Maybe I have to ask that guy some questions....

Some people tend to demonize porn, and it might be unethical in their eyes, but fact is: it is not illegal (in most countries). I don't argue that there are issues in the porn industry, but this is an issue with the platforms, that they don't allow the upload of non-consentual material, or and have processes to take it down. This is a 'THEIR' problem (the platform not the victims).

There some of these issues also exist in the standard movie and music industry as well. Hell, it even goes up to company executives and politics. But this is up to law enforcement do their job and to remove the illegal stuff and prosecute the involved persons, not by branding everyone as a suspect.

Where with Anti-cheat and DRM only the 'good guys' get hit, since the 'bad guys' don't follow "the law" anyways.

You would think it creates a new empty list, for each object of this class, but it actually creates one which is shared between all of the objects. I had a lot of fun with that one once.

If Google or Meta makes 10% of their earnings with that shit and they have to pay max 4% they still have a 6% margin over - not doing it.

IMHO there should be a 4% fine additionally to paying back all the illegally generated earnings. Also, more executives should go to jail for it - And that's the C-Level Executives, because it's them which are accountable.

Problem with those things: usually it still hits the little ones harder than the big players...

You don't pay some heavy license fees for a local installation anymore, but get a login where you get billed a specific amount if you use it that day/week/month etc. I was pretty sad when I saw how it got implemented...

The HN community, in most topics, is against censoring, echo chambers and that free speech doesn't mean you can say anything without being called out.

IMHO there are two impacted groups here: a) the ones who block everything and everyone that doesn't agree with them (on a public platform) b) the ones who are harassed and stalked and need to use the block as a defense

the change is bad for people in group b) - which most people can agree on. The problem with blocking is, it doesn't solve the problem (it's the equivalent of the EU's great idea of DNS blocking). There should be a system in place that actual (online) harassment can be legally pursued and prevented.

against group a), I think the change is a net-positive

on the other hand it's an advertising company getting devices with their software to the kids, combined with often IT-Admins School Directors which don't understand how to create policies and implement them correctly.

following the old adage: "never roll your own crypto"

The wording in the stores is 'buy' not 'rent'.

yes they have some clauses in the 20 pages long AGBs, which makes it legally ok, but imho it's still a break of the (social) contract.

So, if I 'buy' product A on platform Z and it gets removed without any money returned and they expect me to 'buy' it again on platform Y, I wouldn't have any issues pirating product A

Or if I bought product B v 3.0 with an unlimited licence and they suddently stop the licence server tell me I can't use B 3.0 anymore but I can get B 5.0 as a subscripton, I'd be mad as hell.

I personally have issues where the publishers suddenly alters the deal afterwards. (and tell you that you should be happy they don't alter it further...)

> In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam.

> But just like the researchers got more attention with the misleading title about what was studied, the journalists at 404 got more clicks by outright lying about the results.

There are some questions if the scraping via Startpage is messing with the result. They are using the Google crawler, but their anonymisation might mess with the results.

I don't agree with you interpretation of the result though. if we take a look on a longer excerpt of the conclusion, they do mention multiple times that the quality is getting lower:

> Although we cannot predict the rank of individual pages, at the population level, we can conclude that higher-ranked pages are *on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality*

and even the part you quoted goes on to mention a downward trend:

>In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam. Yet, we can still find several spam domains and also see an *overall downwards trend in text quality in all three search engines*, so there is still quite a lot of room for improvement.

- Google forces you to also keep their stupid "verify on another device", where you can't even untrust specific devices without fully logging out - proton apps don't support fido auth - microsoft account only allows it on edge and afaik not at all on linux - and so on..

I think the only service where I can fully disable other 2FA channels is github.

Edit: a word

If laywer sets up such a contract with you, he can't be a good one.

I'll see myself out...

(although the b2c charges for the businesses are quite substantial...)

For stuff that is actually copyrighted that probably could only be triggered by the actual rights holder.