>At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices
I wager most people are putting those on while having a meal and using their phones or tablets at the same time. Moreover, 99% of the most watched content on YouTube is utter garbage that would make the average reality show on TV twenty years ago look like The Godfather in comparison. Gossippy, clickbait videos made to induce an immediate dopamine dump and be used as background noise aren't "in-depth" anything. I don't think people are sitting in front of a TV watching an hour-long, non-sponsored, ad-free interview with Margerite Duras and doing nothing else concurrently, for instance.
On top of all that, this trend of making longer videos comes mostly from an attempt to increase ad revenue. Let's not be fooled here.
The "shit" to "good" ratio in literally every field was much less skewed to the "shit" side before smartphones and social media came along. It's always this same fallacy: "hey, that was always a thing!". Sure, drugs have "always" been a thing, but did you have fentanyl producing real-life zombie parades in the streets just ten years ago? If we make these reductionist claims, we can say just about every phenomenon was already a thing a hundred thousand years ago. We have to think about the degree to which something is occurring as well, and how it is taking place, not just try to dismiss it through knee-jerk intended retorts.
How about instead of lamenting the existence of social networking and smartphones (by the way, social networking has the same effect on a laptop), we try to educate people to not waste their time on "content"?
I didn't. Nothing in my post could possibly make any reasonable person think I missed it. It bears no connection whatsoever to it, nor does it contradict anything I wrote.
>social networking has the same effect on a laptop
You carry your laptop literally everywhere you go and use it in every imaginable situation you can find yourself in for more than six straight hours every day? You really pull out your laptop while waiting in line at the grocery store? You text on it while driving? You use your laptop strolling down the street at any given moment, or at restaurants with friends, really?
Every monopoly is predicated upon abusive, anti-competitive and unlawful practices, as well as exemptions and unearned subsidies from governments. Always. Many people aligning with megacorporations wouldn't support "capitalism" if the playing field was even.
Guys, it's been over for a while now. And I mean decades... This is just one of the next steps in the path that's been laid out in front of us since the general population reached critical mass on the Internet and the ruling class (politicians, the media, corporations...) went all in on exploiting them for money and power. If we don't radically change the underpinnings of how the entire system works, we're in for much worse than this.
None, I'd bet. Can't you see this is just about tightening their grasp on our liberties, swaying our opinions, and selling our data? Organised religion could be going for that (minus the data, at least not in the current sense) in the past with a certain degree of success, but I don't see how they are even a tad bit as powerful as they once were. It doesn't seem sensible to associate these seemingly coordinated measures around the world to organised religion instead of corporations and the political elite. That's just a tone deaf take.
We're going to see more and more crackdown on internet access, in the name of making it "safe", or "safe for kids", particularly. All they want is pushing for censorship and control, though, on top of collecting and selling even more data. We'd be wise to make an effort to migrate to censorship resistant overlay networks like Hyphanet (formerly Freenet) or i2p before it's too late.
It IS a matter of national security if your nations children grow up and witness all the horrors it's government does abroad and heavens forbid grow anti government sentiment or opinions.
Lots of people keep mentioning these conspiracy theories but I still don't buy it.
The "they" you're all mentioning simply doesn't exist. Who are they ? All the governments of the west somehow working together ? They can't even cooperate more than 6 months on internal matters but they globally agreed on some world wide evil plan ? And the plan is to ban kids from youtube ? Because reasons ?
Who is going to collect more data if there are less websites/users ? Who's selling "the" data ? Who's buying "the" data ? What data ? How are governments benefiting from censoring brain rot in a way that doesn't also benefit me exactly ?
All the data is already collected by US megacorps and stored on US servers the US gov can already fully access, it doesn't get any worse than that
Do you have more than "trust me bro" ? Like for example answering any of my questions.
Right now it looks like "something bad happens it 100% has to be a world wide conspiracy against our FrEeDoM", which is like the least likely reason in the list of causes according to occam's razor.
> Lots of people keep mentioning these conspiracy theories but I still don't buy it.
EU is actively working on "age verification" through a digital wallet.
Once that is in place it is a small step to wall off the entire Internet unless you verify yourself through your digital ID.
Since Trump is as borderline fascist as von der Leyen there's no fucking doubt in my mind the United States will follow the EU as soon as there are signs of success or even earlier.
Especially note "The objective is to develop an EU-wide solution to age verification that reinforces the Digital Services Act (DSA) objective to ensure safe, secure, and trusted digital space and the Louvain-la-Neuve Declaration, which promotes a safer and more trustworthy online environment."
Whenever those in power talk about "security", "safety" and "trust" they talk about other things entirely which, for the larger public, have nothing to do with these topics at all.
If I need to buy a phone made by Google to get away from Google, I'm just not doing it. /e/ doesn't support my current smartphone, either, and postmarketOS is not functional. At this rate, I think we're better off going back to dumbphones.
Even if you aren't concerned about the possibility of "backdoored hardware" (and I am not, for one), I'm still sympathetic to the argument that giving money to Google is morally wrong because it provides financial support for their data-harvesting business model (though since you use GrapheneOS, they'll only be able to use it to harvest other users' data, of course, not yours). Buying a used Pixel doesn't support Google financially, so perhaps that's more ethical.
Thank you. I have the same worry. I'm not a developer, how could one tell there isn't some built in backdoor in the hardware? There was another HN posting on Graphene and asked the same question there with no answer.
The same thing could be said about any hardware. Pixels receive by far the most privacy and security research of any devices. They're by far the most secure Android devices and the only ones providing competitive security with iPhones. They're the only devices with even a reasonable level of security combined with proper alternate OS support. Our hardware requirements are listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices. These are very reasonable requirements for industry standard security features, standard updates and the ability for GrapheneOS to use those standard security features. There are other devices with all the major features listed there but not the ability for GrapheneOS to use all of them. Updates are a major issue for all non-Pixel Android devices including the ones advertising lengthy support.
GrapheneOS is working with a major Android OEM towards their future devices providing the expected hardware-based security features and updates, unlike their current devices. The purpose of GrapheneOS is not specifically avoiding Google but if you want hardware from another large tech company to use with GrapheneOS, you'll have that option. The initial goal for these devices is providing a similar level of security and long term support to what we already have with Pixels. In the longer term, we want to have add hardware-based security features unavailable on Pixels or iPhones along with hardening below the OS layer.
For now, Pixels are the only viable option for us to use. We're actively working on changing that but we're not going to simply greatly lower our standards and support devices where we can't adequately protect users. There's no evidence of any backdoor and it's contradicted by how exploits are developed and used. There is plenty of evidence that other devices lack comparable security.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-ju... shows an example where only the Pixel 6 and later / iPhone 12 and later have brute force protection which holds up against the most sophisticated company developing forensic data extraction tools. We have access to more recent documentation showing the same thing.
Why do governments buy exploit tools from NSO, Cellebrite, etc. and develop their own if they supposedly have backdoors in devices? Why would using a device from Samsung or Sony protect against it if they did?
It really highlights how bad crypto is as a solution to what it claims that it can't be a solution here.
It is impractically slow, the user experience is too high a bar, it lacks meaningful consumer protections and it would not be able to handle the transaction volume. That it hasn't been able to address those problems in the last fifteen years calls the whole enterprise into question.
In early 2000s it was IMPOSIBLE for websites to handle millions of visits, except big ones like google and yahoo.
UX for websites was weak, mobile barely existed, https was not used, online payments were limited to certain websites, fraud was common and anyone with CC number could steal from your card.
Internet was not early and Crypto is now at that level. So think bigger and think about process.
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