Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.

Google, probably

Yes, a lot of developers have done this. Many examples have been posted on this thread (OsmAnd, Conversations, Davx5) - Mindustry is another example. free on f-droid (and Google store too I think), but $10 on Steam.

I assume you’re trying to imply in your comment that people are not going to use it if it’s not easy.

It’s unfortunate, but sometimes, having nice things can be a little hard. If people want to use the easiest thing under the sun, then they’ll just have to accept the downsides that come with it. Sometimes, that means private companies will use private photos of people’s underage children in AI training models that can generate deepfake pornography. What can you do? Convenience comes at a cost sometimes.

I’m not saying I agree with this of course, but that’s just how things are in the world where all rules must follow the dollar.

Well of course, that’s true of any and all publicly accessible data. At least with self-hosting, your private channels still don’t get mined against your wishes

Xournal - a great way to draw on pdfs

Honest question here: what would stop me from starting a video, then pausing it and walking away from my computer for several hours so youtube plays ads to no one?

Now repeat but with several tabs.

And bonus points if the videos simply happen to be mine and I were to enable monetization on them.

Hmmm…

Right - they say that they’re just going to use it to defend their “property rights”. In practice, they’re going to use it for a whole lot more than just that…

Of course! I hope you didn’t read my comment as hostile. I read yours as sort of a devil’s advocate type of argument and was just trying to point out the logical flaws in it. I’m glad that you didn’t hesitate to voice a contrary opinion. The points that you raise are interesting… and it’s always good to consider both sides of the argument, even because it just helps us hone our own arguments. You could certainly argue that this is just another enforcement mechanism. It’s just that it comes with a lot of unintended consequences, which most people will overlook, and they’ll inevitably be used in ways that we didn’t anticipate, long after the fact that these kinds of mechanisms become commonplace.

Regarding the reduced cost of lending: sure, in theory they could lower the prices. In practicality, will it? Any time we see cost-reducing developments, it usually ends up resulting in higher profits for the vendors moreso than better competition and lower prices for consumers. Look at how car manufacturers are just letting electric vehicles sit in their lots because they refuse to accept what buyers are willing to pay. The corporate types really, really hate to lower prices on anything for any reason. So I would be surprised to see something like that happen, even though it’s still theoretically possible…

All your points are sound. The issue that I have with this is that remote disable functionality is not necessary to achieve any of these aims. Before they were connected to the internet, people were still able to rent/lease autos and the world managed to survive just fine. There were other ways for lenders to get remunerated for breaking lease terms - they could issue an additional charge, get a court order for repossession, etc. Remote disable was never needed or warranted.

So let’s start by considering the due process here. Before, there was some sort of process involved in the repossession act. With remote disable however, the lender can act as judge, jury and executioner so to speak - that party can unilaterally disable the device with no oversight. And if the lender is in the wrong, there is likely no recourse. Another potential issue here is that the lender can change the terms at any time - it can arbitrarily decide that it doesn’t like what you’re doing with the device, decide you’re in breach, and hit that remote kill switch. A lot of these things could technically happen before too, but the barriers have been dramatically lowered now.

On top of this, there are great privacy concerns as well. What kinds of additional information does the lender have? What right do they have to things like our location, our habits, when we use it, and all of the other personal details that they can infer from programs like this?

There are probably lots of other issues here, but another part of the problem is that we can’t even start to imagine what kinds of nefarious behaviors they can execute with this new information and power. We are well into the age where our devices are becoming our enemies instead of our advocates. I shudder to think what the world would look like 20 years from now if this kind of behavior isn’t stopped.

There was a quaint old time, shortly after Google was founded, where people mused about privacy over the internet. It was forgotten about as the profits started rolling in and pretty much all other companies started following along. That was the time when we started transitioning into a period of massive data surveillance. Glad to see that the conversation is starting to pick up again in some areas, though it’s definitely being actively suppressed in many others.

GDPR desperately needed on the other side of the pond…

The only solution is to break them up. There is no other way - Google will keep perverting and manipulating social trends as long as they’re allowed to hold onto their position.

The web browser is the most important piece of software in the world. It should not be under the control of a single company - especially when that company is a massive monopolist with extreme conflicts of interest.

The web (and the entire internet) was built on standards. It is time to go back to multiple parties working together on standards. Not a single, monopolistic implementation.

(Google isn’t the only company that needs to be broken up by the way, but they’re definitely the most urgent.)

The inevitable fate of any useful software that’s not GPL.

When will people learn???

Edit: Ironically, KHTML was originally LGPL. So modifications to KHTML were required to be open source by the license, but Chrome itself isn’t required to be open source (at least as far as I understand it, I am not an expert here). Nevertheless, if it were stronger GPL, then it probably wouldn’t have been impossible to write features like DRM in chrome. So I would have been a bit of an idiot to say that KHTML isn’t GPL (because LGPL is a weaker version of GPL), but in effect, the outcome is the same - all because of that big fat L at the beginning.

Yeah, the biggest problem with Firefox is that its engine is so hard to embed. Chrome has endless clones because it’s just so damn easy to embed. And Firefox just has some weak forks like Librewolf.

I’d really rather see Mozilla focus on this rather than all their other stupid endeavors…