kibblesalad

Clearly you don't have any sort of social standing to uphold and have disqualified yourself from the discussion!

Citations Needed has a decent episode on the publication and its history: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-98-the-refined-so...

"U+1F346 is an eggplant" and other oddities from the tubes we build modern society on

Ads seem like kind of a generic and misleading term for it. It's less about showing you a flashy clip for an advertised product in the classic sense, and more about building complex personality and interest profiles on users based around their engagement patterns across sites and services. That's the real resource which organizations pay money for, especially once it gets aggregated into constantly growing targeted data collections on individual users and the increasingly monopolized share of their digital fingerprints and track records.

Nobody's figured out that you can redirect a DNS record to an external host yet

Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/) has essentially replaced my local and network share search option. It's a staggering difference, and Search in Windows 10 seems to be primarily designed to show you ad results with the occasional locally installed app thrown in around 50% of the time.

I can do this myself for much cheaper by buying a used computer from eBay, waiting 3 weeks for it to ship with missing parts, trading my old bike for more RAM from Craiglist, setting up Arch on it, compiling my own drivers, writing a webserver and firewall from scratch, connecting it to the internet and then using it twice before my ISP cuts my service for breaking TOS by running hosting on a consumer plan. I could have even just gotten a DigitalOcean VPS for $5 a month and conned friends into paying my costs for me in return for creating them a username and password to a half-working FTP server where they can upload their images in sixteen easy steps.

"Paying employees less and making them work longer hours simultaneously is actually beneficial and good for their health, study finds"

>Accept that you are just boring plumbing, and don't have any "value added services", and you earn my money.

I'd love to see numbers on how much long term projected revenue their captive audience telemetry and ad delivery platform are valued at. I wouldn't be surprised if it renders the actual OS license sales look like a drop in the bucket.

Most of it is fabricated and fudged statistics as part of publications catering to corporate PR and the pro-surveillance narrative anyway:

https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-organized-crim...

That seems to be the end result of companies seeking untapped income from harvesting and selling customer data, besides offering everything as a subscription service without any kind of end-user ownership or guaranteed ongoing functionality. Why just make money off the sale of the product when you can continuously gather telemetry, personal information, track their location, their usage patterns, their contacts, their photo albums, metadata and browsing activity?

Most people don't think twice to hit that "Accept" button prompting for permissions, allowing the envelope to be pushed further and further. The increasing ease of processing huge data sets allows all of this information to be aggregated, sold and used for whatever purpose whoever is willing to pay for it sees fit.

Unfortunately companies know that it's vastly cheaper to frame the narrative around blaming personal responsibility and the employee for "not being tough enough / being unskilled at negotiating / bad at managing their free time" than to change a toxic work culture that demands increasingly more out of fewer and fewer staff.

>barely literate, living paycheck to paycheck and raising children

How about we focus on the issue that we're paying people working 40 hours a week, every week, for months on end not making enough money to reasonably survive?

James Bridle wrote a rather good book titled "New Dark Age" that covers the continual increase in reliance on algorithms and often non-human-verified data in our decision making processes in all aspects of our lives. This impacts scenarios from the individual level when people drive off roads and into hazards following their GPS blindly, all the way to global markets behaving in unexpected ways due to trade algorithms being unable to account for never before seen changes to conditions that don't fit within their existing parameters.

If you're in your 30s and are still thinking in political binaries of "right" and "left" or believe in infinite growth theory you are indeed doing something rather silly

It's really more about being able to trace accounts to people period, as allowed through the Patriot Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Title_II:_Enhanced...

Child pornography gets held up to the public a lot because it's a crime nobody can defend and walk away the same they were, no matter what you say. If you publicly contest this move for privacy reasons, you're automatically defending the worst child molester someone's mind can come up with.