Our Orwellian tech reality: “Enhanced ad privacy” is Google-speak for “more ways to spy on you serve you targeted ads.” More at The Register: Google Chrome pushes ahead with targeted ads based on your browser history and at Ars Technica: Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome.
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Good Luck with the Extortion, YouTube
YouTube is testing a “three strikes” policy to somehow block people from watching videos when they’re using an ad blocker. I wish them good luck with using another Silicon Mobster* tactic — this time, to extort users into signing up for YouTube Premium.
Buick & Beethoven
Most of the time, I use YouTube and “the internet” as a whole on my desktop computer, with Firefox and uBlock Origin. Without an ad-blocker, so much of “the net” is completely intolerable and I had forgotten just HOW crappy it is when I recently tried the YouTube app, on our Apple TV.
Algorithms
Shuwen’s been watching YouTube and was served a Porsche ad. Now I suspect she has secretly come to money and didn’t tell me.
Do The Internet a Favor: Switch to Firefox
Yesterday, I saw with some astonishment that Microsoft’s Chromium-based browser “Edge” has surpassed Safari in popularity, and is now in the 2nd place in desktop browser market share.
Bosch Spinoff on IMDb TV
I recently learned that after season 7 of Bosch, a “police procedural” series that I binged in its entirety not just once but twice, there will be a spinoff. Yay! The bad news: it’ll be available for streaming on IMDb TV. “Ad-supported.”
Soapbox: Give Us This Day Our Daily Insanity
For about three years now, I receive a phone call about once or twice a month, with “an urgent message for the vehicle owner regarding an expired car warranty”.
Thanks but no thanks, Facebook
Facebook is making the news for a while now with their artificial limitation of the so-called “organic reach” of a pages’ posts (that’s the amount of people that will see a new post from a page directly in their Facebook Newsfeed). The latest one that I read is this article on Gawker’s ValleyWag. There’s also that article on The Federalist that has an insight into how FB’s Newsfeed algorithm works.