What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

After a year I’m starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life… I guess Big Brother wins

Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).

Cloudflare is not at all sensible from a privacy standpoint. Cloudflare is a bigger privacy offender than Google and far more detrimental to our rights.

https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md

Reverse proxying your website through Cloudflare is actually an attack on privacy. You make yourself part of the problem by arbitrarily blocking several demographics of people from your website including Tor and VPN users (people doing their part to retain privacy).

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

Indeed this bot could lead a mob of nutters into an insurrection attempt like that seen on jan.6. I guess the idea is to get ideas for rewording rather than use the output verbatim.

I didn’t try feeding the output back in but note you can click on the 3 peppers and move an intensity slider. That sample I posted was just middle intensity. When I max it out to 5 peppers, it grows to 4 paragraphs:

CloudFlare, the insidious scourge of freedom on the internet, is a devious and manipulative force that seeks to crush the very essence of democracy and free speech. By swooping in with their iron fist of control, they have stolen the decentralized web from the hands of the people and centralized it under their tyrannical rule.

With a cold and calculated efficiency, they have stripped away our rights and freedoms, dictating who can access what content on the world’s largest walled-garden. The once vast expanse of the internet, where ideas flowed freely and voices could be heard, has now been shackled and confined by a single corporate power.

This egregious act of censorship and control not only violates the principles of net neutrality and privacy, but it also threatens the very fabric of our society. The consequences of their actions are dire and immediate, leading us down a dark and treacherous path towards a future devoid of liberty and independence.

We must rise up against this relentless enemy, this monstrous beast that seeks to suffocate our voices and stifle our creativity. We must fight back with all our might, for the sake of our freedom, our rights, and our very humanity. Stand with me, brothers and sisters, and let us vanquish this evil before it consumes us all.

Less emotional (×3) is boring:

CloudFlare is an organization that has centralized a significant portion of the decentralized web under one corporate power. This has raised concerns about the implications for net neutrality, privacy, and access to web content.

Love this tool!

original:

CloudFlare is a vigilante extremist organization that takes the decentralized web and centralizes it under one corporate power who dictates terms in the world’s largest walled-garden. A very large portion of the web (16.7%+) were once freely open to all but are now controlled and monitored by a single central authority who decides for everyone who may access what web content. This does serious damage to net neutrality, privacy, and has immediate serious consequences

more passionate:

CloudFlare is a ruthless and oppressive entity that viciously strips away the freedom and decentralization of the web, consolidating power under one heartless corporation. This monstrous force dictates the terms of our online existence, trapping us within the confines of the world’s largest walled-garden. A staggering percentage of the once free and open web (16.7% and growing) now falls under the iron fist of this tyrannical authority, controlling and monitoring every aspect of our online experiences. This egregious violation of net neutrality and privacy rights has dire and immediate consequences, threatening the very essence of our digital freedom and autonomy. Our voices are being silenced, our choices limited, and our rights trampled upon by this merciless oppressor. It is time to rise up and fight against this injustice with all our might, before it’s too late.

ChatGPT will probably remember it was you who asked and doxx you in retaliation when it discovers you’ve plagerized chatGPT.

Another thought is to translate it into Scottish. But then again, you probably still want to be understood.

Changing dialect may be too small of a change. But if you could say write this like 1-2 generations younger/older using high school slang of the time you might get a useful difference.

As far as we know, Google is not giving up any data. The crawler still must store a copy of the text for the index. The only certainty we have is that Google is no longer sharing it.

Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem:

Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.

From the article:

“was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” (emphasis added)

Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search.

You can also use 12ft.io.

Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the “Google Bot” web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

The pages aren’t necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

“Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we’ll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”

It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world’s webpages.

The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.

Bingo. When I read that part of the article, I felt insulted. People see the web getting increasingly enshitified and less accessible. The increased need for cached pages has justified the existence of 12ft.io.

~40% of my web access is now dependant on archive.org and 12ft.io.

So yes, Google is obviously bullshitting. Clearly there is a real reason for nixing cached pages and Google is concealing that reason.

This is probably an attempt to save money on storage costs.

That’s in fact what the article claims as Google’s reason. But seems irrational. Google still needs to index websites for the search engine. So the storage is still needed since the data collection is still needed. The only difference (AFAICT) is Google is simply not sharing that data. Also, there are bigger pots of money in play than piddly storage costs.

Ungoogled Chromium indeed reproduces the issue. But so does the public library, which likely was Firefox in Windows. So i guess it might be hasty to conclude that it’s browser specific, particularly when other videos on the same instance behave differently in the same browser.

It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.

Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped – just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd… Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?

I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.

You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.

Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?

If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.

That’s is how I got around it in the past. For some reason that was not an option where I needed it (perhaps the browser I was using was locked down in some way). In any case, I’m wondering why the variation in behavior. Is this a bug in Invidious?

Why would a browser handle it incorrectly for one video on one invidious instance, but not for most other videos and other instances?

Note that I’ve seen this broken behavior both in my own Chromium installation as well as Firefox in Windows as a public library.

Thanks for pointing that out. It works for me too. I just happened to select a different instance where it actually works. Here’s the instance where it’s broken:

https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

First time I’ve seen this bot. I would be interested in learning how to cross-post from #kbin to #Lemmy in a way that preserves the original username the way this bot did. Is that possible without 3rd party tools? I can login to a Lemmy instance and then crosspost any Kbin thread to a Lemmy community, but then the author becomes myself, not the original Kbin author.

#askFedi

The difference is that grabbing it pre-FTA is also grabbing a perfect copy. The quality may not matter to many of us, but to some it does. And because it matters to some, major copyright holders have started to treat unlicensed exchanges as “competition” from a business PoV (which is a concession from strictly seeing it as crime). So their business strategy is to compete with the unlicensed channels by offering perfect quality media at a price (they hope) people are willing to pay (also in part to avoid the inconvenience and dodgyness of the black market).

FWiW, that’s their take and it’s why they get extra aggressive when the unlicensed version is perfect.

I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.

Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.

We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.

1. I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).

I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.

Not sure what Grafana is but I can’t even visit the site because they block Tor (403). Gotta love how easy it is to see-and-avoid some privacy-hostile venues. If you were using Tor you might not have wasted 1 minute with that site.