Posts by Dinanziame 1351 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
Well to be honest here the settlement is low because few people care about the issue. This was the default way for the Referer header to work, and at the blessed times we're talking of people didn't care about the fact that the website they were going to would know the very keywords... which had brought them there. If anything, they might have thought it was valuable for web admins to know which keywords would turn up their website in Google results.
why would they need to create a whole new sub-service for "short" videos
There is no minimum length on YouTube videos. The Shorts service is more about giving users a different way to watch videos (short video repeats automatically until you swipe to the next one). I understand that video creators can choose whether their video should show up on Shorts, but only if the video is less than a minute long. As to why they've created a "whole new sub-service" to watch videos in a slightly different way, that's because they've noticed a lot of users thought it was more enjoyable to watch videos in that way. From the numbers, it seems they were right.
As far as I can tell, WAA is this:
https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?hl=en-GB&utm_source=google-account&utm_medium=web
and this is what Google uses for personalizing your searches. If I understand correctly, the claim is that this Firebase thing which is used for Google Analytics is storing the same data even if you turn WAA off. Definitely Firebase would be storing some data, but I suppose Google's viewpoint is that they are not actually storing the same data and it's fine to store some data for analytics because users accept it in a different place (maybe with a message like "send analytics data to Google to help it make improvements to tools" or something). The lawsuit's viewpoint is that Google should have a master switch which prevents Google from storing any data whatsoever no matter where and how the user accepted it, including analytics data.
Google in particular does seem to be irrevocably unamendable. They evidently don't care one jot about being caught out engaging in "anti-trust" activities. If they did care one would imagine that, having suffered the public shame of one fine they'd work hard across their entire company to ensure that they weren't crossing the line anywhere else. But no. They're just sat there, waiting for regulators around the world to eventually get round to another part of their business.
To be fair, it has taken more than twelve years for Japan to write a law that might make illegal what they are doing; and every fine from the EU comes after years of examining the business practices to figure out if yes or no this is breaching antitrust laws. The US is only now waking up, and it's not even clear they will find Google is doing anything wrong. What they do would probably be completely fine it was a smaller company doing it, and indeed with DSA and DMA the EU has simplified the matter by declaring new regulations that only apply to mega-corporations, which is pretty much a first. It's not very surprising if Google thought all these years ago that what they were doing was fine — If they hadn't become so successful since then, it still would be.
I think the estimates might be faulty. In the one known case where the default search engine is Bing, Windows for desktop, Bing has only 10% market share and Google about 90%. It's likely that the same would happen on iOS, meaning that if Google was not the default search engine, they would lose only a fraction of the ad revenue.
I think it's a bit negative. In the very least, it should be possible to prove in some cases that the image was AI generated by specific systems. I'm unconvinced by this claim of the authors that they can modify an innocent image to make it seem AI generated. It seems easy enough for watermarks to be cryptographically signed.
First, how is it fine for Bing to be the default search engine on the default browser for Windows, but not for Google to be the default search engine on the default browser for iOS?
Second, how is it that whichever search engine Apple chooses as default is the winner, when the default search engine for Windows (again, Bing) has less than 10% market share on the Desktop?
I think the question was, why clone the face of an existing person when they could just generate a fake face from scratch and pay nobody at all.
And the answer is: fake faces are ultimately generated from pieces of somebody's face, and this is tricky from a copyright and legal point of view. If you clone a person's face with the right contract, you are protected from legal issues, and the additional cost is trivial.
After the hippos, before the crocodiles.
Without even mentioning that the coal-powered power plants used by Germany release way more radioactivity in the atmosphere than nuclear power plants.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-stations-produce-radioactive-waste
The proper solution would be to force Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc to require people to opt-in to be tracked, never opt-out.
I'm pretty sure that's already the case in EU with the GDPR. If you open an incognito window and try a Google Search, the first thing that you see is a banner asking you to accept or reject cookies.
It's pretty surprising, because Google Maps does have a UI to report issues with the map data, and as far as I heard they do react and fix issues — they even regularly mark roads around my place as closed for temporary events like marathons and the like.
Maybe they reported the bridge collapse by sending a letter to "Google, California"?
The road is still there on Google Maps even now:
The Street View data is all the way back from 2012, so it still shows the road, even though the 3D view does show the bridge is collapsed:
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7813855,-81.2835562,84a,35y,62.65h,34.08t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
Relevant article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-copyright.html
The majority of desktops run Windows, where Edge is the default browser, and Bing the default search engine. And Edge has 5% of market share, and Bing has 3% of market share. Apple is more successful with Safari, a respectable share of their users keep the default browser. Not sure whether the difference comes from quality or brand loyalty, but the numbers don't lie.
They're definitely short of cash, they didn't give their employees a raise this year... Yeah ha ha no. They had record profits this year. I truly don't know why Edge is so unsuccessful. Even if Chrome's popularity is due to its connections with Google products, Safari has more users on the desktop, even though Windows computers still vastly outnumber OSX, and come with Edge as default.
I think it's essentially because now they are not market leader anymore, unlike in the 90s. If the market leader makes it hard to move to the competition, it's an anti-trust issue. If the 5% market share holder does the same thing, it's a big shrug. There's not too much point in enforcing monopolistic behavior that is not even successful.
Not quite — it was "Don't be evil".
It might feel like nitpicking, but I think "Do no evil" would have been a ridiculous motto, which brings to mind a hermit living in the desert, while "Don't be evil" is a reasonable goal. Of course, at the time they pretty much meant "Don't be Microsoft", and... yeah...
Er, because the workers who wanted back to the office are already there?
The point is not just working from the office, the point is working at the same place as the others, so you can talk to them face to face. For that, everybody must be in the office. People working from home probably consider that not being interrupted by random people coming to their desk to ask questions is a great advantage of working from home. But all the people who used to ask these questions are now really annoyed that they can't do that anymore.
In fact, having half the people in the team working from home is the worst, because you need to handle separately the communications to both groups, so it's pretty guaranteed that some of the info gets lost: "we talked about it" "no we didn't" "yes, we discussed it in the break room" "well how was I to know since I work from home" etc.
Forrester’s analysts reckon that workers in more creative industries, like editors, writers, authors and poets, and lyricists, are more likely to incorporate generative AI tools in their jobs and are less likely to be replaced.
I think that's breathtakingly naive. The point is that generative AI lowers the bar so much that anybody with half a brain can create content that can pass if you squint. Maybe true art will always be superior, but it's going to be overrun by an ocean of generated crap. The same happened to professional photographers when quality digital cameras became widespread. It used to be photography was expensive and it would take hours of development to know whether a shot was good. That's why you needed professionals who knew what they were doing, and got paid well. Nowadays anybody with a phone can take dozens of pictures in a minute, fix issues with a couple of filters and upload them to Getty. Most of that is crap, but there's so much of it that you can find a reasonably good image for cheap, so professionals cannot earn a living wage anymore.
Searches for "professional photographer" have decreased 60% over the past 20 years
Secondly, in most jurisdictions it's already illegal to have or distribute child porn
Well, no — Not if it's a cartoon. The reason child porn movies are illegal is that real children must be hurt to produce it. Producing a cartoon does not hurt children, so child porn cartoons are legal in most countries (with the notable exception of UK and Australia). This has been so far an acceptable situation, considering the fact that cartoons are obviously different from reality. But with AI, it will be possible to create photorealistic child porn without hurting children, and the goal of the new law is to make this content illegal all the same.
Rebranding is like makeup: If it's well done you don't notice it... Which doesn't mean it has no effect. The fact is that people do react differently to subtle differences that they often don't notice. You don't really pay attention while walking past a shop whether it was painted one year ago or ten years ago, but it still has an influence on how you see the business, and whether you are likely to buy from it.
Of course, sometimes rebranding are complete shitshows and destroy the product. That happens too :)
Figuring out what a website is about is practically the entire business model of Google Search. You can try to mislead them with SEO and the like, but they have a lot of experience doing it, and they might well push down your results to hell (aka "page 2").
It's like suing a law firm. You can get away with it, but you better know what you're doing.
