I actually think the opposite, the hatred on the internet seems artificial to me.
In the current day when AI is so prevalent, it always makes me wonder how many posts are made by agents instructed to maximize engagement by making people angry.
Are you implying that PA is a military organization that is at war with the UK? I don't think you actually have thought through the implications of that. If this were the case, they would be considered legitimate military targets who can be killed.
That would be a lot worse for them than sanctions.
There's a lot of talking around this in the comment section for some reason: they allegedly provide infrastructure for recognized terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestine Action (the group that attacked UK air force bases).
You can comply with the law without banners and dark pattern defaults. These businesses are maliciously complying by making things more obnoxious and painful than they need to be.
A comparison would be a store who was angry the law says you have to be 21 to buy alcohol and starts requesting everyone, even people not buying alcohol, to show ID or be kicked out. That's not a bad law, that's a bad business maliciously complying.
I use an adblocker and I have for a while now. Every so often I hear a moral argument about why adblockers are bad (ads support free internet, etc) but to be completely honest, I simply don't care anymore. Advertising is in such a malicious state that yes, I'm going to put my own experience quality over whatever collective good there is in watching ads.
Advertising is mind rape. They're trying to force their brands and products into our minds without our consent. Any possible moral argument against ad blocking is overridden by the sheer intrusiveness and entitlement of advertisers. Our attention belongs to us, it's not theirs to sell to the highest bidder. Ad blocking is legitimate self defense.
People actively seek information. People don't seek out advertising noise. They avoid such audiovisual pollution quite actively, so much so that corporations get paid in order to force the noise in front of people's eyeballs.
It's that forceful nature that violates consent. I came to HN to see comments from technologists on random stories as well as cool Show HN posts. So someone showing off a project here isn't advertising, it's just the exact information I asked for. It's when that person pays money to put his project in front of me while I'm browsing news or something that it turns into a massive problem.
The key is to differentiate noise from signal, advertising from information. Advertising is always noise they add to signal in order to get paid. Our brains aren't supposed to be sinks for their noise. Our cognitive functions are absolutely sacred.
My extreme arguments are generally reserved for businesses who are profiting off the abuse. People demonstrating could definitely fall into the unwanted noise category depending on what you believe, but I'm not going to go extreme on them for it.
Besides, demonstrations are easily avoided and ignored. They go to the public square to demonstrate. They don't generally go to your house. Advertisers absolutely would go to your house. They are the sort of people who would calculate the exact viewing angle you have when you look out the window of your home and then set up a billboard covering that exact area so as to mine out every last dime your eyeballs can possibly give. They're the sort of people who'd set up hidden cameras in the house across the street purely so they can monitor you to estimate the number of times you look out your windows every day, all so they can sell the chance to be seen by you to some highest bidder.
You-know-it-when-you-see-it might be a good boundary. It's different for everyone, surely.
Personally I find the Protect The Children charity workers and anti-abortion protesters in large city squares to be right on the line of "mind mild-assault."
TBH the charity people are worse than the anti-abortion protesters because they force images of unfortunate kids into my mind and makes me feel bad. The anti-abortion people are almost quaint to me.
"Mind rape" is obviously an attention grabbing way of putting it, but I tend to agree that advertising is essentially theft.
It goes something like this:
* You only have a finite amount of attention. You cannot obviously "pay attention" to everything around you.
* When someone takes your attention, they are consuming some of your finite resource.
* Taking something from someone else is the very definition of theft.
Now obviously we have social norms around attention that allow for a reasonable amount of this non-consensual attention consumption. Things like, make your signage inoffensive, unobtrusive, and generally placed in a way that it is a net positive (the hot dog prices should be near the hot dog vendor).
But what we don't have, at least in the US, are strong laws and norms that protect people from this. Why does an lawyer get to steal my attention on the beach with a plane dragging a banner? Why does a storefront get to blast an ad at me when I walk by? Does anybody really think these examples are a net societal benefit?
"mind rape". How absurd and inflammatory. The notion of consent here is just ridiculous. Nobody is forcing you to use the Internet, you're happy enough to consume free online services, but then melt down when you see an ad.
> you're happy enough to consume free online services
Of course. If HTTP servers want to send me free web pages, I'm only too happy to consume them. If they send me ads alongside those pages, the ads will be deleted. If they don't like it, they can return 402 Payment Required instead.
Just because somebody handed me a free magazine filled with ads doesn't mean I can't rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash. I'm allowed to keep only the pages I want and discard the rest.
> melt down when you see an ad
I don't see ads, uBlock Origin does a really good job at filtering them out. Highly recommended.
There is no moral argument anymore. Every ad peddler online has broken every TOS imaginable to feed its AI training models, at a scale a human couldn't accomplish in a million years.
The current state of things is entirely the fault of the advertising industry. They've acted like users' banner blindness is an obstacle to be defeated, rather than a constraint to build around. Faced with something the users cannot change, they continue to pile up increasingly hostile techniques that only work for a short while before users start to automatically ignore them.
I'm curious where the one-sided arms race ends. Probably a return to subscriptions that frustrate users but are at least sustainably funded.
I understand the moral argument, yes tell me about your product or company from time to time, can be interesting or even funny sometimes but it should stop there.
I always use an adblock where possible. 1. I've seen too much ads trying to straight up serve malware. 2. I'm definitely not okay with the ad-industry data aggregation tracking my every move online.
Plus the algorithm is kinda dumb: I see you bought a mattress, how about another one, every day, for the next months? I was curious once about a product I would never buy but now, weeks later, I still have ten companies paying ads for the same product, each one claiming to be the real deal.
I still use google news on mobile, no adblock there, some publications are okay, others are, well... I take a screenshot when there's 0% of content on the screen → OnlyAds/NoContent folder.
What if the advertising services company (Google) and/or its partner (Mozilla) that produce the source code for popular "browsers" remove the ability for users to run "adblockers"
What then
These entities often claim the code is "open source"
Perhaps users will start compiling the browser themselves and keep the code to run user extensions/add-ons
Maybe they will let "AI" agents compile Firefox for them
The www was designed for its users to send "requests" for resources to destinations, i.e., IP addresses, where the resources are served. The requests are very specific, identifying exactly what was requested. The user specifies the destination
It's possible to automate some requests to destinations the user is not aware of, e.g., by letting the specified destination "trigger" them automatically without any input from the user. This can be useful but naturally it requires trust
Unfortunately, so-called "tech" companies have co-opted this design to support a "business model" of data collection, surveillance and advertising services. Users do not send requests for ads. Software from so-called "tech" companies does this automatically "on their behalf" and it _sends requests to destinations that the user never speficied_
When using software created by these companies (and their partners, like Mozilla) the user sends a single (HTTP) request to a single destination and other parties, e.g., browser developers, the website developers, adtech companies, etc., make more requests for resources the user never requested, e.g., ads
This is only possible when using software that designed to do this
There are various tactics these commercial parties use to coax users into using this software that facilitates unwanted advertising and tracking. In theory it's still a choice to use their software. HTTP servers ggenerally do not require specific HTTP clients. For example, I rarely use the software from so-called "tech" companies or their partners for making HTTP requests. I prefer non-graphical software similar to what was released when the www first went public. It gives me more control. I'm not giving up agency to third parties, I'm not allowing software to load arbitrary resources or run arbitrary Javascript, I'm not delegating authority to so-called "tech" companies by using their software
Eventually, these companies might use tactics such as "attestation" to force users to use their software, (pre)installed after company approval on company-controlled hardware
The thing is, and the article said it, I'm not going to click your ad. Period. That's why I have an ad blocker. So there's no lost revenue, because you'll never, ever get a clickthrough from me.
I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.
Nope. 2000s would refer to the century. We're still in the 2000s and still early. The Wright brothers flew the first plane in the early 1900s. Accurate. Ford introduced the Model T in the late 1900s, inaccurate. 1908 was not the late 1900s.
The US extradites people, including US citizens. That is required from the federal government by extradition treaties that are signed voluntarily by the US (in exchange for extradition _to_ the US). It is uncommon because they require escalations through the Department of State and not many crimes are serious enough to justify extradition.
The US does not allow extradition to other countries for crimes, or the enforcement of civil judgements originating in other countries, that stem from conduct that would be constitutionally protected in the US. For example, a US citizen cannot be extradited to face a charge of blasphemy.
No, there is not a precedent for that AFAIK. But the US does extradite, as we don't have "rights guaranteed to us in the United States that no other country has".
...such as? For that matter, you don't think other countries have rights guaranteed to their citizens that the US doesn't have? The legal mismatches don't seem to be likely to make a difference here that could introduce a bias in extraditions.
As an American who has no desire to visit the UK, is there any particular reason I need to care? The article says it would affect me but they don't have any jurisdiction over me.
