I see two three pin 3.5mm stereo plugs (one of them color coded for the headphones and one for the mic), and zero 4-pin combo plugs?

Weird. The article does have today’s date but only mentions the Nov 10 decision. I think maybe what happened today is the publication of the full text of the decision?

It’d be great if that was how it works, unfortunately it seems like the penalties are closer to once every 3-5 years than monthly, skewing the balance even further to “screw the law, just pay the fee”:(

I’d say that’s a huge problem actually.

For a normal company, abusing data is a small part of their business and profit is a few percent of revenue, so such a fine would be devastating.

For some tech companies, profit is in the double digit percent of revenue and half of it comes from breaking the law, so the 4% are a tax they can happily pay and still be more profitable than if they followed the law.

Same misleading nonsense. If you follow the links it becomes obvious that it’s the old news banning FB from using the data on the basis of contract and legitimate interest - which they’re avoiding by claiming “consent” after people choose that they’d rather not pay a triple-digit amount per year to use the site.

No, the article is just regurgitating old news and the old misleading claim (omitting the critical part that they’re only banned from using data “on the basis of contract and legitimate interest”).

This “news” is what made Facebook start with the “agree or pay” bullshit.

mild_shock.jpg

Sometimes they also came up with literal malware as DRM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

Enforcing DRM has a big downside: it paints a massive target on the DRM implementation, and it will likely end up getting broken.

Imagine, 100 people trying to load a video from your single hard drive, it’s not fast enough for that.

YouTube 1080p is 8-10 Mbit/s according to what I could find. That’d be 100-125 MByte/s for 100 people. I think my SSD is more than fast enough for that.

Even better, a 1 Gbps connection is also (just) enough to actually upload the video to those 100 people.

And with 100+ people watching, P2P distribution should work really well too.

They might be able to relay them in a way that the end to end encryption is actually handled on the phone and the relay only relays encrypted messages.

That would likely still give them a capability to MitM but it’s plausible that they couldn’t passively intercept the messages.

No, the network effect is too strong. Deleting WhatsApp is cutting off the primary/only way to contact many friends (in countries where it’s the primary messenger), and a mild form of “abandon everything and go live in a monastery”.

uBlock Origin explicitly advises against this. If it’s the only content blocker it doesn’t currently have issues with YouTube, if you have multiple you’ll probably hit the “disable your adblocker” warning.

The first three are using identical techniques so combining them is of very limited benefit. They’re mostly there to cover software that doesn’t have an ad blocker.

I’d stick with just ublock origin.

Removed by mod

Steam is full of anime porn games.

For a long time there wasn’t even a way to filter them meaningfully, as porn and gore were in the same category. So you either had the default filter and couldn’t see some of the most violent games, or you turned the filter off and every listing turned into 90% porn games. I think they realized that and now have separate categories for “adult because gory” and “tits”.

In this case, I’d say the censorship worked in favor of Hamas, and while “poorly moderated” platforms did give them the opportunity to spread their “propaganda”, Hamas used it to show everyone their true face. The result of the propaganda was people who were previously sympathetic to the Palestinian’s cause we’re now calling for Gaza to be turned into a parking lot.

I also find it rather rich that the article is complaining about misinformation when most of the press printed the lie about the hospital attack as if it was a fact.

Oh, I absolutely understand that a lot of tracking is stil possible. But in practice, it’s usually handled by third parties via a script loaded from a third party domain, because doing any of the smarter stuff would require a) a competent IT team b) the marketing team talking to them constantly.

Much easier to just slap another tracker into Google Tag Manager.

Of course this doesn’t help against tech companies. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit etc. will most likely track your views based on the requests, which you can’t avoid. But this takes care of 90% of the tracking, and most importantly, it removes the “everyone tracking you across every site you visit” aspect of the ad surveillance industry.

uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

Can’t fingerprint my machine if your fingerprinting script never loads.

There is an universally available subscription that applies to all services, costs $0/month, refuses donations, and is called uBlock Origin.

Haven’t noticed any of the YouTube issues either so far.

20% of their revenue comes from the EU, almost all of it from ads. I’d argue that complying with the law would cost them more than a quarter of the EU ads revenue, without affecting their costs much -> that’d be 5% of global revenue. Breaking the law still pays.

Also, how do you conclude that 448 million people paying 90 EUR per year, for a total of 40 billion EUR, wouldn’t offset a 4.66 billion USD fine?

If the fine was 4% of global revenue every month, sure. So far it looks like it’d be every 3-5 years though…