You mean like https://acceptableads.com/ which is only supported so far by Adblock Plus (and its parent company)?

The problem is until there is some kind of penalty for being too annoying or too resource consuming, it will always be a race to the bottom with more, worse ads. As people add ad blockers to their browsers, the user pool that isn’t running them begins to dry up and more ads are needed to keep the same revenue. This results in even more people blocking them.

Two of the things I had hope for on the privacy side was Mozilla’s Privacy-Preserving Attribution for ad attribution and Google’s Privacy Sandbox collection of features for targeting like the Topics API. Both would have been better for privacy than the current system of granular, individual user tracking across sites.

If those two get wide enough adoption, regulation could be put in place to limit the old methods as there would be a better replacement available without killing the whole current ad supported economy of most sites. I get that strictly speaking from a privacy perspective ‘more anonymous/private tracking’ < ‘no tracking’ but I really don’t want perfect to be the enemy of better.

From the description of the bill law (bold added):

https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/S7694A

To limit access to addictive feeds, this act will require social media companies to use commercially reasonable methods to determine user age. Regulations by the attorney general will provide guidance, but this flexible standard will be based on the totality of the circumstances, including the size, financial resources, and technical capabilities of a given social media company, and the costs and effectiveness of available age determination techniques for users of a given social media platform. For example, if a social media company is technically and financially capable of effectively determining the age of a user based on its existing data concerning that user, it may be commercially reasonable to present that as an age determination option to users. Although the legislature considered a statutory mandate for companies to respect automated browser or device signals whereby users can inform a covered operator that they are a covered minor, we determined that the attorney general would already have discretion to promulgate such a mandate through its rulemaking authority related to commercially reasonable and technologically feasible age determination methods. The legislature believes that such a mandate can be more effectively considered and tailored through that rulemaking process. Existing New York antidiscrimination laws and the attorney general’s regulations will require, regardless, that social media companies provide a range of age verification methods all New Yorkers can use, and will not use age assurance methods that rely solely on biometrics or require government identification that many New Yorkers do not possess.

In other words: sites will have to figure it out and make sure that it’s both effective and non-discriminatory, and the safe option would be for sites to treat everyone like children until proven otherwise.

Doesn’t necessarily need to be anyone with a lot of money, just a lot of people mass reporting things combined with automated systems.

I feel like even if it was open-source, it would still be too big of a target for malware and data exfiltration to ever be justified for most people.

It’s always been a possibility that someone could do this but this makes it a default on feature for a lot of users you might interact with and makes them a prime target for malware to steal the sensitive data that wouldn’t have existed in most cases before.

It also doesn’t help housing prices that the landlords are colluding to raise prices:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing

It isn’t just Airbnb’s fault, it’s landlords wanting to maximize their return, no matter the method (short-term rentals or price fixing collusion).

The trust in the unknown systems of the VPN provider may still be better than the known practices of your local ISP/government though. You shouldn’t necessarily rely on it too heavily but it’s good to have the option.

It was just for the EU, because they didn’t want to add a whole framework and support for third-party browser engines to act as home screen web apps. Now they’ll continue to offer those based on WebKit everywhere.

The ISP would have the records to identify the repeat infringers. Or should at least. That was the problem the film industry is going after: the ISPs not doing even the bare minimum required by law to terminate infringers, even when they had been notified many times by rightsholders.

From a previous article about this case:

https://lemmy.world/post/10751737

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/film-studios-demand-ip-addresses-of-people-who-discussed-piracy-on-reddit/

Last year, a Reddit user wrote that they received 44 emails from Frontier threatening to cut off their service due to torrent downloads, but “if they didn’t do it after 44 emails … they won’t."

Either the ISP has the records to identify the users and the film industry can get their information to use them as witnesses that way or the ISP doesn’t have their information and shows how not-seriously they are taking the issue. Either way, it’s bad for the ISP.

Also, do IP addresses really change that often anymore, even if you aren’t paying for a static one?

The film industry in this case wasn’t after the data to go after the individuals who made the posts but to use them as witnesses against their ISPs who did nothing in response to piracy complaints. The DMCA has a requirement for a repeat infringer policy and evidence that the ISPs knew about the piracy and that their users chose them or stayed with them because the ISP wouldn’t kick them off goes a long way to winning the case against the ISP. They were going after the deep pockets.

That’s how the UK is framing it, “oh, it doesn’t give us the power to block anything, Apple is just over reacting”.

They already have the power to block things from the Investigatory Powers Act 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

From the OP’s article:

The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) actually implemented many of the proposed powers, including granting the government the power to issue orders to tech companies to break encryption by building backdoors into their products. Apple strongly objected to this at the time.

So with this, they would now have the advance notice needed to actually block updates where before Apple could just release an update and by then it was too late for the UK to do anything about.

b and c) Go after the ISPs who don’t disconnect the pirating users and sue them instead. Go after the deep pockets.

If poor security practices only affected those responsible, I might agree with you on that front. As shown from the 23andMe “breach” and also how botnets are formed, individuals’ poor security practices can affect many more people than just themselves. I feel we have a responsibility to protect people from doing stupid things, even if that might not be the most free thing to do.

Software on Windows is still a bit of a mess compared to most other platforms though. The fact that it is normalized to download and install things from the various developer websites, without much verification and without permissions/restrictions on what the apps can do is not a plus in my mind. winget has been helpful in managing the installation and updating of things though.

Everyone having their own launcher is also not great, especially since they are not all created equal with respect to features, stability, and resource consumption. Games have had this problem for some time with EA, Ubisoft, Epic, etc having their own launchers. As like what happened to games, I don’t think it will necessarily end up with more freedom to buy the apps from the store you want, but rather you’ll be forced to download a store/launcher based on the whims of the app publisher. Some may publish to multiple stores but I don’t expect all to.

If the mandate to open the platform up to more stores came with some kind of requirement that apps be available across multiple stores so that the stores actually had to be competitive on their own features, not app exclusivity, I would be more inclined to support having more stores.

It appears they aren’t taking legal action against the pirates but instead wanting to use them as witnesses against the ISP who has more money to go after and from the sound of it didn’t have decent repeat infringer policies in place. They also are after more than just the IP address, such as name, email address, and logs. That would presumably be enough to identify someone more clearly.

The least they could do is bring back the Office of Technology Assessment to help them understand things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment

I’m not sure which thing you’re referring to.

If it’s between http and https, the s stands for secure and the connection to the server is authenticated and encrypted.

It does if you just type in something like wikipedia.org . This most recent change they’re working on is so that a link on a page to:

http://wikipedia.org will get redirected to https://wikipedia.org if the site supports it.

This will fix a bunch of old links that are still floating around on various sites, forums, etc and keep people on https, instead of doing the https -> http -> https redirect bouncing around that can happen now.