No not really. When everyone does it, untargered ads will be the norm and will just be more valuable. Just like they were before adtech happened.
Also, 50% less doesn't have to mean not to exist.
I do wish they had mandated the existing do not track flag to be honored though without presenting any popups. This would have finally made that flag useful and would have made things much easier. I know some browsers have removed it but it's easy to bring back.
For me as a user it's not about the payment thing at all. It's about being able to do with my device what I want without the manufacturer having to approve it first.
Ah that makes sense. Yes Reddit is pretty good at not showing you NSFW unless you actually go and look for it. But when you do it takes you all the way down the rabbit hole (figuratively!! - I hope), this is why I found it a bit surprising, it's not just some lingerie pics or anything.
In a way though, that means Safari should be banned too. And the camera app, I mean point it down in the right state of undress... ;)
Sounds like it'll be a bit like on Mac with that whole notarization rigmarole.. But on Mac you can bypass it by jumping through some hoops. I guess on iOS you won't be able to until the EU catches up and forbids that too.
I'd actually consider iOS again if it were more open so I think this is a really good thing.
Oh trust me it's way way lower than 5%. More like 0.05% :) I was until recently a corporate admin of (among many other types) tens of thousands of BYOD iphones.
PS Not sure why I get 0 points here :) I have it on good authority from some webmasters that were trying to offer non-tracked ads that advertisers simply don't want them anymore.
They're so addicted to tracking, and 'retargeting' (meaning repeat ads) that they're just not paying for untracked anymore. Not nearly enough to make an ad-supported website work anyway.
Due to GDPR and the cookie ban, things are turning in Europe though. Because now they no longer have the choice.
> Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product. If that is manipulation, so is pretty much any content that seeks to change what people know.
That's what advertising used to do before tracking was a thing. When this was introduced the industry realized that targeting and manipulation is far more profitable and this made ad campaigns that don't do this unviable. Because nobody ever wants to go back to a lower profit margin.
It was restricted to that for the time being yes. But still a big step in the wrong direction. I don't want my own phone spying on me. It's a bridge too far. Scanning on a cloud service is a very big difference.
Does it matter in practice? No. But it makes me feel very different about it. That's important too.
I know what Shadow PC is. But they now have an 'activation fee' that costs 1 month of use - $30 (currently waived but it will be imposed soon). That means if you just want to use it for 1 month (e.g. during a holiday) you will have to pay for 2 months. It applies every time you reactivate a paused account too!
And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.
Even Google search is going downhill. Most searches contain a lot of sponsored crap at the top. And it's often returning worse results than duckduckgo.
But that's really focused on long term commitments.
First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee.
For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it.
Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile.
I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.
Throwaways from work were one major source of my home lab too. However for me this has become a lot harder in recent years, because our company scrapped its own datacenters and moved to the cloud. A hallway full of decommissioned servers is now extremely rare. We have some "computer rooms" left (not allowed to call them "datacenters" anymore) but it's just for the stuff that really must be on-site.
Other than that, online marketplaces. Not eBay generally, because its auction system and international reach drives prices up, even for items which normally gather low interest. I tend to use local buy & sell websites where people usually offer lower prices than advertised and these kinds of items are not very popular so they tend to go cheap.
I've never seen fanless servers, but my home lab is not something I keep running 24/7 anyway. And it sits in a dedicated room with my 3D printers and electronics workbench so it's not the kind of place I hang out for peace and quiet anyway :) It's my mancave really (though, for lack of a partner, right now my whole apartment is a mancave :) ).
My 24/7 stuff I do pick for energy-efficiency and to a much smaller extent, noise. I have 4 NUCs for this stuff. 2 nice ones with 4/6 cores and 64GB RAM, and 2 ancient ones (one atom and one skylake IIRC) which are very low power though. They're the ones that keep running when everything switches to UPS.
I'm not really big into networking so I have some semi-managed TP-Links that bought new for 35 bucks. They're gigabit, 8 ports and can do basic stuff like vlans and mirroring which is all I need. I'm not doing any CCNA stuff or anything.
Yeah perhaps in the US this might not work. I was thinking more of europe where even ammunition isn't readily available to buy already (and people don't have stockpiles except highly regulated sportshooters).
But I thought the part where the firing pin hits the cartridge gets damaged and the primer there isn't easily replaced. I'm probably wrong, I never even held a real gun.
Also, 50% less doesn't have to mean not to exist.
I do wish they had mandated the existing do not track flag to be honored though without presenting any popups. This would have finally made that flag useful and would have made things much easier. I know some browsers have removed it but it's easy to bring back.