Parents signed up for one of those porn blocker services. I didn’t have the password to the service, but I did have the password to my dad’s user account (shared PC back then). Managed to figure out how to copy his active session cookie to my own user account and was able to freely turn on and off the service.
greenskye
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Ordered food at Sonic on their app. After I ordered, it popped up with ads for travel, various credit cards, etc. Completely crazy to me that they’re triple dipping on monetization now (sell me food, sell my data and then sell me other shit while trying to sell me food.)
Yes, but actually managing to use crypto for commerce is pretty tricky.
Not sure of the state of things currently, but back in the day it was so volatile that you had to buy more than you need because it might lose value before you could pay with it. And the company also couldn’t cash out with the same value either. That’s why Valve stopped accepting crypto if I remember correctly.
It would be nice if it actually worked well for that, but I expect if it ever did approach broad adoption the powers that be would come down hard on it to prevent losing their control.
You were saying they were motivated by advertisers. That these websites can exist if only they chose not to use ads.
But hosting a website of any decent size takes money. So to pay for it you need ads OR payments from your users. Either a subscription or donation.
So if the websites, like you suggest, avoid advertisers to get away from advertiser sensibilities, they’re still subject to payment processors. Which have many of the same kind of hang ups.
Patreon has had several crackdowns on content solely because of payment processors getting upset. Patreon doesn’t care. The patreon creators are happy and their fans are happy. Everyone involved in the commerce was happy with the business. But PayPal was unhappy and the fans couldn’t send money to the people they were supporting without that middle man. So a company almost entirely unrelated gets to dictate what can and can’t be hosted on Patreon. And this has happened multiple times on multiple sites.
Primarily right now it happens to NSFW content, but there’s zero protections from PayPal and visa doing the same for LGBT content, content critical of China, etc. They’re a private company so all our rights and protections don’t apply.
Theoretically there’s an alternative. You could always make your own banking system and your own Internet (good old ‘free market’ at work) just so you can pay for your website hosting costs. Since that’s technically an option, then they aren’t legally interfering. It’s just business and they can choose not to do business with you if they want. Just as easy as building your own power grid and water system. (Though even if you did try to make your own, they’d heavily interfere to stop you).
So yes, avoiding ads will free you from their control, but it will also limit you to only the size of website that can be hosted for free. Anything of a size that would need funding is subject to these company’s morality rules. Which also makes these communities small, isolated and easily dismantled if they prove to be a problem.
As soon as any one instance gets big enough and needs to get funding, the payment processors will crack down on allowed content. Don’t like it? Tough luck in receiving the money people are trying to send you.
No it’s really payment processors.
There have been multiple successful ad-free websites in the past. But they still need revenue to function. Revenue their users happily pay.
But then Visa or PayPal or whoever is handling the transactions starts to pay attention and then all the sudden there’s new rules in place or else they hike fees or just stop processing payments altogether.
And on the Internet, there is no true alternative methods of payment (hint: any viable methods are quickly suppressed by those same payment processors).
So the only way any website gets big is left to the whims of advertisers or payment processors (usually both).
I have no idea why we as a people are somehow fine with private companies having a complete stranglehold on all significant online business. Why we’ve allowed the government to privatize digital transactions, subject to very little rights or protections. It’s allowing private corporations to massively suppress free speech, commerce, and social gatherings in the digital sphere.
Honestly our supposed freedoms are more and more limited these days because they only apply to public spaces, but there’s been a continual erosion of ‘public’. Where is the modern town square? If the only place you can practice your ‘rights’ is almost nowhere, do you really have those rights at all?
The government should be mandating that ‘digital infrastructure’ (ISPs, data centers, payment processors, etc) are neutral and can’t be utilized to bully others out of business. That their privileged position also comes with extra responsibilities and restrictions so you don’t have the digital equivalent of cutting off water to an abortion clinic because the water utility is pro-life.
Yeah. But it makes several pitstops before hitting my bank account. The government pulling back a grant or funding is different than the government taking $500 from John Q Citizen’s account
Also the money came from the government in the first place. That’s a critical aspect to this.
greenskye@lemm.eeto PC Gaming@lemmy.ca•Brace yourself for Discord to get worse: Reports swirl that the company is in talks with bankers about opening itself up to shareholdersEnglish21·4 months agoIf only discord had stuck to just voice chat. They are miles better in that arena than other options were at the time. I just hate how it also replaced forums. And issue trackers. And some people try to run wikis and image boorus and everything else under the sun as a discord server
This is clever. Going to use this from now on
greenskye@lemm.eeto memes@lemmy.world•Take your passkey and shove it where the sun don't shineEnglish4·4 months agoSame. They also don’t allow password managers and I have multiple systems that don’t use my main password, so I have at least 5-6 work passwords for different systems.
Nobody can remember all that.
So everyone makes the simplest password they can (since it has to be regularly typed in) and writes it down somewhere so they don’t forget it.
Seriously. It’s honestly easier to find chill communities on Reddit, even if I hate supporting that site. But at least it has non-political stuff. Politics feels impossible to avoid here.
greenskye@lemm.eeto No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Is anyone else getting a bit of schadenfreude from the news each day?English2·4 months agoQuiet yes. They’ve gone quiet several times before. But it never results in different actions. They don’t change, they only ever become more circumspect.
It’s how Democrats deluded ourselves that things were turning around and then were so surprised to lose everything. All of the words in the world aren’t going to affect any real change.
I honestly don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reach these people. I think something is deeply broken in a huge majority of Americans. Either they’re voting for this or they’re too checked out, self absorbed or hopeless to bother to do anything to try to fix it. 2024 revealed just how broken we are.
Should be yes, but the human is only interested in getting passed the prompt, not with accuracy so it’s no. Which I’m pretty sure fucks with their AI training, but who cares.
greenskye@lemm.eeto Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•Are we modern humans, across the board, enormous wussies compared to people, say, 150+ years ago?English21·4 months agoI also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.
I mean the part that no one really wants to confront is that there is no alternative with a viable chance. The blue moderate has been suffocating all other options for ages and now that it’s come to this, there’s nothing waiting in the wings to rely on.
greenskye@lemm.eeto No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Is anyone else getting a bit of schadenfreude from the news each day?English821·4 months agoI’m struggling to believe these articles are anything but pandering to the left. I struggle to believe there’s any significant number of conservatives actually having real second thoughts.
I mean during COVID you had conservatives literally claiming COVID was no big deal as they died. I think that was when I understood just how far gone these people could be. They will happily drink the Kool aid no matter the personal cost to themselves.
So losing their jobs is questionable as to whether or not it’s going to actually result in a different mindset, rather than some fleeting complaints that are forgotten by the next election cycle.
Not a horse person, but I did look this up once. My understanding is basically what you were assuming.
There’s no way to tell the horse to not walk on the foot and the options they have to keep a horse off the leg can only be used for a limited time without causing death anyway. (You can’t put a horse in a suspension sling long enough to heal the leg as it supposedly does bad things to their organs)
So it’s feasible a centaur could recover as they’re smart enough to take things easy without needing to be physically restrained the whole time.
greenskye@lemm.eeto Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•Go to wikihow and press on "random article". That is what you die doing. How do you die?English6·5 months ago‘How to treat a sprained neck’
So not sure if I’m the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else
It’s still possible, but only with a physical Kindle device and I believe only one of the older ones. You can copy files off those devices to your PC and crack them that way.
Otherwise I’m not aware of any other method. It really sucks too as my favorite genre literally only exists in the Amazon ecosystem (small indie authors that rely on KU and so don’t publish anywhere else)