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Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google
The problem is that (if you live in the USA) your and my tax dollars are spent by national security agencies polluting Reddit with content from sock-puppet accounts to promote certain agendas.
This means, that by design, Google will be training its AI on untrustworthy sources.
Nothing about this plan is wise.
I know that Google does plenty of stupid things accidentally, but this seems willfully stupid.
I mentioned here how I added a filter to my browsing to block those annoying Google login pop-ups. I had successfully ordered take-and-bake pizza from Papa Murphy’s before implementing this filter. Today, I can no longer order pizza from them.
Even though I had previously placed an order, and can call up that order from my rewards profile, attempting to actually order anything takes me to a Google Maps page to identify where to pick up from. That page never finishes because of the new filter. Every attempt at adding something to my shopping cart fails because the operation cannot get past the check-in-with-google part.
Well, if I have to choose between keeping the filter in place versus ordering take-and-bake pizza, I’m keeping the filter in place. Which is a shame, because the previous pizza order turned out really well, and was reasonably priced.
Writing this down here, because although I have synchronization turned on in Firefox, I have a couple of new machines, and the setting isn’t syncing over:
uBlock Origin > Dashboard (it is the gear wheels icons) > My Filters > add the following:
https://accounts.google.com/gsi/*With this in the filters list, Firefox won’t pop up that annoying login box.
I don’t know whether this enhances privacy or not.
Without the filter, the website you are visiting has some content on it which tells your browser that the browser should rat you out to Google fetch this login form from Google.
You should feel uncomfortable when that login prompt box shows up on the porn site you are visiting, by the way. Also if you are a Tea Party member or a Black Lives Matter member.
So, without the filter, your browser is definitely reaching out to a Google server and interacting with it, supplying IP address and whatever else Google asks for. Google is also then supplying this login prompt code to run in your browser.
With the filter, I don’t know.
The website page has code (which will be shipped to your browser) that your browser should request from Google this login form.
I don’t know if the filter strips out the request for the login form, or brings down the login form and immediately returns “no information for accounts.google.com is available”.
If the former, it might protect some privacy. I don’t know if uBlock Origin stops the login form from being loaded from Google. If so, probably Google didn’t get notified that you visited that website.
If the latter, then Google shipped the code to your browser. But before it could ship that code to your browser, your browser had to hand over your IP address as the destination to ship to. And as long as they are preparing the login script code to ship to you, then need a little more information…. (user agent, screen size, is JavaScript enabled, whose’s your daddy, and any other fingerprinting data they can get).
If I were DHS (who is paying Google with your tax dollars to rat you out to DHS), I’d have Google supply the login form code from a different host and domain than accounts.google.com. This filter could still remove all code that points the browser to accounts.google.com, but it is the initial download of the login page pop-up form that lets Google record that you visited website foo at a particular date and time and from where.
Dear FutureMe,
Just saw this new video of a dystopian future: ROSE | Short Film by Omid Pakbin
It is well done. Omid says he got the entire film done for $8,000.
I’d like to post it in the politics channel of some of the Discord servers I’m on, where my Circle-Of-Friends-On-The-Internet hang out. Well, I’d like to, but being on OpenSuSE, the Discord app is broken because the publisher has a new version out, and they don’t publish to the OpenSuSE repositories. I have to wait until a community member packages it for me. I have a running list of when Discord is working versus not working here: Discord app update ā hooray! š
As of this writing, Discord has been down since the 12th, and today is the 17th.
Anyway, if I’m still alive in 2028, how close did Omid nail it?
We already know that China is implementing the social credit score system today.
Seven days after Biden was elected, a guy, Douglass Mackey, was charged and found guilty of a tweet in the 2016 Presidential Race. Yes, in 2023 he was sentenced to 7 months in prison for a 2016 joke tweet. “Social Media Influencer Douglass Mackey Sentenced after Conviction for Election Interference in 2016 Presidential Race“
Recently there was a hearing on weaponizations of the government, where testimony was provided that after the 2016 election, federal officials said “something had to be done”. In their view, an outsider presidential candidate was such a threat that they needed to implement some censorship regimes: and they did so. Both Facebook and Twitter (pre- Elon) censored the Hunter Biden laptop story so that it wouldn’t spread and change the 2020 election.
There have been several hearings about weaponizations of the federal government to implement a censorship industrial complex. The censorship industrial complex was proposed in 2018, and was in force at Facebook and Twitter for the 2020 election. We wouldn’t know about Google unless a whistleblower comes forward; but their deplatforming of certain people on YouTube is obvious censorship.
Google, for weeks, was scrubbing news about the biggest denier of Pizzagate being found to be a producer of child porn. Today, they no longer say “this story is developing therefore it is too new to report on”, but they don’t link to much that makes Slade Sohmer look bad. They (mostly) only link to news that it’s all conspiracy theory.
So Google is on board with the censorship industrial complex. Facebook is too. Twitter / X under Elon appears to be the only social media company against it. Rumble will gladly host people against it, but they aren’t gaining much traction.
Bruce Schneier also points out that spying on people will only get worse with AI.
So the question is: just how close to truth is Omid Pakbin’s video going to get? It’s a great movie short: less than twelve minutes long. Very high quality, and amazing that it was pulled together which such a low budget.
Pro-tip you should have done a decade ago: add a second hard drive to your machine, and put /home on it. Then during the install of the fresh OS, do not format that disk, simply mount it as /home
In a previous post, I was whining that YouTube videos were not working. I also (rather mean-spiritedly) implied that maybe Google was screwing with the connection because I was looking for ad-blocking videos. That was wrong: this fresh install of OpenSuSE has fixed that problem.
Of course, never does a single thing change, and I happened to roll over into the new month, so T-Mobile doesn’t see me as over my “unlimited” transfer limit.
But for all that testing I did, what I hadn’t tried was Windows versus Linux. I saved off a problematic YouTube link to my NextCloud Tasks, and logged in to it on a Windows machine. It played perfectly.
D’oh! It’s my OpenSuSE machine that’s borked.
I’d done an Upgrade per SDB: System upgrade to Leap 15.4
So I downloaded the ISO and did an Install not an Upgrade, and now that problematic YouTube video plays correctly.
I’m still going to have to install all the packages that went away. But that is a trade-off I’m willing to make, for being able to see videos of how to open up the connection to Mariadb running on a Synology NAS (for example).
Do I want to watch television? Or maybe check out YouTube for a Home Assistant tutorial? I decided to try YouTube on the television set. I do the search terms, I find a video with more than 1 million views, and I hit play.
First, Google wants to play an ad. It is so fucking stupid that Iām out.
Back to HBO for me.
I suppose someone thought that being outrageous was clever. Instead, they just confirmed my suspicions that YouTube, on the television, is simply a waste of time.
I chuckled at a recent observation by someone: Google gets paid to put ads on YouTube. Then they put unskippable ads on YouTube. Then they offer to let you pay to skip those ads. “Get paid to create the problem, get paid to solve the problem. Genius.”