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engadget.com

djsaskdja , to aboringdystopia in Amazon is bringing its palm-based payments to all Whole Foods Market stores

Anyone who voluntarily subscribes to this program needs to be involuntarily committed.

muaveri , to aboringdystopia in Amazon is bringing its palm-based payments to all Whole Foods Market stores
rebul , to aboringdystopia in Amazon is bringing its palm-based payments to all Whole Foods Market stores

It simply isn't necessary.

sgtgig , to technology in YouTube Premium quietly goes up in price to $14 per month | That's a significant $2 increase with no official announcement.

I pay Google for Google domains (shutting down, being transferred to somewhere) and YT premium and they didn’t tell me either of these things.

TechnoBabble ,

All Google domains are transferring to SquareSpace, and you get 1 renewal at the old rate before SquareSpace can charge you whatever they want.

sgtgig ,

A nice email from Google explaining that would have been lovely.

Pizzarules668 ,

I got an email saying there was a price increase coming soon

atomicpeach ,
@atomicpeach@pawb.social avatar

I love that I learned about Google Domains being shut down from a Lemmy comment~ I was debating moving those away from Google anyway. Has anyone else already done research and narrowed down the list of decent registrars worth using?

Coreidan , to technology in YouTube Premium quietly goes up in price to $14 per month | That's a significant $2 increase with no official announcement.

These services won’t survive Web 3.0. Interest rates are squeezing them and their only way to pivot is making their user experience worse. It’s a double edged sword for them and the rest of Web 2.0. Change is coming.

Ferguson_turd , to technology in YouTube Premium quietly goes up in price to $14 per month | That's a significant $2 increase with no official announcement.

VPN and Argentina. Less than $2.50 US per month. Google it.

Lucidlethargy , to technology in YouTube Premium quietly goes up in price to $14 per month | That's a significant $2 increase with no official announcement.

What fucking idiot pays for YouTube premium? Like, I’m sorry… But what the fuck?

Chickerino ,

i mean i would get it if the platform wasn’t trying to take advantage of you, but considering youtube’s moves in the past few years and especially recently with some people getting adblock-blocked, yea i don’t think supporting them further is a good idea

al4s ,
  • No ads
  • Creators get more money than from ads
  • YouTube is less dependent on advertisers
  • You can get it in a bundle with YouTube music It’s not that bad of a deal. Music and YouTube are the two pieces of media I consume most, so it makes sense for me.
sgtgig ,

Same reasons here. Also, if you regularly watch Youtube on smart TVs/streaming boxes, etc. it’s just the most hassle free way to not get ads there.

lenninscjay ,

yes, but this increase is a bit rough.

pazukaza ,

Also the fact that they were sneaky about it. But this is just how YouTube does things. They know being loud is the best way to get hate, just like what happened to Netflix. They have pushed longer ads in sneaky ways over the years. Now they are evaluating blocking ad-blockers, also in sneaky ways, they are never loud about it.

Sightline ,

Consider this: It’s a shit business model.

A lot of things should have been wiped out a long time ago via survival of the fittest.

phillycodehound ,
@phillycodehound@lemmy.world avatar

SO your saying that subscriptions are shit or advertising and you being the product is shit?

InternetUser2012 ,

Both

phillycodehound ,
@phillycodehound@lemmy.world avatar

Don’t agree with that. Subscriptions work. Nothing’s free

fubbernuckin ,

I kinda wanted to for awhile because I’d much prefer to have a service like that be paid instead of driven by ads, but it’s getting harder to do that with how they’re operating.

NPC ,

I recently started paying for it when I realised the only reason I wasn’t already was the fact I didn’t want to give Google my money.

You agree with me in this or not, but I use youtube more than any other video service. I pay 10 euro a month for Disney+ and maybe watch an episode or two maybe once or twice a week, while I’m constantly on youtube (I use it a lot for podcasts while travelling hence why I want background playback). I use youtube more than anything else and since I do wanna support the creators I watch, paying for youtube was the logical thing to do for me.

Yes, i don’t like giving Google my money, but Disney is just as terrible of a company. At least when buying youtube premium I get benefits on a service I’d use anyway and support people I like, be it through Google.

Void_Reader ,

I was in the same position until a few weeks ago; mainly used YT for podcasts, downloading videos to watch while travelling etc.

If you have an Android phone, get the NewPipe app from F-Droid. It has pretty much everything that YT Premium offers, but free. It’s been working really well for me.

NPC ,

I’ve had new pipe before switching over to premium. After coming from vanced, new pipe still just feels too clunky for me and like the recommendation feed and using shorts here and there. If new pipe was more like vanced was, I’ll probably switch back but until then I’ll think I’ll cough up for premium

dunestorm ,
@dunestorm@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t pay specifically for YouTube with no ads, that’s just a nice bonus, the primary reason is YouTube Music which is amazing.

notatoad ,

yeah, ad-free youtube, downloads, and background playback is only a couple dollars more than spotify. it’s one of the easiest subscriptions for me to justify.

BitingChaos ,
@BitingChaos@lemmy.world avatar

I pay!

I was paying $90 a month for cable TV. Something that I hardly watched. When I did watch it, half the time I was watching OTA channel that I could just pick up with rabbit ears.

I was spending more time watching YouTube (everything from car crash videos, to videos of people doing lawn care, to reviews of tech stuff), and I was getting fed up with the ads.

So, I stopped paying the $90 for TV, bought a new HDHomeRun with a new antenna, downloaded the Pluto TV app, and subscribed to YouTube Premium.

Now I get my OTA shows, get some of the stuff I liked with cable (The 24/7 Tosh.0 channel on Pluto TV is pure delight), and I can binge all the dumb shows I want on YouTube without a single ad getting in my way.

fidelacchius , to technology in YouTube Premium quietly goes up in price to $14 per month | That's a significant $2 increase with no official announcement.

I got an email from YouTube explaining the increase along with a few extra months at the old price before they raise it for me. 🤷‍♂️. Seems fair

Marcy_Stella , to technology in YouTube Premium quietly goes up in price to $14 per month | That's a significant $2 increase with no official announcement.

So I’ve had YouTube premium for years now, going all the way back to when it was still called YouTube red so I’ve been on the legacy $10/month plan and because I got to keep my old pricing it’s stopped me from canceling at any point when I was rebudgeting and it even stopped me from getting the cheaper $8/month student plan as I didn’t want to lose my legacy pricing once I was done with college but considering they’re hitting all subscribers and not just new subscribers I’m going to jump to that student plan to pay less each month instead.

It just doesn’t quite make sense why they’re increasing prices besides greed(or they know they can with the roll out of ad blocker blockers). If it was still during the YouTube red era they could have at least used the argument that they were re-investing in originals but they stopped creating YouTube originals. The only real new thing to YouTube premium since the rebrand from YouTube red is PIP and you can join the beta program.

ColdWater , to technology in YouTube Premium quietly goes up in price to $14 per month | That's a significant $2 increase with no official announcement.
@ColdWater@lemmy.world avatar

This doesn’t concerned me one bit because I have Revanced Premium

Axiochus , to technology in OpenAI's trust and safety lead is leaving the company | Engadget

What a misleading headline 😒

TheSaneWriter ,
@TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.com avatar

What’s misleading about it?

boatswain ,

Good question; it doesn’t seem misleading to me. Here’s the relevant bit:

Willner is staying on in an “advisory role” but has asked Linkedin followers to “reach out” for related opportunities. The former OpenAI project lead states that the move comes after a decision to spend more time with his family.

bcorgansmp ,

Yes it is. I would do the same thing if I were in that situation.

boredtortoise , to android in ChatGPT's Android app arrives in the last week of July | Engadget

Hope it has some more settings. It’d be nice to get rid of the verbose mode by default and not have to prompt for succinct answers every new chat or when it forgets the instructions

SJ0 , to technology in Mastodon's decentralized social network has a major CSAM problem | Engadget

I feel like these are just establishment hit pieces. They do it every time to up and coming platforms…

dragontamer ,

I know enough about internet porn to know that the online-porn communities will love something like Fediverse, and furthermore, the child-exploitation groups would also love something like this.

But what’s surprising to me in this study is that they focused on the top 25 Mastodon servers. They’ve included specific keywords they were looking for (yall know what keywords I mean), and include a practical methodology involving just hashing files + matching known CSAM databases, rather than forcing a human to go through this crap and picking out what they think is, or isn’t CSAM.

It seems like a good study from Stanford. I think you should at least read the paper discussed before discounting it. We all know that even here on the Lemmy-side of the Fediverse, that we need to be careful about who to federate with (or disfederate from). Its no surprise to me that there will be creepos out there on the Internet.


112 hits is pretty small, in the great scheme of things. But its also an automated approach that likely didn’t get all the CSAM out there. The automated hits seem to have uncovered specific communities and keywords to use to help search for this stuff + moderate, and includes some interesting methodologies (ex: hashed files compared against a known-database) that could very well automate the process for a server like Lemmy.world.

I see this as a net-positive study. There’s actually a lot of good, important, work that was done here.

LexiconDexicon ,

112 out of 325,000 posts is incredibly small, it’s 0.03% of posts

cyd , to technology in Mastodon's decentralized social network has a major CSAM problem | Engadget

Why would anyone use Mastodon for this stuff? It would be private Telegram groups or something like that. This kind of “research” is barely a step above trolling or low-effort clickbait.

redcalcium ,

While I don’t agree with the author’s use of “major CSAM problem”, if you browse instance federation list, you might notice a few mastodon instances that suggest they might be a MAPs community at best (domain name like pedo-school, mapsupport, etc usually with cute dolls in their banner image). They are closed community so can’t see what happening inside.

Aggy ,

What does MAP stand for? I'm a bit wary to use a web search to look it up

Voyajer ,
@Voyajer@kbin.social avatar

It stands for pedo. Minor attracted person.

fubo ,

The researchers are looking at actual posts on actual servers. The research itself is not made up. The speculation and handwaving that the tech press feels the need to introduce into it? That’s made up.

As for why would anyone use Mastodon for it — your typical Internet pedophile isn’t any smarter than your typical Internet user, and half of those are below average.

fubo , to technology in Mastodon's decentralized social network has a major CSAM problem | Engadget

…stanford.edu/…/20230724-fediverse-csam-report.pd…

I’d suggest that anyone who cares about the issue take the time to read the actual report, not just drama-oriented news articles about it.

Melpomene , (edited )
@Melpomene@kbin.social avatar

The article reads like a low key hit piece, the report is good and has food for thought.

As an aside, always look at anything NCMEC says with a critical eye. They do great work in their space, but they are vehemently anti-decentralization and anti-privacy.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

Thank you!

azuth ,

Given new commercial entrants into the Fediverse such as WordPress, Tumblr and Threads, we suggest collaboration among these parties to help bring the trust and safety benefits currently enjoyed by centralized platforms to the wider Fediverse ecosystem

In such a system, the server on which a post originates would submit imagery to PhotoDNA for analysis

This same technique could also be applied to other hosted media analysis mechanisms (e.g. Google’s SafeSearch or Microsoft’s Analyze Image API40

While large social media providers utilize signals such as browser User-Agent, TLS fingerprint,8 IP and many other mechanisms to determine whether a previously suspended bad actor is attempting to re-create an account, Mastodon admins have little to work with apart from a user’s IP and e-mail address, both of which are easily fungible.

So basically people might have joined the fediverse in large due to privacy reasons but if fediverse is to be “ethical” it should share your images with big tech as well as track you better.

He also laments Tor and E2E messaging.

fubo , (edited )

Anyone who’s on Lemmy for “privacy reasons” is probably not looking very closely at the technology. Everything you do here, including votes and DMs, is effectively public. All of it can be scraped, ingested, processed, etc. by absolutely anyone.

azuth ,

Votes are federated. They are tied to account names. Only your instance can tie them to your IP.

DMs are insecure in that admin instances can read them. Most instances tell you not to use them.

Scraping is more resource intensive than using an API to have data submitted to you. Since you are now offering a service you can set terms on what you can legally do with that data while scraping can lead to legal issues. PR issues as well.

In general using a corporate social media will allow companies to track you (or buy the tracking data from the social media company) far more thoroughly than scraping lemmy.

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