Google eyes privacy-friendly substitute to cookies – Axios

Tests show advertisers can expect at least 95% of conversions per dollar spent on ads, compared to cookie-based advertising, Google said.

Source: Google eyes privacy-friendly substitute to cookies – Axios

I don’t even need to read the article to know this is utter BS. If Google is advocating for it, it will not do anything like it is purported to do. It will aid Google’s efforts to serve you ads, and hinder other advertiser’s efforts. And Google won’t knowingly give up any tracking, in any way, shape, or form, so don’t pretend that this is helping privacy. All this will do is more-solidly cement the fact that if you want to advertise on the internet, you’ll have to go through Google to do it. Any effort they expend in this area will have that goal, no matter what color of lipstick they apply to the pig.

… given that the entire digital ad ecosystem, worth $330 billion USD globally…

Yeah, and according to some reports, it’s about 80% fraudulent. I’m just glad I don’t need to be involved in that world whatsoever.

Take the Profit Out of Political Violence – BIG by Matt Stoller

Repealing Section 230 or reforming it so platforms who profit via advertising are not covered, would reduce the incentive for social media to enable illegal behavior. If we did so, a whole range of legal claims, from incitement to intentional infliction of emotional distress to harassment to defamation to fraud to negligence, would hit the court system, and platforms would have to alter their products to make them less harmful. There are other paths to taking on targeted advertising, like barring it through privacy legislation, a law for a real Do Not Track List, or using unfair methods of competition authority of the Federal Trade Commission. But the point is, we need to stop immunizing platforms who enable illegal behavior from offloading the costs of what they inflict.

Source: Take the Profit Out of Political Violence – BIG by Matt Stoller

These “platforms” driving all discussion and conversation today are, by definition, common carriers. The phone company was a common carrier. They couldn’t discriminate against anyone. They had to provide service to everyone, because they were 1) essential to modern society, and 2) had a monopoly on the service. In the same way, Twitter and Facebook are essential, and monopolies in their respective spaces. Like the phone company, they should be required to just carry everything that’s not clearly and always illegal, and let the court system sort out behavior that requires any sort of legal interpretation.

I could see making exception for blocking groups or people identified by the government as terrorists or criminals, but that’s the point. The government — i.e., our system of laws — would be making that determination, not a bunch of un-elected modern day kings and princes of our neo-feudalistic capitalism.

I don’t trust them. Their influence over our country, news cycle, and opinions is too great to leave to profit motive. It’s already been credibly demonstrated that Russia (at least) interfered in the 2016 election through these two platforms, because it aligned with this profit-seeking motivation. What guarantee do we have that this is not ongoing? There’s no accountability, and no visibility into their systems, hidden behind trade secrets for the banal purpose of making obscene profits.

Facebook is making $20 billion dollars a year, and paying about 8% tax. The older I get, the more liberal I get, and the more I resent the squandered opportunity cost of another round of tens-of-millions-of-dollars bonuses for a bunch of execs, while human beings pile up on the sidewalks in the city which hosts the company’s headquarters. It’s immoral. I don’t know when the line was crossed, but the whole thing is simply immoral, at this point.

Twitter doesn’t make nearly the money that Facebook does, but they are arguably more directly important. It seems that half the news articles I read these days are about a tweet, or reference tweets as part of the story. Their influence is overarching all news organizations now. That’s a dangerous situation for a democracy. These companies are ruining the world by — dare I say it: “inciting violence” — through driving everyone crazy with anger and division about every issue, no matter how big or small, evading meaningful oversight, and not giving back commensurately. I tire of it.

UPDATE: Right after posting this, I read Continuations by Albert Wenger : Welcome to the Government-IT Infrastructure…

I believe there is a high likelihood that we are witnessing the visible emergence of the government-IT infrastructure complex. Government will be even less inclined to try and generate competition in this space. It is so much more convenient to have just a few large entities that an executive agency can influence behind the scenes rather than having to bother with the rule of law. We have already had this in the payments space for a while where instead of targeted interventions against actual abuses payment providers withdraw wholesale support for companies in certain categories (most prominently anything related to sexwork).

Matt Stoller thinks that there’s a shot at doing some serious anti-monopoly regulation under a Biden administration, but Albert Wenger makes me realize that Facebook and Twitter don’t just have government “cover” because of campaign contributions. They also are manipulating their systems in subtle ways for the government’s benefit (besides giving them access to all the personal data they want, of course). I realize now that the relationship goes deeper than I have previously, cynically concluded. There’s not going to be some sort of noble, united urge from Congress to reign these companies in and hold them accountable for their influence on our democracy. A few of the “radicals” may make some noise, but only because they haven’t been briefed on the whole dynamic. And they won’t be. Their political theater is useful to those actually in power. Or, cynically, maybe they do know the real situation, and they just volunteer to be the token voices against these companies, to string along the public’s desire that they do “something” about them.

Microsoft Released a Bizarre New Surface Pro Ad and It’s Hoping You Won’t Notice It’s Pure Gaslighting | Inc.com

Microsoft made a point of mentioning that price point–since the Surface Pro is cheaper–but it’s worth mentioning that it means the MacBook Pro in question is sporting Apple’s new M1 processor. It raises an interesting question: How do you compare two things that are not at all like each other? And, maybe more importantly, why would you?

Source: Microsoft Released a Bizarre New Surface Pro Ad and It’s Hoping You Won’t Notice It’s Pure Gaslighting | Inc.com

Whatever sales figures Microsoft might release about the Surface, they are continuing to struggle to sell these units. How do I know this? Because of jumbled and confusing ads like the one referenced in the article.

The kid in the video complains about not having a stylus or a touchscreen, but you can get both of those things in an iPad. The only reason alluded to in the ad about why you wouldn’t just want buy a tablet in this scenario is “gaming.” LOL WUT? You can’t pay me to believe that people are buying a Surface to play games that you couldn’t play on a MacBook.

Microsoft continues to try to sell people on the idea that the Surface somehow bridges a theoretical gap between a laptop and a tablet, but if that market segment exists, it’s very small. And, when your competition has so completely dominated the tablet end of that spectrum, any effort to wedge a hybrid device into that market gap is going to be difficult at best.

The issues with using a touchscreen while it’s not-horizontal have been beaten to death, and I won’t rehash them here. I know 3 people who have Surfaces, and they seem to like them. But I watch them fumble around with their keyboards as they switch between tasks, and wonder why they put up with it. Microsoft is betting they can make money selling to people who don’t mind living in the usability gap. Maybe they can, but they’ve obviously not created a segment-defining product the way the iPhone and iPad have.

My advice to Microsoft’s advertising department would be to simply sell the devices on their merits. The people who are interested want to live in that “convertibility” space. Market that. Play to that strength. I don’t see it, but there are people who do. Sell to both of them.

The best PS4 games to play right now – Polygon

A mix of originals, remakes, and remasters makes the PS4 a system with a vast library of wonderful games

Source: The best PS4 games to play right now – Polygon

I just note, for the record, and with no small amount of satisfaction, that Red Dead Redemption 2 didn’t even make the list. It’s only an honorable mention. It’s not that it was completely terrible in all aspects, of course, but I contend it will eventually be seen as one of the most overrated and over-hyped AAA titles to ever hit the market.

CADT Model in Action

JWZ, the arguably-most-infamous developer of Netscape, has a theory called the CADT: Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers. I got an email this morning as another example of the model in action.

I posted the problem to serverfault.com and opened the bug report. In my opinion, it was a good example of a fully-documented bug, which was easy to replicate. In their bug system, there were 12 “upvotes” of people saying that the bug was affecting them as well. Today, 6 years and 4 months later, the person the bug was assigned to is asking a rhetorical question to document that it’s going to be closed because the version of PHP it applies to is being sunsetted.

I still have no idea why an unavoidable bug in the stock PHP install in a major distribution didn’t cause more of a fuss, but it clearly wasn’t a show stopper. I don’t remember what I did about it as a workaround, but I guess everyone else did it too. I think I just gave up, and decided that I didn’t need a local dev instance of WordPress for this blog.

Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog

Last week, Elastic announced they will change their software licensing strategy, and will not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2). Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server Side Public License (which has requirements that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community). This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software. In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.

From https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch/. (Because Amazon seems to have broken the auto-embedding from the WordPress widget.)

Someone pointed out that the company behind Elastic made a profit of $500M last year. This apparently wasn’t good enough, because Capitalism, so after promising just 3 months ago that they would never change their license, they did, in order to try to claw back more money they might be missing out on. They gave anyone bundling their open-source product a giant middle finger to try to spite Amazon, and Amazon gave them the finger right back.

The resources to continue to develop Elasticsearch, post license change, is a rounding error on Amazon’s balance sheet, and you can bet your sweet bippie that anyone actually affected by Elastic’s spiteful license change will simply use Amazon’s version, and avoid the Elastic “tax” on their efforts. In open source, it’s always been about having the largest benefactor on your side, and knowing that keeping Elasticsearch truly open source is in Amazon’s self-interest will swing the choice between versions away from elastic.co. It seems to me that Elastic just misfired the foot-gun.

Best comment of the HN thread on the subject:

Unless it’s not clear yet, the biggest benefactors of OSS have become the 3 largest cloud vendors owned by 3 of the largest tech mega corps, namely:

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • GCP

The multi-billion dollar infrastructure and network lock-in cloud vendors enjoy ensures there will only be these 3 cloud platforms (in the western world) that will enjoy most of the value derived from OSS, who are collecting rents on the backs of ISV’s who developed the OSS products, because of which they’re also going to be most invested in keeping the OSS status quo where they’re able to repackage the resources & efforts others have invested into developing their OSS products and reap a majority of the profits by offering it as a managed hosted service on their platform, since relatively no customer using the cloud is going to want to use an external service if there’s also the same managed service being offered by the cloud vendor.

 

The fantasy that OSS allows equal competition is no longer a reality, ISV’s cannot compete with a cloud vendor who uses their own investments against them in addition to their anti-competitive monopoly lock-in of already having Customers running on their cloud platform.

 

Elastic’s move to SSPL is effectively “OSS + free for everyone with the exception of exploitation by a major cloud vendor”, since without it we’re heading towards a mono culture future where all hosted OSS software is going to be funded and resourced by the billions major cloud vendors have reaped in collecting all the rent for hosting others OSS investments, that AWS gives nothing back in exchange for.

 

SSPL is effectively being used a tool to force AWS to do the ethical thing and reach an agreement with Elastic to distribute a portion of their profits from using their trademarks and hosting their Software they’ve invested a decade in building. AWS has instead chosen the path to maintain their own fork to avoid sharing any profits with Elastic as they’re obviously currently making so much from hosting Elastic’s products that it’s in their financial best interest to start hiring dev resources to maintain their own fork then sharing profits with Elastic to fund its continued development.

 

Will be interesting to see how this strategy turns out, AWS may have already become to big to compete against who will be able to out resource, out fund & take over any ISV’s OSS product, but it’s clear the longer Elastic waits, the harder it would be to protect their own investments being used against them.

This all factors into ideas knocking about in my head about de facto monopolies and what modern society should do about them, which I’m still trying to be able to elucidate succinctly.

 

The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming – Glenn Greenwald

No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.

Source: The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming – Glenn Greenwald

Glenn wrote a long article about how all political speech is going to be painted as “inciting violence,” in order to stifle opposition to whoever is in power. He identifies a lot of historical examples from the left, which we are calling “incitement” today, which people are forgetting.

You don’t need to look any further than the popular reaction to a tweet made by Ted Cruz to see that he was correct:

The “hot take” here is that he’s “trying to incite,” and I was provoked into blogging about this because it was the third such hot take I saw on Imgur about this tweet in my doom scrolling. Here’s an elected member of Congress saying the same thing:

The problem, of course, is that there’s literally and absolutely nothing in Ted Cruz’s tweet that could be construed by a rational, reasonable person as an incitement to violence. The whole thing just proves Greenwald correct, and in record time.

As a followup, here’s The Daily Caller, hosting a former Facebook exec, who is complaining about not being able to control the flow of information, and suggesting that we need to get AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast to block right-wing news sites from their internet service. Regardless of hosting provider, they would simply not be able to reach Americans, because of the regional monopolies on local internet providers, and the duopoly of phone service.

The Debt Question Facing Janet Yellen: How Much Is Too Much? – WSJ

A big question hangs over Janet Yellen this week at her confirmation hearing to become U.S. Treasury secretary: How much debt is too much?

 

In the past four years, U.S. government debt held by the public has increased by $7 trillion to $21.6 trillion. President-elect Joe Biden has committed to a spending program that could add trillions more in the year ahead. At 100.1% of gross domestic product, the debt already exceeds the annual output of the economy, putting the U.S. in company with economies including Greece, Italy and Japan.

Source: The Debt Question Facing Janet Yellen: How Much Is Too Much? – WSJ

There it is, and Biden hasn’t even taken office yet! For the first time in four years, someone in the press noticed the national debt. We only care about the debt when a Democrat is President. Search and see for yourself. WashPo, CNN, Pro Publica all wrote articles about the debt in the past 5 days.

I don’t even know where the WSJ got their number. According to the Debt Clock, the current figure is $27.8T.

We added $7T to the debt under Trump, including $4.5T for two rounds of corporate welfa… — I mean, “stimulus” — and now we worry about adding another $1.9T? Are you trying to tell me that another 7% is suddenly going to topple the world’s economy or something? Trying to inflame political tensions about this just before Biden takes office is as disingenuous as it is completely predictable, and Lord knows we don’t need any more political inflammation right now.

Through the 90’s, lots of people, including myself, advocated for a flat tax, thinking it was “fair.” Well, without anyone in Congress stumping about it, that’s what we’ve quietly wound up with:

I hope the people in the 99.99% bracket are mad at the Top 400

The problem is that it’s piling up debt. There’s never any money to do anything extra. So we just print more money. That sounds very scary to us normal people, who view the country’s economy like our own household’s, but apparently it doesn’t matter, because we’ve been doing just that for several decades now, and we’re just now reaching levels of debt, relative to GDP, that some other first-world countries have.

My thinking on taxation has flipped 180º, fast and hard. If we ever want to actually fund the government, and pay for all of these bailouts and stimuluses and old-fashioned “safety nets” like welfare and social security, we’re going to have to go back to a steeply progressive tax scheme, and cut out shelters that cater to the ultra-wealthy. But just like Congress voting for a pay cut or term limits or killing corporate political PAC’s, this will never happen, because these desperately-needed changes would affect the people that fund campaigns.

 

Our paranoid friend who fears Facebook’s power – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

As a demonstration of how irrationally paranoid this guy is for imagining that a combination of political rulers and corporate cronies would suppress his speech via deplatforming, Facebook has deplatformed him…

Source: Our paranoid friend who fears Facebook’s power – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I have nothing to add.