Donzo

Lots of people take Ibuprofen when they have a fever.

This is absolutely correct.

Not only is an individual's private data nearly worthless, but they can protect it for free simply by using the Brave browser or other adblocking/tracking solutions.

People often claim that they would pay for web content if it were somehow easier or if micropayments worked better or something. I'm not sure that I believe them.

We can even still have voting at registered polling places with judges.

But, instead of throwing our votes into a magic black box, how about we put them on a blockchain and receive a way to audit our own votes?

I'm not sure what scientific bar of proof you would need to see passed, but Google stalks users and targets them because it makes them more money. The ads perform better. Their systems fall back on context, when they can't do the more lucrative stalking.

Yes. It will make a good investment:

https://twitter.com/CL207/status/1142651211310485504?s=20

50-100k a coin by December 2021 is what many are targeting this time.

Transparency.

I must have struck a nerve.

I use the Brave browser now. I think other people should too. Downvotes welcome.

They broke my YouTube account a number of years ago in an attempt to force Google+ across their systems and artificially inflate user numbers.

Yesterday I got an email from them saying that they are nuking my Google+.

I will always remember that series of events as one of the most hostile acts of aggression against users that I have ever experienced.

That changed my perspective of Google as a company and I'm not sure that they can ever regain the positive perception that they lost due to those hostile actions.

Now their dominance with Chrome is leading them to make similarly hostile actions: breaking webaudio, attempting to "do away with URLs," forcing unwanted shit on our Internet.

Arrogance is the right word for it.

Even then, the yearly USD value of a 2-10% return on your ethers will be unknown, but hey... Compounding interest is compounding interest.

The collateral is your stake, in this case ethers.

If you engage in provably Byzantine actions, your stake can be slashed, burned, or otherwise sacrificed or redistributed.

There are Byzantine actions that one can take that are unprovable at this time AFAIK (IE: exploiting the data availability problem).

Has sharding just recreated the double-spend problem by shattering the consensus mechanism that solved it into 100 pieces?

Are we now free-floating, hoping to find a new solution to the double-spend problem on a fragmented system?

So the data availability problem renders the fisherman solution useless in a pragmatic sense?

Thanks for expressing these problems clearly and succinctly.

Does the Fisherman approach involve validators randomly checking other validators for phony transactions?

Will validators be incentivized to do this?

Is that why they are called fisherman? Because honest validators are "fishing" around for opportunities to catch invalid transactions and increase their stakes?

How long is the challenge period currently being discussed?

The other attack vector that the fisherman opens, "grieving" attacks, whereby malicious nodes launch a series of false reports, knowingly sacrificing their stakes presumably to overwhelm the system and push through a double-spend or phony token mint or something.

Am I interpreting how this attack works correctly?

Has any thought been given to making the challenge period as long as it needs to be to process all challenges, and incentivizing goodwill from those affected by the slowdowns with a fractional return of the slashed stakes... Maybe like a reverse gas cost? Is that insane?

I bounced around hosting providers for years until I landed on DO. I have nothing but good things to say about them.

How does Uber burn so much money? Isn't it a fundamentally profitable enterprise? Aren't they just skimming off contractors' wear-and-tear?

Won't they eventually hit a point where they promote their product less aggressively and generate significant revenue off the massive ride-sharing network that they've established?

Fortunately, Chicago burned to the ground, which gave them an opportunity to replan.

They adopted the Daniel Burnam plan, which reclaimed the lakefront from industrial shipping and attempted to put a park within one mile of every home.

The city is much better off for it, which just goes to show you that even destruction presents the opportunity of rebirth.

I'm a small to medium sized publisher and I've had to travel through Google's compliance funnels more than I would have liked.

I've never had any compliance issues with any other advertising network.

Google works hard to keep the ecosystem healthy because it's good for their long-term interests. But of course, their systems are not perfect.

One issue that is not addressed by the subscription model is the subsidizing effect that the ad-based model has:

The finance professional who lives in New York has very valuable page views. The African school girl does not. Yet, through advertising their values are averaged. The affluent subsidize the poor without even knowing it.

Putting content behind a pay-wall reduces this effect and creates an informational disparity that will only broaden the gap of equality between the two.

The New York finance professional just has to decide that the subscription is "worth" paying. The African school girl cannot make this same decision.

"None of this points to 'trying to do away with URLs'"

Except for that "trying to identify an alternative" part. But let's ignore that, because doing so makes you comfortable.

Did you read the whole article?

"The focus right now, they say, is on identifying all the ways people use URLs to try to find an alternative that will enhance security and identity integrity on the web while also adding convenience for everyday tasks like sharing links on mobile devices."

My statement is clearly supported by the article. They paint a rosy picture of it, because this is a submarine piece, but they are definitely making moves against the url.

Their dominance has become problematic when they entertain concepts like this seriously. They are really growing into the monolith that we all feared.

"Their complexity makes them a security hazard."

GTFOH! HANDS OFF!

From the linked article:

"I don’t know what this will look like, because it’s an active discussion in the team right now," says Parisa Tabriz, director of engineering at Chrome. "But I do know that whatever we propose is going to be controversial. That’s one of the challenges with a really old and open and sprawling platform. Change will be controversial whatever form it takes. But it’s important we do something, because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck."

https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/

She's says it's important that they do something! GTFOH! Hands of our Internet!

The problem here is that they view Chrome as their platform. They have too much market share ala IE6. Instead of following and helping to shape standards, they are considering highjacking the project. Argh!!!!!

The reason why Google is doing this is because they are slowly trying to do away with URLs, as direct traffic is probably their greatest untapped segment.

Google is trying to get users to go through their doorway pages, which is exactly the kind of thing for which they penalize publishers.

Pay attention to when you enter direct addresses, let's say from a device/media subscription authorization page. The autosuggestion feature will often recommend Google searches, disguised as URLs, instead of helping you complete the very obvious URL.

If they help you get to the site directly, the opportunity to acquire your page views diminishes.

These behaviors are hostile toward users. I'd like to see further in their playbook to depreciate the URL as we know it.

That's fair, but currently being "the best," doesn't ensure that status.

The modern browser is quite good at rendering text, just as it was in 1996. The web is largely still about words. What improvement is so important as to strike the words of those from 1996 off the record?

I guess what we're seeing here is a developer/development-first ideology versus a platform-first ideology.

Should the developer/development have to resubmit to the benevolent platform? Or should the platform have to support the development that has occurred?

I don't really care, but I know that I'd rather develop somewhere where my contributions aren't under constant threat of being wiped off the landscape.

Again, good luck with the other thing.

A website from 1996 will look much the same in a modern version of Chrome. Good luck with your SDKs.

I actually just let my membership to their developer program lapse after 4 years.

In addition to having to pay money to develop on their platform, the return I get is questionable.

The straw was that they're forcing me to republish old programs, just to force them through their new compliance tunnels.

Frankly, I'm sick of their hoops and their walled-garden. I'm ok with forcing users to the browser now. Amazon does it for digital sales.

The web is not broke. People just prefer stories, situated within time, to "homepages," which are like reading resumes.