I was not the original person that replied to you. I was just providing with you with information on the incident they were referring to. Proton denied the claim but it is up to you whether you believe them or not.
I don't think NordVPN is sketchy, even with their latest hic-ups. They are however located in Panama as far as I know, which probably gives the US access for "drug trafficing".
ProtonVPN provides the source code for their desktop and mobile clients in their GitHub organization [1]. Yes open source != safe; however this level of transparency is at least a step in the right direction.
They also have regularly been audited by independent organizations that are openly available for the public to see their compliance [2][3][4][5][6].
Do you have any evidence to suggest that they are honeypots?
Can you provide anything beyond conjecture that there is any merit to what you've stated? My understanding is that the effects of CO2 as a greenhouse gas are pretty well understood at this point.
I'm already being downvoted on here - proof that there are a substantial number of HN users who have Made Up Their Minds on this, and simply do not want to even consider that they have been bamboozled by various interested parties. I realise that no one likes to either admit they've been fooled by someone/a group of people, or simply that their view of the world around them is simply wrong - still, no reason to use HN's downvoting as a weapon against those who would otherwise try to post a contrary view. Still, it's fascinating to be downvoted simply for offering a contrary opinion.
As an interesting but connected sidenote: I've noticed on here that numerous HN submissions which tend towards CO2 demonization get upvoted and are filled with the Convinced, whereas the various articles I have submitted which tend to question this either get zero attention or are downvoted to obliviion. Whatever, and so be it.
Hint: capitalizing things and tossing about assertions about behavior of HN readers the way you do significantly undermines your credibility. If you really want to advance the argument you are making in good faith, you need to adjust your approach.
The problems with fossil fuels go way beyond climate change. If you told me that everything is a myth and it was just some government conspiracy involving almost every country on earth it wouldn't change anything. Even at 0.30€/kWh a used Kia Soul EV (small SUV) would pay for itself in gas savings compared to my 40MPG car. If climate change turns out to be true it will just be a nice bonus on top of all the other benefits you get by switching away from fossil fuels and if it doesn't, then everything is fine. You just can't lose by betting against fossil fuels. You know what the best part is? You get to avoid fuel taxes! The German government budget will shrink by 10% if we go all EV so if you hate taxation then EVs are the way to go!
Link looks a lot of garbage cherry picking of individual bad or flawed actors and arguments as misleading rhetoric that fallaciously implies the underlying belief is incorrect... as per usual...
Proposal: ignore their broken system and try to do something else entirely at the edge of the frontier, where such things are (sometimes) allowed.
“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.” --Buckminster Fuller
We've talked a bit about adding TCP support and really like some of the options it opens up. However, we have to move away from the use of pickle for event serialization before we can do that, otherwise we would have some security issues with remote code execution.
It's a library we use in the "Trinity" client for the ethereum network. The lahja library itself is however just an event bus and has no cryptocurrency ties other than being used in the Trinity codebase.
There are a number of comments here who seem genuinely happy about this. This is a perspective that is hard for me to understand, largely because I'm strongly in the pro-privacy, anti-tracking ideology.
So if you are part of the group who sees this as a good thing, I'm genuinely interested to understand why you see this as a good thing and whether you view the mass surveillance of the general public by advertising companies as bad?
Targeted ads have helped small businesses and indie brands thrive.
Previously, only large brands and national/multi-national corporations could afford to advertise at scale and reach customers through TV/Radio/Newspapers (that too with a high minimum spend).
Now your local mom and pop bakery could have a spend as low as $100 a month to reach their customers and help drive their business.
The world is not black and white, and neither is the morality of advertising.
Even ignoring the morality, this is all ultimately driving the adoption of ad blocking. Advertising online is an industry digging its own grave, which would be fine except they’re going to bury a lot of those small and indie sites with them.
I don't think ads inherently promote ad blocking, but you're right: this specific instance of an ad breaking links and lowering the quality of other sites does indeed promote a culture of ad blocking (if they can remove the fbclid param?).
I don't see any indication that advertising online is an industry digging its own grave. On the contrary, the increase in quality of ads over the past 10+ years (especially in terms of unobtrusiveness and relevance) would suggest to me that online advertising is digging its way _out_ of the grave it dug itself with flashy, irrelevant ads throughout the 90s and early 00s.
While this is completely true, it is worth noting that a huge majority of the $100 ads that are marketed as the channel that enable small businesses to "thrive" are Facebook or Google ads, and they are professionals at confusing these business owners with vanity metrics, payment / pricing models, constraints on packages, etc (and this is just from the buyers side, these cos have massive leverage on the publishers' end as well).
Engineer here: I used to be completely anti-tracking.
Then, I started needing analytics for my own business. Without analytics, I wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a business. Granted, the anti-consumerist in me thinks maybe as a society we shouldn't be so concerned with our efficiency to sell. But, we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
The way I see it now, I'm less concerned about tracking than I am about how big some businesses are -- especially in this space.
At every start up I know, they use analytics, and no one is doing anything spooky. But, I'm sure there's plenty of spooky stuff going on at the FAANGAMUs.
"Sell with efficiency" sounds a bit vampiric to me; a bit growth-at-all-costs or refusing to accept the normal costs of doing business (although I can sympathise with that mindset).
Where do you draw the line? This is parallel to the discussion around government surveillance. Just be cause they / you can, doesn't mean they / you should.
If Internet tracking had no potential use to governments then they'd be regulating the shit out of it. The problem is that governments want their own noses in the same trough, and so all these privacy-invasive technologies continue to be developed. The fact that it's not illegal means that anyone with the ability to implement it can, as long as they can sleep at night.
As to solutions that could help with "selling efficiency", maybe some kind of agreed tiers of analytics from benign to spooky that users can opt-in / opt-out of when visiting a website or using an app. Which GDPR is a bit of a kludgy solution for. The problem is that it only takes one bad advertiser to break agreed rules and the trust is gone again for all advertisers.
One bad apple.
Analytics are unquestionably useful. Collecting the data without user consent is what potentially should be regulated.
I'd be completely ok with intent based advertising - I search for $X you show ads that are related to $X. And I'm ok with measuring what percentage of those who click the ad that converts as well. However, that's not where we are today. The appetite for marketing and advertisement has grown to such a level that companies like Facebook want to know every aspect of your life so they can satisfy that appetite. Clearly a) there's a demand from companies big and small and b) it's working. Companies can still be ethical about it - like why should Facebook track every URL I visit (via the Like button)? Or, why not provide an option to opt-out of targeted ads - I don't like them and I do have friends who like them. I get it but provide an option to opt out.
The general retort I hear is what do you have to hide? Like the only thing that people want to hide are the bad and evil stuff.
and those companies arent just selling that gathered data to online marketers, they are pairing it with offline data and selling it anyone with enough money.
Microsoft owns Bing, one of the most important search engines and advertising platforms on the Internet...
Uber had that secret API access granted directly from Apple so it could see which apps you had open at all times (in case you opened Lyft) so it could charge you different rates.
AirBNB is similarly large, so I thought they were worth mentioning.
The point I was trying to make is: before I worked in the growth team at several mid-sized startups, I had this naive assumption that tracking data was basically the food for an evil monster.
I had this idea of an evil group of people getting together everyday and looking at this data and somehow using it to puppet my entire online-life.
Sure, this group of people exists at every decent sized online company, and sure they're trying to get you to spend more time and money on their site/app/whatever, and sure this tracking data helps them.
Sure, SOME of these websites are peddling fake news or selling scams or preying on the poor/unfortunate/uneducated/etc. But I think that's the exception, not the norm.
Most successful companies make a product people genuinely like. There are millions of people that would buy and enjoy this product if they knew about it. Most companies are just trying to use this tracking data to get their product in front of as many of those people as they can, and as few people that don't want their product. They're trying to fine-tune their messaging to make sure it appeals to the people that actually like their product. They're trying to use it to figure out how to BETTER make a product people actually want!
Again, if you're saying that increasing our efficiency in sales is a bad thing, you're saying that capitalism is bad. But I've just come to see this data as something that enables product evolution to occur much faster. I see this data as something that's helping the world, mostly, get more of what it wants.
Like everyone says, Capitalism is the worst economic system, except all the others we've tried.
> Again, if you're saying that increasing our efficiency in sales is a bad thing, you're saying that capitalism is bad. But I've just come to see this data as something that enables product evolution to occur much faster. I see this data as something that's helping the world, mostly, get more of what it wants.
Unfortunately, I've seen too many product decisions catering to the manipulative aspects of adtech. UX often suffers, not improves with ads. Online platforms all seem to follow the same game ad monetization plan these days which results in messes like Frankensteinish apps--see official Twitter app.
As for actual hands on manufactured products or services, I'd like to know how ads improved the UX.
> Without analytics, I wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a business.
I guess your summary is about right.
> we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
We were living in a capitalist world two decades ago, and we didn't have a significant amount of tracking back then. If you are concerned about your competition using tracking, then just try to make a better product.
If you are concerned with making a better product, you are going to need quite a bit of tracking and instrumentation to understand how to make a better product.
Users will give you the preferences that they think are important. Or are important at the point of that interview.
Analytics can give you a decent glimpse of revealed preferences, which may or may not be what you're after.
Whether or not this is a good thing, depends on a lot of subjectivity, sure. But suppose you run a porn site - if you asked most users what they wanted in porn (before they had seen any), they would probably say one thing. If you examine what kinds of videos people look at, you'll see another. (This theme, with actual data from pornhub, is explored at length in the book "Everybody Lies" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.)
Both routes (asking and instrumenting) have their uses.
Glad you brought up porn because I believe that if you optimized any site's features just based on engagement analytics, you'd end up with a porn site with elements of gambling!
I'm kidding of course, but the idea is that analytics tell you a part off the user story, but doesn't answer the deeper "why" questions. It certainly has a place in tech, but it's less than what it's currently afforded.
Bender was on to something. "X but with blackjack and hookers" is the next untapped market for disruptive startups. We've worn out "X, but on the internet" and "X, but blockchain".
I mentioned before that "Thinking about it, I imagine that one instance of Google Analytics would be fine, but tying two instances of it in order to track a user would probably be ridiculous, right?".
My guess that it's the Facebook employees, advertisers and marketing people who like this.
There's a flawed belief that it's necessary. UX on the other hand suggests otherwise. AdTech is not concerned with UX though and tries to wrap targeting in some kind of pseudo user benefit—spin.
Good products and services sell even without tracking. Advertising is an economic powerhouse though and will always push for anti-UX trends because it fundamentally runs polar opposite to the user experience.
I understand your stance from an end users perspective completely.
However, it's not hard to reason why people whose livelihoods depend on being able to track users and increase the value of their ad inventory would be happy about this.
People are unusually good at separating their personal interests from consumer interests. I've observed this emotion arise in many entrepreneurs first hand, be they in the brick retail, or conventional energy or obsolete auto parts, it's common for people to be happy about events that benefit their livelihood even when it has a negative impact on humanity or that ecosystem.
The fact that this all happened in the first place is really telling. It's nice that they've backed these features off (a bit) but there's a reasonably clear signal to take away from this.
When company and customer interest are misaligned this is the result. There are plenty of cases where a strong leader in the company with a strong ideology can hold this stuff back, but companies normally outlast those individuals and eventually there's nobody left to stand in the way.
It's wonderful that we were able to make enough noise and fuss that the cost/benefit shifted sufficiently but this will happen again, and then again, and so on... And eventually, we'll be tired of yelling or won't be able to yell loud enough.
Vote with you attention and your data and your money. Switch to Fastmail or Protonmail. Use Firefox or Brave. Buy a System76 laptop instead of yet another not-so-great-for-developers-anymore Apple macbook pro. Choose these options even if they aren't as good because if we don't support the handful of companies who are trying to do something other than gobble up all of our attention and data we're in for a really dark future for the web.
Facebook: Twitter is a decent competitor for network effects. I've moved my photo sharing to Google Photos as it trumps anything Facebook offers. For me, the biggest Facebook benefit is sharing photos with family on Facebook. Everything else on there is pretty much noise or garbage you can find on any other site. The one recent thing that Facebook does better than anyone that I get value out of are "local events".
Google Drive: Dropbox, Box, OneDrive....
Google Voice: Depends what you're using it to do. Amazon & Microsoft have apps you can use that do similar tasks. Whichever you use does require access to a lot of personal data to be useful though, no matter what company you pick.
Amazon: Target, Walmart, Jet, etc... Lots of competition here. Amazon's online experience is typically better but their is plenty of competition & they often have cheaper prices. FYI in case any Target person reads this. Your site is terrible & full of bugs.
Nicely said. I did do that for 1.5 out of the 4. While I didn't state it well, my argument was meant to be for replacing one or two of them, not all of them.
Voice is probably the hardest one to replace all 4 of them on.
For Facebook's network effects, I mentioned Twitter which is not one of the four. I did mention that my main use I've replaced with Google Photos. I did that because it's free & great. If I hated Google, I could use several paid services that offer similar benefits. Snapchat is becoming more popular with the older people I know. Instagram was great before getting bought out by Facebook so we can't count them now.
I think maybe one point that needs to be made, is if you want a "free service" you must be willing to let your data be sold. That is the big problem that many people have with a lot of the above free services.
