Ferk

Yes. The thing is that then you are no longer anonymously using yt-dlp.
The next step would be trying to detect that case… maybe adding captchas when there’s even a slight suspicion.
Perhaps even to the point of banning users (and then I hope you did not rely on the same account for gmail or others).
It’ll be a cat and mouse situation. Similar as it happened with Twitter, there are also third party apps, but many gave up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point they start doing something like what Twitter did and require login to view the content.

The thing is… they are not really disagreeing if they are not saying something that conflicts or challengues the argument.

They just mistakenly believe they disagree when in fact they are agreeing. That’s what makes it stupid.

If you don’t like it, vote with your wallet

I’d say more: don’t use Youtube if you don’t like it.

It’s very hypocritical to see how everyone bashes at Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Uber, etc. and yet they continue using it as if life would be hell without the luxury of those completelly non essential brands. If you truly don’t like them, just let them die… look for alternatives. Supporting an alternative is what’s gonna hurt them the most if what you actually want is to force them to change.

There’s also a lot of videos from rich Youtube creators complaining about Youtube policies, and yet most of them don’t even try to set up channels on alternative platforms. Many creators have enough resources to even launch their own private video podcast services, and yet only very few do anything close to even attempt that.

Even if they did hallucinate answers, it wouldn’t be the first game that relies on the “unreliable narrator” trope.

Most of those 90% of vendors are not big enough to pull it off. The ones with the muscle to do it successfully are apparently offered special deals by Google that make it not really worth it for them to spend the effort to try and invest in building their own store. Specially if doing so compromises that deal.

Add to that the technical hurdles of trying to run a store in an OS managed by the competition and with increasingly tight security restrictions for functionality that is considered “system level” (eg. automatic updates on F-droid don’t work unless you root/flash the firmware…), to the point that you need to make your own OS/firmware if you want to be a real alternative with the same level of user friendliness.

Then add the technical hurdles of installing/managing an alternative firmware for several phone models, to the point that it might be easier to become (or partner with) a phone manufacturer.

Then add to that how competitive and ruthless the phone manufacturing market is, with very thin margins, and how reluctant people are to trying something that isn’t already mainstream and doesn’t have the fancy apps from the remaining 10% of successful big companies in the Play Store.

A giant as big as Amazon tried to pull it off at a few of those levels (from running their own installable store on regular Android to making their own devices with their own firmware) and even with all the pull from Amazon it isn’t making much of a dent. And in some of the device categories (like the fire phones) they already gave up.

This is further crippled by how the increasingly tight security measures in Android make harder and harder to add functionality that is considered “system-level” and is as deeply integrated as the Play Store.

You can’t simply install F-droid and expect the same level of user friendliness and automatic app updates as in the official Play Store. Without esoteric, hackish and warranty-voiding rooting methods, you need to give manual user confirmation for every small update. You need to update 30 apps that accumulated because you forgot to manually update each of them? get prepared for going 30 times thought the same process of pressing buttons and giving confirmation for each of them.

If your grocery store “willfully acquired or maintained monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive conduct”… then you’d be actively and purposefully affecting the ability for anyone to “try to build an alternative to compete with [it]”.

They aren’t asking Google to use a specific price, what they are asking is for them to stop offering special custom-made deals under the table for some of the partners with the intent of preventing competition. Nobody is stopping Google from offering the same fees to everyone indiscriminately… the issue is when they pick and choose with the purpose of minimizing/discouraging competition. Particularly when they are already the biggest one in their market by a wide margin, so they have a higher power/responsibility than a Mom’n’Pop store.

Would it help turning on the setting to have the links always open in a new tab?
It’s been a long time since I used ddg, but I believe they have the option in their settings page, most search engines do.

Will you be notified and asked permission before the page is loaded?

I mean, even for self-signed/invalid certificates, most browsers allow you to optionally access the page anyway… it’ll show some error page first, but it’ll allow you to load it if you explicitly request to continue in the error page itself, right? and you’ll get an eye-catching red icon indicating the website is untrusted… why can’t browsers implement something similar to that? Just use a different icon and a different page/dialog to opt-in on first visit. Something that isn’t as strong as the error page, but that makes it clear to the user which organization/government is responsible for authorizing the access.

But then again… why not simply have that website registered under .id.eu (for example) and have the EU use that DNS for registering/signing subdomains using eIDAS certificates? then there would be no risk for it to potentially poison other top-level domains if it’s compromised. And imho, it would be great if when a citizen gets their eIDAS certificate it comes with a personal domain that they can freely use.

I feel I’m not fully understanding here neither what exactly is being asked nor the purpose for asking it.
Is there some more clear and unbiased information on this? …the way they wanna call it “secret” is also very confusing to me, that smells of FUD… in which way is it “secret”? are there no public details about the request? “secret legislation” feels almost like an oximoron. I feel that what they want to say is that the controversial sections were introduced very late in the process, following some closed-door meetings, but that’s no the same thing as the legislation being “secret”…

Yes, I agree that it feels unrealistic that there will be something stable and good by the time the law actually takes effect. But the regulation (the Digital Markets Act) has been already approved since 2022 and we already have a deadline for Whatsapp set by the EU: March 2024 (6 months from 6th September 2023, which is when the Commission designated Meta as “Gatekeeper” and Whatsapp as a “Core Platform Service”).

So, while I’m very skeptical that the result will be satisfactory, I’m very curious to see what will Whatsapp come up with when the deadline hits, because, allegedly, they are already working on it.

With the new European regulations Whatapp will soon be forced to offer some compatibility towards 3rd party apps, so there are chances that perhaps bridging in this way will become easier in the near future, or at least have some level of official support. But we won’t know for certain how will it work until it happens. All we know is that Whatsapp is currently working on a way for 3rd parties to connect with them.

Personally, I’d hold for a bit to see where does that go and then decide what method to use.

be nice

What niceness level exactly?
The most nice I can be in my system is -20… but being too nice to one process leaves others with less time and resources in their life.

Yes, I got your point. Mine was that many of the things we do (specially online) cannot be protected by trying to keep it “secret” in the way you previously described. Because they often involve a “Bob”, even if it’s one we sometimes don’t even notice.

So it makes sense for someone to try and look for ways to at least get some level of protection from Alices in other ways than just “don’t tell Bob” even if they might not be flawless (you gave some examples of such ways in that last response).

That’s true, though personally I find a sort of warm feeling about the idea of my messages and content I produced being available for my descendants, beyond just my bank account.

I wish I had a way to see how my great-grandparents were. What their life was like. That I could check out conversations they had in a public forum. Or see what hobbies they had… but life back then left no traces, so their thoughts were lost to time after my grandparents and my father went away. If they wrote any letters they were lost. So I’d be ok if one day one of my descendants has a way to see what accounts I used and they come upon this message when wondering about me. Like a time-traveling high-five from past-me to my relatives.

When Bob is active part of what you don’t want Alice to know, it doesn’t matter whether you “tell” Bob or not, he knows.

You can try and hide it from him, add layers like an onion, but even that isn’t necessarily a failproof guarantee that you left no trace, even onions can be peeled or holes pierced.

Systemd “enabled” services are literal symlinks… whenever a target runs, it tries to start also all the service files on its “wants” directory.

You can literally enable any service for next boot by making a symlink in /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/ (or whichever other target you want it to run on) as root (and installation scripts are run as root).

ln -s /usr/lib/systemd/system/whatever.service  /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/whatever.service

Yes, the way his hand is positioned, it would not have worked if they had wanted to make it hold the wooden stick. They’d have needed to edit the hand too much and it would have likely been noticeable / even weirder.

Probably they decided: f*ck it, let them grab it however they want. Maybe it’ll even become a thing.

And it looks like it worked, since we are talking about it and spreading the ad. Smart advertising, imho.

Yes, his relationship with the idea of “Others” is strange… like a love/hate relationship. In fact, the cat which you mentioned (named after a racial slur, though it seems it was not him who named it) was deeply loved by him… he using his cat’s name in one of his works was more of a way to honor it rather than anything else, there’s letters from him claiming he was still mourning even though it was more than 20 years since it vanished.

Other-phobic

Honestly, the “cosmic horror” or the mere fear of the unknown kind of plays into that as well.

One could argue there’s something inherently racist in sci-fi horror that depicts aliens as monsters when in fact they might just simply be different intelligent lifeforms with their own set of needs…

There might be sometimes problems among intelligent lifeforms to properly understand / communicate, or conflicts in our goals. But painting everything alien/unknown as inherently scary is kind of racist, even if in some situations it might be written in our instincts to not trust that which is unfamiliar.