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I mean, people are dying. Including the people who didn’t pay for it. So, kind of a bigger deal than that.

I think I buy this worldwide, honestly. Case in point: one of the most popular video game series for young people recently has been Five Nights at Freddy’s, and that series dropped its first four games in eleven months, and its next four games in four years. Minecraft remains one of the most popular games in the world, and it’s releasing full free content drops every few months. Pokemon is still insanely popular among kids, and there hasn’t been a year without a new Pokemon game release since 2015.

So, yeah. Hey, kids like novelty. Who knew?

people were shocked that banks are businesses trying to maximize profits like any other business.

Because every ad they see talks about how respectable and responsible they are. Like I said above, they’ve spent billions trying to cultivate this level of obliviousness in their customers.

Still even if people are so ignorant that they are unaware of privacy issues, they have chosen to be willfully ignorant, because this issue has been talked about non stop for decades. For nothing to sieve in at some point, you have to be a special kind of willfully ignorant.

In our sphere, sure. But most people don’t live in our sphere. Most people don’t mainline tech news and privacy updates. A lot of “normal people” (i.e. people you meet dropping your kids off at school, or in line at the supermarket, or on a bus) would have trouble telling you the name of the company that made the phone they stare at for seventeen hours a day. Some of the smartest, most world-aware people I know couldn’t tell you the difference between “encrypted” and “password-protected.” The stuff that breaks through into the mainstream are the huge breaches, but the problem is always spun to be the hackers, or one guy in the IT department who did something wrong, or whatever, not the fact that they’re even collecting all of this data in the first place.

And this isn’t willful ignorance, it’s just not something they think applies to them. Maybe they bought the “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” line, but more likely they just don’t actively think about it at all. Like how, if you live inland, you probably rarely worry about tsunamis; they’re simply a reality, and they probably vaguely know about the danger, but they’re a fact of nature, there’s nothing they can do to change it, and it’s not a risk they face personally. That doesn’t make them willfully ignorant, it just means they think it’s something that really only matters to spies or whoever.

Even people that are very low information on technology, know that the Internet is a source of potential surveillance, and having your info on the internet in any form is a potential for being surveilled.

But usually only in the abstract. “Oh, as long as I just look for the lock in the top left of the browser, I’m ok.” They think the threat comes from hackers and foreign governments, not companies that make the funny cat meme service.

Everybody knows that all the big IT companies are trying to gather as much information as they can. And Amazon is right at the top among them.

No, I think you’re wrong about that, and I think that’s because–again–these companies have spent billions trying to convince people that they aren’t. Even in the rare cases that they do see a threat, they have completely the wrong idea about what the threat really is; think about those memes that go around from time to time saying “I hereby declare that Facebook doesn’t own my photos!” or whatever. Zuck doesn’t want their photos, he wants to be able to lock them and their friends in, he wants their personal data, and he wants exclusive, 24/7 access to their eyes so that he can cram personalized ads into them.

All of that advertising may not necessarily convince people that the company is good, but it might cast just enough doubt or confusion to get them to focus on the wrong issue.

And Amazon? If people have anything against Amazon, it’s probably just “oh, they’re trying to put mom & pop companies out of business!” (Which, in fairness, they are also doing). Do you think the average person knows that they even own Ring and Roomba and AWS? I would submit that a surprisingly large chunk of the population probably doesn’t even know that they own Alexa.

Not because they’re ignorant, just because (1) it doesn’t matter to them, and (2) they’ve been aggressively propagandized to not care.

Question is why they bought a Ring camera in the first place?

Probably because of marketing.

There is no way they can have been unaware that these gadgets can be accessed from outside.

(1) Clearly you’ve not talked to enough people outside the privacy-aware community. Absolutely they can have been unaware of that.

(2) They may well have known, but not known the scope, or not cared. If you’re having trouble with (for instance) porch pirates, you might not care about the privacy ramifications.

But it was only when the evidence was put right in their face they finally connected the dots?

Yes. When you don’t live and breathe this stuff, a lot of times that’s what it takes.

My mom used to use the same password for every service. It was a ten-letter password that she came up with in 1999, and she essentially never deviated from it; until I typed it in for her on haveibeenpwned and showed how many times it had been leaked. People who don’t care about privacy won’t care until they’re shown how it actually affects them.

So my answer is quite simple: Because they are stupid,

Profoundly uncharitable read on the situation. Are you “stupid” if you don’t know what you don’t know? We don’t have classes about this sort of thing in high school or anything. There are billions of dollars going toward telling people that sleazy products are actually great and companies actually care about their well-being, and only neckbeards like us on Lemmy spending $0 to tell them the opposite. If they’re not watching tech news because the regular news is too much, or because they have jobs and families and hobbies, or because they don’t know how to process or parse it, or just because they’re not interested and have never been convinced that they should be, they aren’t stupid, just propagandized.

and bought a sleazy product from a known sleazy company,

First of all, “sleazy” is a perfect word for this, and thank you for using it.

But second, keep in mind that for a lot of people, most companies are still responsible members of society; “pillars of the community,” and generally worthy of trust. It’s not because they’re dumb, it’s because they’ve been propagandized into believing it.

and when they found out it was in fact as sleazy as could be expected, they figured that maybe they didn’t want to to be voluntarily surveilled anyway.

People are waking up to the reality of big tech “convenience.” That’s a good thing. Don’t shoot at them for coming to their senses.

It’s kind of a weird game theory thing, because the industries affected aren’t consistently losing. A decision he makes on Wednesday can help the finance industry but hurt the tech industry, and then he can reverse it on Thursday and now the finance industry is tanking but the insurance industry is up. It’s tough to know who would work together to pull him out of office, because between any two given days, the people who have the money have different opinions on how he’s doing.

I can’t imagine “Discourse”'s branding will survive for long.

Oh, absolutely–but back then it was just normal, ordinary platform decay, not the sparkling AI hellscape of today.

Office has been Microsoft 365 for five years now. They added “Copilot” to the name at some point last year, but it’s been M365 for a while.

I don’t disagree that some articles could use better information hierarchy. Headings could make that experience way better. But to say that the info shouldn’t be there at all is short-sighted and ignores the point of an encyclopedia.

That’s what the info boxes on the side of the article are for. They’re the simplified, just-the-facts version. If you want to know more, you read the whole article, or look for the section that contains the info you need.

Musk is well-known for bringing a project to a close way late and way over-budget. He’s the king of overpromising and undelivering. After a couple years of “next quarter, I promise!” they’ll be wishing they’d bought the bulldozer.

Yeah, lol. All the robots need is any actual robotics, and then they’re good to go!

they can do “policing” even more effectively than ICE.

A bulldozer with a brick on the pedal can do “policing” more effectively than ICE. That’s not much of a flex.

He desperately wants people to think he’s cool.

You’re not crazy, but it won’t be Elon who does it. The Tesla robots are nowhere near ready for production. This is vaporware, just like the Roadster.

Sorry, I left out the part where most RSS fetchers are not hosted by the user. Of course it is self-hostable, but that’s by far the less common use case.

Images and CSS aren’t natively a part of RSS, though (and in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen an RSS feed or reader that tries to do any CSS rendering at all). Assuming you have a third party downloading your RSS XML, all of the tracking capabilities are outside of the RSS spec itself, and dependent on you clicking on a link or something after you get the RSS feed.

If you want news and articles from the sites you appreciate to come to you directly and not be filtered through social media first, RSS is what you want. You get every link, and often the full text of every post, and you aren’t at the whim of an algorithm.

Spam-free? It’s literally only what you’ve specifically asked it to deliver you. If a site starts spamming its RSS feed, you just unsubscribe from the site.

Tracker-free? There’s literally no way anyone could track you through RSS. It’s just an XML file and can’t run any arbitrary code.

I use it for everything I can: news sites, blogs, YouTube channels, social media feeds for people whose content I don’t want to miss. There are even services that will let you subscribe to an email newsletter through one of their inboxes, and they’ll convert it to an RSS feed for you to follow so it doesn’t clog up your actual inbox. I especially like reading webcomics through it; it makes sure I get everything, and I don’t lose my place, get spoiled by a later post, or have to rely on the whims of social media.

I love RSS.

Interesting. That’s the one thing I would miss the most about bailing on Nova. I’ll have to check this out.

In this case, the service is the same thing. Both the Minecraft client and the Hytale client are connecting to a Hytale server. So I guess you could say it’s like if Lemmy had an official app, and you used that and the Boost app to connect to a Lemmy backend: the hypothetical Lemmy app would be the Hytale client, connecting the way it’s meant to to the service it was designed for; and the Boost app would be the Minecraft client, designed to connect to a different type of server but modified to work because the workloads are similar enough that they can be translated pretty simply.

Probably not. This is more akin to using different apps to access the same service, like one person using Ivory and the other using Tusky to access Mastodon. Multiple clients accessing the same API endpoints is kind of how the internet operates, or at least was before big tech decided to shut out third-party apps.