And why should we? It should all be "allow" and not "block". Machine should be serving _us_ the buyers/users.
I could never understand why my Windows Explorer (back in the ZoneAlarm days) were speaking to Microsoft when I was searching for my FileName.doc inside my C: Drive.
I could understand the Word or Excel accessing when I need "Help" (I assume online help file was more frequently updated).
No! Naughty developers and naughty businesses. My machines should leave my 127.0.01 when I want for MY uses and MY needs and MY convenience.
For vast majority of home users the only app that needs to 'get out' is their browser and their "windows udpate". Everything else is just tracking.
> Machine should be serving _us_ the buyers/users.
Yes.
But every now and then consumers get a tempting offer and trade a bit of their freedom for lower price, more comfort, more prestige, or something else. I.e. in practice buyers don’t mind that much and likely also don’t understand the difference and the consequences that well.
> … and likely also don’t understand the difference and the consequences that well.
this could be a very good argument to explain why so many have become skeptical of companies.
we have example after example where companies take advantage of people.
hearing my grandfathers generation go on about “the days when you could trust a company to be fair” i used to think they were seeing with rose-tinted glasses, but more and more im convinced we’re dealing something much more nefarious than that generation.
> the days when you could trust a company to be fair
Those days never really existed. It was simply that their misbehavior affected groups of people who didnt have access to the media and power structures. For the US, e.g.: central Americans (banana company inspired coups), native tribes (water pollution, deforestation), poor whites (coal ash pollution), etc.
I can see that companies treated their employees better, but that might also be correlated with strong unions, less regulatory capture, more competition, or some other factor, rather than intrinsic goodness.
Companies used to hire Pinkerton detectives to put down strikes and make employees use company stores.
Behaviour has improved for various reasons.
All we’re seeing now is that people’s technological surface area is expanding from zero to infinity so there are lots of new little cracks and edge cases society still has to sort out.
of course there is. it just takes a lot of people to make the good choices, and when money is tight, that is very hard for people to do en masse.
this is part of the trend lately that has money flowing upwards and not back down again. if the end-user/customer is at the bottom, wages they're paid are what go into the economy and do the work that money does all the way up the chain of commerce until it reaches some rich guy shaped like a sphere who smokes cigars and laughs maniacally all the time. but because he's been tightening budgets on all the companies he's on the boards of, the employees of those companies get less money every year to spend on things. so more of the money stays in his hands. so customers have necessarily less choice on things they can buy and choices they can make in the marketplace.
eventually people get laid off or fired and now they have no money to do anything with and in the end take any job they can, if they aren't found by some employer before then. so they have less and less agency while the people selling things have more and more and more.
the end result of this is that we will become pets of the bourgeois which is exactly what they want. they not only have a need to win (which is fine by itself) but a need for all others to lose (which is not ok in any way) and they can never ever be happy with what they have.
I truly wish I had not had children. Life is going to be hard for them.
This is not what the vast majority of people want.
People want security issues patched, preferrably without them having to do any work or even know about it (because they won't do the work and get annoyed at popups they don't feel like they need). People want bugs fixed (and crash reports do actually help with that, despite what some say). People want companies to prioritize the features that they're using and fix places where users get "stuck", and that's much easier with telemetry. People will almost always choose free shit over products they have to pay for, and for many products, free only works if you know what ads the user should see.
there's thin line between 'autoupdates consisting of security patches and bugfixes' and 'we will extract every piece of data we can and possibly remove features with no way to rollback'.
most apps fall into the latter, into the network blackhole they go. You give them an inch, they take everything.
You cant even get away from this by paying (and i'm willing to to so!) because people who actually are willing to pay are the most valuable ones to advertisers - so the incentives are there to extract even more value in such case.
In case of products from outside of software domain there's this consumer assumption that product does the thing and just the thing - food doesn't try to poison you, toys are just toys and so on.
they are aware of tradeoffs - something's cheaper, it might be less safe, less featured or maybe made a bit worse.
99% of modern software is user hostile first - data extraction and maximizing value for adverts and then it might do a bad job of actually fulfilling its purpose, with updates usually making it worse over time, or jacking up prices in form of monthly subscription instead of license sale.
The only way it could have security issues is if it's connected directly to the internet (not behind NAT) or a device on my LAN is actively attacking it. The former case is difficult to accomplish without enough expertise to know better; the latter is plausible, but mitigated by a printer too simple to easily harbor a persistent threat.
Sure, and that could break the printer, cause it to print things I don't want it to, or cause it to serve malware to other devices. I would like the printer to be too simple for the third case to be realistic, but that may be harder to build today than something with a more complex embedded OS.
> And the vast majority of people hate ads like me.
I don't mind respectful¹ ads, and refrain from using sponsorblock & similar. What I object to, and actively block, is the stalking that is endemic in the ad industry and is in no way respectful.
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[1] i.e. not the pop-ups/-unders of yore, not those that autoplay video or, worse, audio, not those that otherwise interfere with the normal use of the page I'm trying to look at, stalking etc.
That's up to you. I block everything and I'll never go back. I just want the whole advertising industry to go away. They've betrayed my trust so often that I'm never going to let them back in. In any form. I don't care about the collateral damage in the services and sites they 'support'.
When I ask around me people don't really have a very nuanced view either, though they're not as hostile as me, most of them just believe it is unavoidable. They don't have the skills I have in ad avoidance. But they don't have any kind of ethical concerns.
Internet advertising is a race to the bottom. If you're not using scummy tactics then your competitors will, and you lose money -- or your entire business.
I can't remember the last time I was exposed to respectful ads. My home PiHole deny-lists keep growing in size and this will continue unless the internet at large changes. Which I don't believe it will, barring any civilization-wide disaster.
> I can't remember the last time I was exposed to respectful ads.
There are still some out there, or at least some that aren't actively disrespectful. At least sponsor spots in podcasts don't stalk me online, etc, at least when they are honest about what is happening¹. They are very much in the minority though.
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[1] The 3D printing “community” on youtube is rife with “personal” recommendations that are obviously paid for but try to look more organic. “Today I'll test if you _really_ need to dry your PLA filament rolls, in a video sponsored by the company that makes one of the dryers I'll be testing…”
I have doubled my battery life on Moto Edge with Rethink DNS, blocking everything per app. There's so much junk I don't want to phone home that tries 50 times a day.
This sort of solution appeals to me but I wonder what the trade-off is. I am now sending data about domains I visit and when to a different entity not my ISP, how do I trust them more?
You don't have to use any DNS features, Rethink will happily let you set your DNS resolvers to whatever you like, you can just use it as an on-device VPN that allows you to block or isolate everything per app or per connection.
