telcos, Meta and everyone else who has a platform that bad actors abuse, then it's a bogus standard.
If Ad Platforms don't want to be held responsible for the fraud that their platform literally delivered to the victim, then they should have KYC for all of their Customers that pay them money to deliver advertising to their victims. That way, shock fucking horror, someone or something might actually be able to be held responsible.
And if the argument is that there are many ways that scapegoats can be used and shell companies setup to avoid actual responsibility, then we'll know more about the next layer of regulation that's required.
Or we just give up and say that fraud is OK (which, I believe, is the current thinking in the US).
it's like ... "when my vacuum cleaner takes pictures of my wife naked, it should use HTTPS when uploading the pictures to the cloud"
If my government tries to regulate, tax, or otherwise annoy one of these corporations, their billionaire owner will deposit a few million into the right campaign fund and the Big Cheeto will tariff us, threaten to invade us, swear at us, send us ambassadors who swear at us, or start trying to rename bodies of water. (He'll probably do that anyways.) In general, it's bad enough for our business that we usually just let these companies do what they want and hope that, someday, the U.S. will regulate them properly. That's unlikely to happen anytime soon. (Note: Even Democrats get nasty when their campaign funding is threatened.)
In the meantime, look out for the people you care about and support anything that pries your data out of American fingers.
If you're asking technically, well, google made over 400 billion dollars last year, they can spend some of that to figure it out.
Or stop serving ads. Just because it's difficult to do safely doesn't mean you get to just do it anyways because there's profit involved.
That's not required. Google could employ proportionality as many people reviewing what they advertise as, say, National Geographic Magazine.
I did the same with my mom, but then her broker and doctor's websites started complaining that they will only run on a supported browser, i.e., Chrome.
I've gotten her to still use Firefox for most other things, but it's not easy.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
It's off by default and has to be turned on per site, but will automatically stay on for subsequent visits. Test the site with it to be sure it works for your mom. Most sites that insist on enforcing Chrome-only user-agents run just fine on Firefox. I've encountered a few that run even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome.
I have never encountered a site that requires a Chrome user-agent string
Some sites require a string that either (a) is in a list of acceptable strings (that includes non-Chrome strings) or (b) follows a certain format
FWIW, most websites submitted to HN, including many high traffic sites, do not require a user-agent header at all
What are some examples of these alleged "Chrome-only" sites
I’m sure we can find rather strange things going on Ubuntu too and bending the definitions a bit, there are several pleads for donation like on Gnome, Vim and Wikipedia that are a bit questionable.
The longer a company is able to profits from something, the less they'll be able to see that it may even possibly be a net negative for society.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.
I know people have rosy eyes for a BBS/IRC comeback, but that will never happen.
By and large, people don't care about having to look at tide and Toyota ads to watch YouTube.
Your bank, school, doctor, and government would all still have websites. Companies would still sell things online. Video calls and chat systems would be there. All the websites run by donation or self-funding would be unchanged. Without ads, the worst parts of the internet might stop existing though.
Uh? No?
The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does. Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.
What existed in 1993 was a cultural blip, it's never coming back, so let it go.
Ha! I am under no illusion it is coming back. But even though it flows like the unstoppable tides, ad money is not a requirement.
It's like free software. When it exists you can use it. When it doesn't exist you can't demand anyone to make it exist. And yet we still have free software. Not as much any more though as a lot of it changed to open source.
Now _that_ would be a killer feature.
The "Mag 7", as they're referred to, are dominated by companies that are either advertising companies, or have services that are infested with advertising.
AI might be the last hope for blocking advertising in the future. And potentially only generated by local LLMs because OpenAI and Anthropic are already pwned by members of the aforementioned Mag 7, so ad blocking could well be a verboten path of questioning.
Yes, it's a huge waste of resources - but blocking advertising could be one of the least wasteful use cases if we maintain this dark timeline.
Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would you parents even notice?
You could even extend that to OS as well.
What do you mean it has to be numbers? I can read it right here, it says abcd efgh.
This needs to stop.
This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.
If they're falling for things that they didn't used to fall for, that's sounds more like dementia than age.
My parents "fell" for fundamentalism early (as kids - raised in it), for televangelists in their 40s, and Fox News in their 70s/80s. Fox News so recently only because they didn't get it very often until about 10 years ago when they moved into a retirement home (didn't have cable before that).
I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
Bitcoin provided both a financial use for stolen compute and a bankless online international payment system for ransoms.
That's what turned the script kiddies into professionals. Malice and lulz were replaced with dollars and cents.
And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.
Software, OSs, and the internet at large were comically unsafe from a safety perspective. There was also a very high barrier of entry in terms of the skills required to take advantage of that, and very little incentive to do so compared to today or even 20 years ago.
It's worse than that. Google turned their exploit delivery platform into Google Tag Manager so they can be employed on more than just ads.
The only thing that should come up is actual local locksmiths.
As far as I can tell its a national company with an overseas call center, the scam is that it looks like a local company - at least they can sell a lead gen to someone that can open my lock.
I've heard worse happening in other cases where they drill locks and then quote much higher than $200 after they do it, it's sadly common.
I've read that if you let them work on your property, they will claim your bog-standard lock is unpickable, and charge you an exorbitant amount to drill it (destroying the lock) and replace it.
Almost everyone who calls a locksmith is in a hurry, dealing with something unfamiliar, so people are susceptible to this.
This is the crux of it.
If they can't block scammers from their own platform then they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place. The profit they make should easily cover it - unless they like profiting from promoting scams, in which case they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place.
They must pay the best because so many old forums that are/were near and dear to my heart use them to pay for servers, hopefully because they only saw the profit number and didn't consider the consequences, but you never know.
Ad-blocking is a safety issue, but luckily you can still block them just fine.[1]
The only thing this heavily neuters is tracking blocking, but no one admits that because they know, deep down, that ~0% of the non-tech crowd cares, so it's not as good at stirring up outrage as being dishonest is.
[1] If anything gorhill is to blame for the safety issue, since he refused to update his extension in-place, so any distant relatives will have the adblockers you installed for them removed, instead of updating to the fully functional Mv3 version.
gorhill made the reasonable move of not updating in-place because the new version is strictly inferior and you don't just make a massive downgrade like that without the opportunity to explain it to people.
If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe.
We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't.