Humanizing and accustomizing

Right on, same here. :)

The study found 58.3 percent of buyers say they couldn’t live without Bluetooth connectivity

Strange, when smartphones no longer come with 3.5 mm sockets… The consumer never asked for the majority of these “features”: they already had access to most of them (through their smartphone or other standalone device), or was easily and cost-effectively installed as an aftermarket gadget. All of these “safety” features, that coincidentally also happen to constitute a (future) privacy-nightmare, were pushed for by: legislators, insurance companies, and the automotive industry itself. Consumers effectively got conned into buying a duplicate of products they already owned, but which are instead subject to terms and conditions dictated by aforementioned stakeholders.

Imagine going after those seeking to protect their works from being stolen by AI, instead of the AI scrapers that caused this entire shit show to begin with. Put the blame where it makes sense, and don’t try to guilt trip those that are victim of intellectual property theft, into believing they are the ones responsible for the web becoming an accessibility-nightmare; not for just the disabled, but everyone (locking content behind: a login, PoW challenges, and CAPTCHAs). Awful defeatist take.

Audio fingerprinting works because small differences in browser versions, operating systems, audio libraries, and hardware can produce slightly different results from the same generated signal. It is not necessarily enough to uniquely identify a device by itself, but it becomes much more useful when combined with canvas, WebGL, hardware, timing, and interaction data.

The gaining happens after retrieval of the results it seems: so it’s just silent for the end user. And perhaps they do both fingerprinting, and ensure audio devices remain awake.

Yeah, I understand (as an ex-GOS and current pmOS user). It just feels hypocritical to crutch on monopolies for “child protection”, while in the same breath criticizing monopolistic practices… The EU should pick their poison

How about requiring Apple to provide an option for the device “owner” to disable Apple’s “protections”? If I want to choose freedom over “security”, I should have the option to do so. But the EU seems more interested in app signatures and app distribution through centralized channels controlled by the very same monopolists (as a similar approach can be observed on Android). But everything to protect the children, right?

Interesting that Chart 1 a only shows data up to 2023, while data up to 2026 shows an even closer resemblance to the dot-com bubble and 2008 financial crisis; in terms of steepness of the growth. So the more linear growth seen since the 2008 financial crisis, really should be attributed to other (more legitimate) forces in the market; while this article should’ve really focused on the growth since 2022 (which it just barely does).

So after butchering the like/dislike ratio, the view-count will also become utterly useless… What’s next, automatically subscribing users to inflate subscriber-count too? All these universally liked videos (no dislikes), views/exposure (zero engagement), advertiser-friendly content (threatened (shadow)banning or demonetization)! Now the only red flag to any malinformed advertiser might be a low subscriber-count; so just do it already. Well, alongside the lackluster performance of the ads themselves of course (which can only be measured after the transaction: poorly at that). And the best part: non of the ad-revenue will be shared with the propped up channels: as the recently heightened threshold, requires additional engaged viewers; as opposed to the TikTok-level, worthless kind.

Law enforcement shouldn’t become too convenient (“The company built a staff of hundreds of compliance officers, many of them veterans of U.S. and European law enforcement agencies. The police could often get information about accounts far faster from Binance than they could from banks.”), but equally not be excessively hindered by procedures or cronyist governments (“[…] unable to obtain account records from some Binance users based in the United Arab Emirates. […] certain information requests flow through the Emirati government […] conflict of interest, because the investment firm MGX is funded by Abu Dhabi royals.”); so I’m quite mixed on the change of direction.

It might be positive for legitimate users of the platform (which are less likely to be investigated, let alone receive specialty-treatment), but simultaneously protect Trump’s crypto-scamming inner circle, alongside other high-value targets.