I really wish people would stop calling them adblockers too, they’re wide-spectrum content blockers, and they’re not blocking ads, they’re blocking malicious ad-networks which is necessary for user security. Given the prevalence of online spyware it should be a basic feature built in to all web browsers.
It just gives spyware-promoting sites the ability to say “but you’re hurting our revenue” which is a completely separate issue.
I find they’re a pain to use and I only have one out of social pressure, and privacy or not I’m constantly confused on why they’re so popular.
I just use a throwaway account and have the rule of not putting in any data that I don’t want to be read - which is barely anything any way because I do all my computing on my Linux laptop. I figure if they’re collecting location data and recording me then they’re just associating it with “random guy x” because I’ve never given it anything else. I should look in to one of the de-Googled Android distributions but I have so little interest and energy in anything to do with it, if it could be made totally private I would still rarely use it.
Logseq is great, a bit of a learning curve but worth it.
Most people aren’t professional musicians though.
I don’t understand why people are so cynical about this, it seems like a harmless demonstration of the current state of the technology.
Essentially yes, I would give the person using AI to generate an original image the credit as the image’s creator. I’m willing to bet that anything “good” AI generates is a result of many attempts and refinements and a human selecting the best result, and to me that makes it a human-driven creative process using a tool, the same as using a random number generator.
I’m deliberately not saying “copyrightable” because I don’t personally believe that digital files should be copyrightable (since recognising a copyright of a number is insanity), but it should be copyrightable in a society that recognises number copyrights.
My thought on that is if you generate multiple images through a random number generator and find one that’s interesting or aesthetically pleasing, then you are the creator since selecting it, while low effort, is the creative process.
Not within Lemmy, but if you were on, for example, a federated Mastodon instance it’s perfectly possible to boost that comment that would appear like a retweet to Mastodon users.
The point is that YouTubers pay for that with their own reputation, if I followed a YouTuber that promoted exploitative companies I would stop following that YouTuber - why would you want to watch their content anyway?
Blocking YouTube’s advertising is necessary for privacy, and it punishes YouTube for their bad business practices.
But sponsors aren’t underhanded like that and I feel like they’re the type of thing we should really be promoting as an alternative to privacy invading ads, and hopefully a way for creators to move off of YouTube eventually.
1: Use Linux
2: Mullvad browser (Firefox-based) - while I don’t use it myself (I have my own customised Firefox in-keeping with my threat model) for an average “normie” user this seems to have the most sane defaults for privacy including uBlock Origin installed by default (and fingerprint resistance).
3: Keep your software updated (too overlooked by so many users).
Seems bold of them to assume who your friends are. Glad I never used that site.
What annoys me most about that kind of logic is that the reverse could also be true - they could potentially run ads like on TV without directly profiling users or violating privacy. But by marrying the concept of ads and tracking, they can play the “but we need to pay for our services somehow” card.
It would be hard for them to prove that they’ve actually done it, and they won’t want to admit that giving them your data is something undesirable.
I haven’t yet but I presume that’s because I don’t have an account - which according to the article they’re targeting people by account.
Are you replying to the right person?
OK, fair enough, I misread your question. Honestly I’ve not really encountered many websites that don’t work on Firefox, less than 1% surely, and when I do I tend to avoid that website. If I can’t avoid it I tend to fall back to using GNOME Web (Epiphany), or ungoogled Chromium from Flathub (which I think receives regular updates, I’m not sure what the exploit you’re talking about is, should I be worried?).
I really think that’s a separate issue, which needs to be discussed as a completely separated issue. I agree ads by their nature are manipulative, they serve the website and the advertiser not the user. I think that once ads are non user-tracking then we can have a discussion about advertising ethics and deceptive advertising (online ads have always been terrible even before they were privacy invading) but you can’t have that discussion when it’s mixed in with privacy issues. Only once you take away the privacy issues then we can have the conversation about ad-pollution versus website revenue.