Submitted by Google back in 2005:
There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages.
Google today:
The company confirmed to the Guardian that it is testing a system with about 30 advertisers in the US in which it shows banner ads for companies including SouthWest Airlines on pages which include them in web search results.
And people wonder why I have zero trust in companies.
I used to think that Google was “not that bad”, on average, and clearly less worse than other companies such as Facebook.
But I have to say that, from the last few months, news from Google are going for the worse. I guess someone will tell that it’s “inevitable”, but frankly I don’t care. I liked Google as it was a few years ago. I’m not sure I can’t keep this confidence in them anymore.
Now for the more difficult part : find alternatives (not just for search, but for the myriad of services which are now in my everyday life).
FWIW does anyone know free mail service with IMAP access and more or less capable filtering? (Eg. capable enough to filter on headers.)
There in lies the problem: people expect this kind of thing for free. It takes skilled people to run those servers, to administer the system, and to keep it secure. People don’t work for free, so they have to be paid. If you’re unwilling to pay at least a bit of a fee for a service, the service’s management need to find other sources of income or else shut it down.
I’m sick of everyone wanting stuff for free. Google is the end result of said desire, and you’re paying a price for your “free” services; a price that is, in my opinion, far worse than a bit of cash.
darknexus,
“There in lies the problem: people expect this kind of thing for free. It takes skilled people to run those servers, to administer the system, and to keep it secure. People don’t work for free, so they have to be paid.”
It’s funny you should say that. For about a year now I’ve been selling VPS & hosting service, and man it can be difficult to convince people and companies to pay fair prices. They only want to pay a pittance for services these days. I transferred over one moderately busy business website from a godaddy dedicated server it’s now running faster on my VPS servers (a bit surprising, but hey I take great care in tuning my servers). It’s very difficult to compete against cheap oversold services coming from the big names. Just recently one company, who provides 24H emergency service for their customers said a price of $10/month was ‘too expensive’ for their web hosting. I tried to sell hosting service to a local school for $8/mo, but they went with a cheaper package from godaddy… (The teacher who was asking for help setting it up was a long time personal acquaintance, which makes this all the more sad) Seriously guys?!
I work hard to meet client expectations, but frankly when the money flow is almost non existent, that becomes a big impediment to providing a good service and it’s even a struggle to make a descent living.
Welcome to the world of globalization and mass automation and mass communication. There is going to be a lot of change in the world in the coming years.
As an example FoxConn a company employs 1.2 million people in China, mostly in factories building electronics. They say they want to have their first fully automated factory build in 5 to 10 years.
Think about it: if you were a truck- or taxi-driver, do you expect to have a job in 5 years now Google and others are building self-driving cars ? And Uber makes it really easy to get a taxi where you want ?
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/this-time-is-different/
45% of jobs (!) in the US are a high risk to be automated away in 10 to 20 years.
It probably has already started, jobs that existed before the crisis did not return:
http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/destroyi…
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology…
Luckily electricity, water and food, the basic necessities of life might get dirt cheap too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEWLjVmweoE
If you want to have a job, be a generalist and move up the stack. Maybe learn programming. Moore’s Law will take away your job eventually. As Marc Andreessen says: Software is eating the world.
Edited 2013-10-25 09:22 UTC
When I was an undergraduate back in the late 80s a visiting food industry executive explained how his global company was planning fully automated factories. Twenty-five years later they are no closer to automation.
It might go slower than people expect or faster, we don’t really know.
But don’t dismiss the power of exponentially improving technologies like Moore’s law.
Automating is more expensive than the wages that are not increasing.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution only a small minority of people had a permanent job. The rest were seasonal or part-time employees.
In the Middle Ages European peasants had at least 150-200 work-free days per year.
Hunter-gatherers typically spend only 15-20 yours per week “working” [a more realistic description would be a permanent camping trip].
The Industrial Revolution also made many people unemployed, depending how you look at it. It took 40 to over a 100 years to recover those jobs.
Probably because the next generation of people were educated to do other jobs.
The original jobs were gone.
As automation and robotics improve, the tasks they can do will be more complicated, which takes a human more time to learn to do a better job, eventually you can’t learn a completely new job fast enough to keep up with that.
If you are a taxi-driver and your job is gone. What will be your next job ? If you were good at doing something else, you probably wouldn’t have chosen taxi-driving in the first place. Am I right ?
I hope you explain just how much you don’t respect them before you get in one of their Taxi’s next time, asshole. Sometimes you take whatever the hell you can get regardless of what you’re good at, and other times those people genuinely enjoy their job. You can always tell those ones by the way, they’re the honestly cheerful ones. Do you also look down on the workers who make the gadgets you so prise, or the truck drivers who deliver them to you?
Better get some perspective and get off your elitist ass.
No, I don’t look down on people. I’m really sorry if that is the impression you got.
I’m just saying: learning a completely new job in an other field takes a lot of time and effort. And you are probably unemployed during that time.
And software (businesses trying to be more efficient) is working hard on taking away all the simple tasks.
He’s not the only one who got that impression, he just beat me to the chastisement. Try working a menial job with no choice in the matter before making those kind of comments. Hell, I love my job, but most people wouldn’t accept such low pay for a tech position (I work for a very small company). But I’ve had far worse and in this economy I’m just happy to be working at all.
Don’t worries, same here.
I also work for a small tech company, for small salary.
My reason is I can do things there, I can’t do anywhere else.
It’s easy to get that impression when you say:
“If you were good at doing something else, you probably wouldn’t have chosen taxi-driving in the first place. Am I right ?”
It really was the wrong choice of works.
That is what happens when you run out of inspiration/ideas how to elaborate on something.
A secure and reasonably well paid job is actually a 20th century aberration. It is the exception not the norm throughout human history.
The logical solution is to automate society and pay people a decent basic living allowance regardless of whether they work or not. If they want extra money they can opt to do some sort of part-time work.
Ironically some of the most knowledge based technical jobs are amongst the easiest to replace with technology eg laboratory technicians.
The most secure jobs in future will probably be skilled trades like hairdressing are virtually impossible to automate.
Agreed about decent basic living. That is why in my original comment http://www.osnews.com/permalink?575525 I mentioned cheap electricity, water and food.
Some people say we should all work less hours, so more people have a job. I don’t see that happening.
Instead what I see is more and more people being forced to be self-employed. These don’t get to work less hours, maybe more hours.
While payment is staying the same, look at the buttom-left graph:
http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/destroyi…
On the topic of skilled jobs.
You’ll have to be more and more skilled, the simple repetitive tasks (maybe not jobs!) will be gone.
The Japanese are pushing hard for many tasks in nursing:
http://japandailypress.com/japan-pushing-for-low-cost-nursing-home-…
Have a look at page 37 for the overview per-industry:
http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_…
A nursing home robot is more likely to replace a nurse aide rather than an RN.
The question I have is: all this change might cause social and political unrest, will we have to see a revolution before we get a proper solution ?
Wrong. When I was growing up the janitor a the local hospital was a former surgeon from Poland. Unfortunately His qualifications weren’t recognised in Australia. He was middle-aged and it would would have been totally impractical to retrain from scratch (14 years including a six year undergraduate medical degree).
You would be surprised how many taxi-drivers and bartenders own a Master degree in Philosophy…
Well, if some predictions are correct. They’ll need their cognitive skills.
See, I don’t know what will really happen.
I just know certain tasks will be automated, some predict certain jobs will disappear.
If that means these people will be without a job, well, not if they get enough education in a timely fashion.
What is “enough education” however will increase with time as computers can do more and more cognitive(-like) tasks.
Education is, however, another problem. As it stands now, the education system is nothing but a legalized extortion machine at least in the US, propped up by ever more laws and ever higher costs for nothing of real value. The only education that is currently of value is specialized education, i.e. medical and law, and even for that you have to go through four years of crap before you can even start.
Those four years, we call them college, are useless and that’s being kind. If you go for a degree in, for the sake of argument, software engineering, do you have any idea what classes you take the most now? English literature, philosophy, history. Remember that you’ve just spent 12 to 13 years of your life going through all that, and you have to do it again not because it helps your education, but because it’s a way to raise money so the school can put in more sports stadiums. Do you know who get the most scholarships here? Athletes, not students.
The trouble with mandatory education for employment is just like the trouble with government. They can squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and you have two choices: take it up the ass or don’t get work. Is this the world you people want?
It’s been suggested online education will eventually be better than in the classroom, because when someone in education realizes they can create one course for much, much more people it allows them to spend more money on the production of the course things will improve. Think: math 101, for million of students, would mean enough money for production of that course. The kind of money that gets spend for production of a Hollywood movie. This will help.
Who is you people ?
Well, there’s also the 3rd choice of living in a country with a sane education system, one that isn’t designed to be a profit machine.
You should have a go at The Knowledge, one of the toughest tests in the world, academia be damned. Being a hackney cab driver in London requires becoming certifiably more knowledgeable about the largest city in Europe than more or less everyone else. Who would put themselves through that for a job they don’t care for?
Thanks. The real question is thus this also apply to for example the US.
And as it is called the knowledge. The question is how much of this task is knowledge and much is creativity that can’t be captured in a software algorithm.
Anyways, first automation will make the tasks of the driver easier. I’ve seen a few developments and they will call it an auto-pilot. Just like with flying and airplane.
OK, I did a quick Back-of-the-envelope calculation and the average smartphone will have the computing power in 15 years as the IBM Watson machine that won on Jeopardy has now.
Supposedly the software used on the IBM Watson was “embarrassingly parallel” because a large part was just the usual ‘big data’ software Apache Hadoop running on Linux.
Will that cab-driver be able to compete with that ?
Edited 2013-10-25 14:16 UTC
That’s actually something I’ve thought about several times: sooner or later it’s possible to automate anything that doesn’t require creativity, and that means the only jobs left for real, living human beings would be the creative ones — how much demand can there even be for that? Given how today’s economy works would it be possible to earn enough money to sustain yourself in a world where almost everything is automated? And..how would the kinds of people fare in such a world that simply aren’t creative?
That is where personalization comes in. It is on the rise in a big way.
Have a look at what Gabe Newell has to say about productivity, the economy, personalization, the corporation and political instituions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td_PGkfIdIQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhgOqyZHBIU
Well, in theory the massive increase in profits could be used to subsidize decent living for everyone. On the other hand, that’s probably already possible and the main reason it’s not happening is greed.
This discussion reminds me a bit of Childhoods End.
Soulbender,
“Well, in theory the massive increase in profits could be used to subsidize decent living for everyone. On the other hand, that’s probably already possible and the main reason it’s not happening is greed.”
This is my thinking as well. We could technically automate everything under the sun such that there’d be very little need for humans to work and products becoming very cheap. However our current economic models would actually result in extreme poverty due to the fact that only a few companies would own all the capital and nobody else would have the means to compete with the machines. In order for fully automated society to work, it would have to imply some kind of shift to egalitarian economics where the means of production are collectively owned and the benefits reaped by switching to machines are fairly distributed to society at large.
One of my friends owns an upmarket hair salon. She earns $2000-3000/week after costs. Her son is studying pharmacy. I know who has the best long term financial prospects – the hairdresser. Robotised pharmacies are already used in some US hospitals.
unclefester,
“One of my friends owns an upmarket hair salon. She earns $2000-3000/week after costs.”
I first read that as “per month” and thought that’s pretty good. But re-read that “per week”, 104k – 156k per year “after costs”, wow… that kind of income makes it easy to become a millionaire!
“Robotised pharmacies are already used in some US hospitals.”
I think it makes a lot of sense from an efficiency and reliability standpoint, however I suspect the main impediment is actually the law requiring drugs to be sold by certified pharmacists. Technically speaking selling drugs wouldn’t require much more than a glorified vending machine with ATM-like authorizations. If the law gets updated, a lot of pharmacists could be made redundant in short order.
Something tells me the world is not ready for robotized hairdressers
However I do think we are ready for robotized chiefs, once the price of robots drops below that of the minimum wage kids working in the back, they’re likely to be out of a job.
If I had money to throw at it I’m pretty confident that I could build a machine capable of doing a chef’s job. It would be very efficient, timing all the ingredients to be ready at exactly the right moment. A customer might place an order online and know exactly when it would be ready. It could remember customer’s meal preferences and reproduce them with utmost consistency.
Customer facing jobs aren’t as likely to disappear. Take a bartender for example, there are already machines that can mix drinks, that’s not such a hard problem technically, but something is lost in the ambiance when you get rid of the human element.
She started work at 15. By the age of 25 she owned two houses and a fairly expensive sports car outright.
unclefester,
“She started work at 15. By the age of 25 she owned two houses and a fairly expensive sports car outright.”
It leaves a huge dilemma as to what direction to steer the kids, doesn’t it? Start earning an income right away at a job that cannot be offshored. Or start earning it years later while paying down interest on a six figure education debt?
Edited 2013-10-26 19:31 UTC
Maybe just steer them in the direction they have interest in?
Soulbender,
“Maybe just steer them in the direction they have interest in?”
Hey I’m all for laissez faire as long as they can be self-dependent. However if they’re going to become a protracted liability for many years into adulthood, then I consider that it’s both our right and responsibility to help guide them in their economic choices, if not for their sake, then at least for ours.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/01/13/20-something-livin…
Edit: I’m not meaning to sound cold here. I love my kids and want them to be happy. However economic realities don’t always provide us with the means to do what we want.
Edited 2013-10-27 18:43 UTC
Well, I’ll give you some slack since you’re American and have to deal with a screwed up profit machine … err …. I mean educational system.
My parents never steered me in any direction that I wasn’t interested in and I wouldn’t dream of doing it to my daughter.
Edited 2013-10-28 17:50 UTC
The robotised hospital “pharmacies” are nothing more than very expensive and very sophisticated vending machines. The doctors produce electronic “prescriptions”. The machines then dispense pre-packaged tablets of the required drugs. This performs virtually all the routine tasks of a pharmacist at minimal cost.
And how many of these do we need? And how often? Most hairdressers are broke and some are highly valued artists.
Lennie,
“If you want to have a job, be a generalist and move up the stack. Maybe learn programming. Moore’s Law will take away your job eventually. As Marc Andreessen says: Software is eating the world.”
Well Lennie, there were several cold truths in your post, however I found this conclusion rather comical. I have a CS degree and am a talented software engineer, however software commoditization and offshoring has weakened demand for software guys like me.
These days companies buy commodity software and simply customize that instead of engineering their own. One of my ex-employers, who used to do major inhouse software engineering, is clearly (albeit slowly) phasing it out in favor customized commodity software. While this trend is very bad for those getting into the software field, it’s difficult to blame the businesses; they save heaps of money on the costs of employing engineers. Why hire engineers when you can shop around for pre-existing & supported software that only needs to be slightly customized?
The most obvious rebuttal is that this software has to be written somewhere, they need talented engineers. That’s true, some big players are growing, but they don’t need nearly as many as those they’ve displaced in the market by means of consolidation. Since software engineers are actually higher up in the food chain, we often get jobs we’re overqualified for, I guess that’s a perk, right?
With regards to offshoring, many people are dismissive of it because they didn’t care about the industries that got offshored, presumably because it didn’t effect them directly and they now get cheaper products. However it’s quite naive to think software is somehow impervious to offshoring and many don’t realize just how much it’s already happening.
When I say move up the stack, I do really mean: work on the infrastructure and at the producers of the original software.
I’m just thinking: you might have some more job security if you can land a job at the people that are building these things.
I’m sure it can’t work for everyone, because you are right, we can’t all do that work.
An example could be to work on open source software like OpenStack.
Find a company that needs new features in OpenStack and work there.
That is infrastructure development.
BTW Did you know there is also a reverse trend ?
They are opening up factories in the US again that were previously closed when the work moved to China ? Or in Europe ?
Obviously not a very large scale, but it is happening.
Some people that used to work in the factory are now being hired again, but for less pay.
China had a pay increase of 12% every single year, for many years now. You just can’t keep doing that without getting to expensive eventually.
And obviously the price of oil is making transportation more expensive. So shipping goads from China to US or Europe also becomes more expensive.
Doubt it will help people in software, but it’s an interesting trend.
Edited 2013-10-25 18:26 UTC
That is because the US has access to very cheap shale gas. It will help energy intensive manufacturing but not skills based employment like computer science.
This is a natural progression, I think. When you think about it, it’s a bit absurd that a company would have their own software engineering team and have custom software, especially if they’re not a tech company.
It’s not like most companies employ their own mechanics and build their own cars.
Are there really people who think that?
Soulbender,
“This is a natural progression, I think. When you think about it, it’s a bit absurd that a company would have their own software engineering team and have custom software, especially if they’re not a tech company. It’s not like most companies employ their own mechanics and build their own cars.”
I agree with you. When I need my car to be serviced, I *need* a car mechanic (whether I hire him myself or go to one working at a garage). When my mechanic needs software, he does not need a software engineer. He *could* hire me to write it then maintain it, or he could buy it off the shelf. With the possible exception of large chains with huge scales of economy, it doesn’t make sense to hire software engineers. Same goes for a bakery, hair saloon, dentist, grocer, accountant, school, restaurant, etc.
That’s the tricky bit about the software business, the need for software engineers is extremely asymmetric compared with other occupations. This is the primary motivation for my having become a web developer: there’s more work to be had, but it’s also lower pay. I have to work three hours to pay my garage for one hour’s work after taxes. I’m a bit sour about that, but that’s supply and demand, and at the end of the day I’d rather be working in IT.
Working for the producer of COTS software is not “up-the-stack” it’s down the stack. Up the stack is consulting and value services. Going up the stack would require for you to produce more value with less or no code.
Get a a job solving hard, unique problems. they can’t automate those kind of jobs.
If you want free mail service you’ll end up paying for it in some other way, like e.g. by the service – provider tracking you and selling the data for marketing purposes. As such why move away from GMail to something else? You’ll just be trading the provider to another one, not actually improving your privacy conditions.
Why not pay for your own mailbox? It is a pittance.
Edited 2013-10-24 17:15 UTC
An excellent suggestion at least for those of us who read pages like OSNews, but most people do not have any idea how to do it. Guess they could pay someone to do it for them, but for some reason people now days rebel at the idea of paying for anything.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=email+hosting
😀
Edited 2013-10-24 18:05 UTC
How about email hosting that is a bit more than just a configured Sendmail+Dovecot? Like add a celendar, contacts and boom! you are looking at $50+ per year. Which, for many, is far from pittance.
https://mykolab.com/
Its not free, but it comes with a lot of good things, like being in Switzerland, and supporting free software development.
That’s what I’m going to do. Just wanted to poll for other options I could consider.
Indeed, my web host (tigertech.net) offers POP3/IMAP email at no extra charge, and I can make as many accounts as I want across my two domains. The webmail interface is very basic (think SquirrelMail) but I can use any client I want, and the host isn’t scanning my email for data to sell to advertisers.
If you don’t want a full web host you can get hosted email with your own domain for a few bucks a month. If you’re paranoid about someone snooping, get a host that supports encryption and is headquartered in a country with more respect for privacy than yours.
Does your ISP offer mailbox as part of your internet package?
Ah the good? old days of everyone’s constantly changing email addresses.
It is like when one changes telephone number or address, always an opportunity to get rid of connections that no longer matter.
Ah the good? old days of everyone’s constantly changing email addresses. [/q]
Pick good ISP so you don’t have to jump to another one.
Use your own domain and an email forwarding service. It costs a pittance; my registrar offers forwarding for free, and the domain is less than $10 a year. My email address hasn’t changed in 11 years but I’ve used four or five different email providers…
That’s an improvement. But, it’s not as good as what I do. I own my own domain. I can create actual email address and delete them whenever I wish. I never give my out my favorite email address to anyone that I think I might want to refuse email from in the future. I have done (and still do with a few addresses) it your way too. The problem is that with mail forwards, the actual real email address gets embedded in the email source. And, if you ever reply, they not only get your real email address there, the email From: typically contains “on behalf of <your real email address>”.
So, if mail forwards are all you have, I guess it’s okay as long as you don’t reply to any email. But, setting up real email addresses works much better.
Luckily for me, I was able to get Google to host my email domain for free when they offered it as a free service. I’m grandfathered in. Each account I create gets all of the benefits of a real Gmail account (free storage, docs and etc.). This doesn’t solve the eavesdropping by Google problem for me. But, it solves the SPAM problem. If I didn’t have Google hosting my email for free, I’d pay for hosting somewhere other than Google and do the same thing.
I’m not sure about the filtering, but you might look a Zoho Mail LITE.
https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
Mail.ru?
Being an avid OSnews reader for 15 years ever since Euginia Loli-Queru started it, I have watched in shock at the decline of the internet into a corporatised land grab, and with it the stealth of the user’s freedom, characterized vididly in the original TRON film. As such I have started steps to redress the issue. Please check my upcoming website (work in progress, hopefully up and running in 12/2013).
https://lspeurodomains.co.uk
I think Google turned to the worse when Sergey Brin stopped defining the direction (once he started working on “futuristic” technologies). “Don’t be evil” was primarily his push.
Brin had never been defining the direction of the company. Page has always been the alpha of the pair.
Still Brin had more influence in the early Google.
This is why after their change in their privacy policy, along with trying to ram G+ down my throat and tie everything from my phone to my Youtube account I have stopped using Google, they have just become too nasty.
I made a dummy account for my Android phone that is ONLY used for my phone,never used for anything else,switched to Yahoo for my email and Bing for my searches. At least this way no one company has too much data and I can control who has what,and to keep my mobile searches away from Google I use a third party browser on my phone.
But can we all PLEASE agree that “Not be evil” or “do no evil” is just a damned marketing ploy, no different than “where do you want to go today?” or “think different” now? Because the past couple of years Google has been getting seriously nasty, both with trying to force you to tie everything into their services and with turning more and more of their services and Android proprietary, yet all we hear from the apologists is that stupid meme and how bad the other guy is. Well the lesser of two evils is STILL evil and I’d say Google isn’t even the lesser anymore, from them jamming more and more ads to trying their hand at the old MSFT EEE strategy by making things tied to Chrome I’d say they are becoming every bit as nasty as MSFT under Gates.
I don’t know, maybe its a side effect of becoming number one, once you get to the top greed and fear turns a company nasty, but it sure ain’t the same Google of 5 years ago. Google used to be a cool engineering company that was always throwing out new ideas and trying new things, now they seem to be stuck in “maximize profits” mode, no different than any other Wall Street corp.
Do they really? Virtually no-one trusts companies. Its not an fascinatingly aberrant insight.
“It’s time that someone had the courage to stand up and say ‘I’m against those things that everybody hates!'”
I did wonder and I’m glad to get it finally confirmed.
Libertarian mentality seems to be on the rise, and they trust companies.
The free market is a load of bollocks; money is power and the rich get richer.
The thing is, they trust companies because companies are behind the push for libertarianism. “Corporations are people, my friend”, and that’s how things get 1984’d.
Ironic, considering that 1984 was about socialism, and libertarianism is almost its polar opposite.
What they don’t tell you is that it’s nothing to do with socialism. Anyone or any ideology that wants assert its superiority based on no evidence to back it up must redefine language so that language places that person or ideology as the winner by default merely by being uttered*.
It’s like trying to win a running race by debating who would win, rather than actually running the race to see who should win.
* The example of “corporations are people” is probably the best one. Merely by being uttered, it neatly fits in to every pervious expression of the idea that power belongs to the people. Without changing anything else, suddenly the democratic call for corporations to pay their fair share of taxes becomes the tyranny of the majority.
Just proves something I’ve been saying for years: neither extreme is right and both will lead to disaster.
No, it only proves neither of you understood Orwell’s book.
Actually is is about the growth of the bureaucracy in post WW2 Britain. 1984 is 1948 transposed. George Orwell was a committed socialist who opposed tyranny.
As opposed to government-regulated ones, where the only people getting richer are the politicians? You can’t say something like the free market is a load of bollocks when we’ve not had one in the past thousand years. We’ve never been able to try, the pols have always gotten in our way. Even the example most people will come up with, that of the US in its early years, tried to regulate it and the results… well, the whole world is looking at the results now I would say.
A truly free market means no regulations.
So, companies clump together to form monopolies, as is their tendency.
There is no minimum wage, so nobody who isn’t already running a company can afford to start competitors.
When the media clumps together, it’s then easy to buy away bad publicity, meaning consumers have no way of “voting with their wallets”, because they know of no wrongdoings.
Meanwhile, pollution, slavery, etc. are just going on, and because there’s no anti-monopoly laws, the wealth just keeps focusing in.
Eventually, you have a couple of large conglomerates like one does today, except they can basically get away with anything; just like 1984, except the nations are corporations.
You *need* checks and balances that can not be bought out.
Instead of taking politics out of business, we need to get business out of politics.
Without government, nobody would be doing anything to stop climate change.
Without anti-monopoly laws, Microsoft wouldn’t have had to save Apple, intel would have destroyed AMD, and we’d have no smart-devices or alternative browsers, because without antitrust, there’s no reason not to forbid HTTP traffic to non-IE browsers, for example.
The free market is inherently flawed, because it has no entity to balance things in the way that is best for society. It just wants money to increase.
Society exists to protect and aid its people; that’s the entire point of civilisation.
Would you rather people’s homes be destroyed because the fire service is privatised?
How about competing road or power networks, taking up valuable room and not requiring pricing regulation where they’re the only option?
Government is *necessary*.
The problem is corporations, a democracy that requires a government exceed 50% representation to rule a house, and the fact that legislation does not need to be evidence-based, logical and objectively beneficial to the planet and her people.
Ah yes, I forgot the mandatory recommendation to http://duckduckgo.com
“Anonymous adblock user, [X]
We respect your use of adblock. Some of us use it too. Will you please make an exception for our one ad?” -DuckDuckGo website
Not making a dig at DDG, I’ve used it for years, but even they are pushing ads in search results.
Gotta pay to keep the servers running somehow, and their audience is the privacy-minded, who largely run ABP.
Their ads are even less intrusive than the old yellow google ones, so they’ll not shoot themselves in the foot by sabotaging the entire reason they exist; to stop tracking.
I switch ABP off on DDG, since they should get paid. And their ads aren’t based on tracking, they use keywords only.
I do not trust DuckDuckGo, I think they might share informations with either the US government, either keep track of users actions either sell informations for profit.
I trust startpage.com or ixquick.com more. Of course, when I use startpage.com for searching, I don’t do it from Chrome or IE as it would defeat the purpose of using startpage.
DDG uses the Russian Yandex search engine. I doubt Uncle Vladimir is interested in your pr0n viewing.
He might be interested in selling you a wife though.
What a surprise.
….exactly how do you expect Google to pay their employees and the costs of all their datacenters and R&D projects etc etc? You don’t pay jack for their service so what is there to complain about if there are a few ads?
Really, ads in the search results isn’t exactly an earth-shattering development.
Besides, all this noise about ads is a bit hypocritical since OSnews has them too. Don’t give me the “we’re not as large as Google” spiel, you don’t have their costs and expenses either.
Edited 2013-10-24 17:27 UTC
Wrong. If you pay taxes in most of the free world you pay for Google’s services. Google as a company has a long history of taking tax breaks and subsidies from local governments then moving their revenues into off-shore tax shelters. Note this isn’t a Google specific problem but we are paying.
That’s not the point and you know it. By that logic I should be given an iPhone and a Surface Pro and pretty much any damn product for free because “I have already paid for it”.
Your quote:
Which is fundamentally wrong so I corrected it — Nobody ever said anything about getting free iPhones. Fact is if you pay tax, especially true in the US, some of your money goes to Google, Apple, HP, Microsoft, etc. in the form of tax breaks and subsidies. Sad but true.
Soulbender,
I don’t know if that comment was a tad sarcastic, I wouldn’t want google to provide free services in return for it’s tax subsidies, instead I’d be a bigger proponent of having google paying it back. Whichever country they’re operating from, they seem to be evading taxes and only paying a fraction of their share.
http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/19/google-under-investigation-for-tax…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-…
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/05/04/google-pays-no-oz-tax-on-940m-a…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2185427/How-Google-avoided-…
http://trendsupdates.com/google-fined-47-million-for-tax-evasion/
It extends beyond income taxes too. It’s quite bewildering that for years they have been beneficiaries of government benefits that aren’t offered to “normal” businesses.
Google Jet Fleet Loses a Pentagon Fuel Perk
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323864604579069…
http://projects.registerguard.com/apf/wash/or-google-the-dalles/
Google Tax Break Approved SC Data Center
http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2007/12/20/google-tax-break-approved…
Is anyone where of any others? I’m truly curious just how far this government favoritism goes around the world in order to make exceptions in taxation for google?
Huge banner ads or the 15 secs unskippable ads on YouTube.
I’ll gladly take banner ads that I can block over those god damn unskippable youtube ads. It only makes sense that you should expect some degree of unwanted unsolicited advertising in exchange for using a “free” service. But if you’re spamming people so bad they’re getting ad-rage, maybe there’s a better balance to be had.
Btw, paying for email isn’t going to alleviate privacy concerns or prevent spam from reaching you.
What unskippable YouTube ads, I’ve never seen one or many ads of any sort.
Edited 2013-10-24 19:45 UTC
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=unskippable+youtube+ads
Edited 2013-10-24 21:35 UTC
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=adblock+blocks+youtube+ads
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=adblock+plus+not+blocking+ads+anymore
I specified Adblock, not Adblock Plus. Two different projects.
And yet there are plenty of posts for both versions about the ads not being blocked so you’ll get similar results regardless.
The videos are blocked by adblock effectively.
However teh developer of adblock will add an whitelist of ads … because he had to make a living.
I’ve donated to him, but I don’t think it is sustainable for him.
Adblock Edge.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/
Adblock Edge is a fork of the Adblock Plus version 2.1.2 extension for blocking advertisements on the web. This fork will provide the same features as Adblock Plus 2.X and higher but without “acceptable ads” feature.
Seriously, come on. AdBlock is a one-person operation trying to get by and you’re going to screw him over because you don’t like the acceptable ads? It’s not like he’s wading in cash or anything.
Jesus, wtf is the world coming to.
He even lets you turn it off with a quick checkbox for f**k’s sake.
I’d rather donate thx.
Good to know.
Annoying, but with flashblock and adblock *shrug* (Hey, I did give Thom money for this long article when he linked to payment for it.. but, yeah, I use adblock).
Now if Google pressured firefox into breaking adblock – that would evoke a *sigh*.
Most interesting bits to me is that:
– This tells me, despite all their talk about innvoation – that the only way Google can figure out how to grow revenue with acceptable margins is to just keep growing space devoted to ads.
– Marissa Mayer, now CEO of Yahoo, made the original promise. Can’t say why that strikes me as interesting, but it does. Shows some of incestuous nature of the power brokers in many tech industries, especially the marketing ones, and how adaptable the values and beliefs of these executives are..
https://adblockplus.org
I don’t use it on smaller sites but for removing things from places like search or annoying talking adds it is awesome.
For fuck’s sake… would you guys PLEASE shut up about adblock? Sharing information is great and all, but there are some things we need to keep as ‘hush hush’ as possible, and this is one of them
Is this sarcasm? ABP is one of the most popular addons for firefox and chromium. It’s definitely nowhere near secret; as much as companies would like to, they can’t stop users from filtering what their browsers download.
Quote
they can’t stop users from filtering what their browsers download.
Shouldn’t this read
at this time they can’t stop users from filtering what their browsers download however they (google etc) will no doubt be working day and night on ways to stop the ad-blockers once and for all.
Indeed. Gotta keep supporting FOSS like firefox in order to hold that off for as long as possible.
This is one of the reasons why we’re seeing increasing amount of adverts in websites, in terms of number and size. If you don’t want to give back, don’t use the service or website in question. That’s it. Taking something (information, use or functionality of a service, etc.) without giving what’s asked of you for exchange is analogous to theft. Being thrifty and selfish only make things worse for a lot of people, even innocent bystanders.
Adblock is OK
Adblockplus is not, it is misused.
The info is in internet in german.
The Scorpion and the Frog (Aesop)
A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion says, “Because if I do, I will die too.”
The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp “Why?”
Replies the scorpion: “Its my nature…”
DDG here i come.
This just goes with what I’ve been saying for a few years now — pretty much since they started crapping all over the accessibility with javascript, fixed metric fonts, and illegible color contrasts — they are slowly forgetting what it was that made them better than other searches (and sorry to say it was NOT results that did it) — that being clean accessible bandwidth lean search.
Very rapidly they are adding more and more garbage that reminds me of what BURIED services like “Ask Jeeves” – Auto-loading on the memory hogging image search, endless goofy javascript for nothing with no graceful fallbacks, and on the whole reeking badly of “WCAG, WHAT’S THAT?!?”
You can even see the newfound designer ineptitude on the home page (though at least they FINALLY axed that stupid malfing black menu)… the white on light blue buttons have a contrast well below 50%, and even though the other buttons are #444444 on #F2F2F2 (67% contrast) the narrow small px metric fonts result in most font smoothings brightens that FG color as high as that 50% legibility minimum.
Worse though is what’s going on under the hood — One of of not THE highest traffic websites on the Internet — and they have static scripting AND static CSS inlined in the markup? REALLY? So… The current Google developers have never heard of CACHING?!? Hardly a shock then it’s a massive 123k every time a pageload is done to deliver 201 bytes of plaintext, one INPUT, and one image that I’m not sure even belongs in the markup! (of course given some of the retard advice coming out of services like Google pagespeed and yslow… makes one wonder if they even understand the technology they’re deploying on!)
Graceful degradation? What’s that?!? Semantic markup? Never heard of it… AND THEN they go full hog bandwidth wasting ajax-tardery with the content delivered by it so grossly inefficient it likely consumes three times what they were doing a decade ago — for nothing of any real value. They’ve trawled way too deep into the “pageloads are evil” nonsense, and most likely it’s costing them far more than they realize.
It’s a shame nobody with the proper backing has made a real effort to take them down in the search arena. Closest we have is duckDuckGo, and to be frank they started out on the right path, but their current efforts grow worse and worse daily in this regard… the stupid slide-in animation on load, AJAX-tardery in an attempt to sweep crappy code practices under the rug — it’s the exact same crap I thought they were founded to fight!
Though hardly a shock in the age of idoitic BS like “jQuery for everything” and people DUMB ENOUGH to think that HTML 5 so far as MARKUP is concerned (the entire point I thought of a MARKUP specification) provides ANYTHING of value… As opposed to it’s real purpose being the new transitional, setting coding practices back a decade and a half, actively encouraging people to sleaze out markup any old way, pissing all over semantics in the name of semantics and on the whole being reduced to little more than a new sick buzzword akin to “Web 2.0”
Of course, Google going advert happy is hardly a surprise since Adsense has been their big cash cow for almost a decade. As we move closer and closer to the new dotcom bust (Mark my words, it IS coming). We’re seeing the same “advertising can pay for everything” BS we saw back during the netzero/bluelight days. As revenues shrink due to the economy and more people start rubbing brain-cells together to install ad-Blocks, the advertising is going to get more and more obnoxious and in your face (remember popup hell circa the end of the 1990’s?) to try and squeeze every last dime out of us.
Of course, I remember the pre 2001 world of web — it’s why I don’t trust advertisers as far as I could throw the big stick. (aka the USS IOWA, last of the Battleships). Advertisers online do NOT have a track record that engenders anything resembling trust — Which is just part of why I think anyone not running a browser with a built in ad-block (like opera 12/lower) or the ability to add an ad-blocking extension (FF/Chrome) is just asking for malware, spyware, and in general bending over painting a bullseye on their rectum in a men’s prison. Also see why I’m pissed with the steaming pile of cripple-ware known as Chrome with the Opera logo slapped on it any old way…
Seriously, if you are looking for the biggest “wretched hive of scum and villainy” online, look no further than the advertising community — and right now Google by way of AdSense is the big dog in the yard; and like anyone else who’s on top when things start to tumble, they’ve got more to lose by way of farther to fall. As revenues continue to decline, you’ll be seeing more and more acts of desperation like this one.
What scares me even more than a return to the days of pop-ups is the malware that is likely to be hidden in them. There was a time near the end of the .com era that you couldn’t even go online without taking proper security measures unless you wanted to get viruses, ad malware, spyware, and every other damn rotten thing in existence. Even if you did take all precautions you were still wise to disinfect your computer every other day or so. That was one of several things that really got me interested in alternate operating systems in the first place.
Made even MORE scary by many of those alternatives being significantly less secure than people think. While Linux may be semi-passable (though for all the TALK about Open Sores being better…) you look at the Mac world, and given how ridiculously vulnerable that platform is (who’s first trashed at EVERY pwn2Own?) the only reason I can figure that platform isn’t hell is a lack of interest, insufficient audience size, or just plain pity — as if hackers think Mac users are already suffering enough.
That could change overnight as the scam artists masquerading as serious businessmen known as advertising executives get more and more desperate.
We should know not to take statements with an indefinite face value. Ideals made by anyone, whether it’s personal, corporate or political are usually made under conditions specific to the time. Circumstances, people and companies change and as do their priorities.
I am definitely not a fan of the direction Google has taken in this Larry Page, Google+ all-in period. But Google of a decade ago is different to Google of today so this latest change isn’t a surprise.
At least for the moment you can still liberate and ‘takeout’ your data to move on
Do such people exist? Even fanboys will tell you something like: their favorite company “just sucks less”. Nobody has trust in companies, this is why they don’t care about patent and other legal spats between companies, they only care when some community FOSS project is attacked.
PS: i actually like the arrogance and feeling of invulnerability google has lately. It will lead to bad decisions (like more and more invasive ads) which will make an opening for the competition.
Edited 2013-10-25 11:15 UTC
Which is funny when most of the FLOSS-tard BS is somewhat more insidious from a social standpoint — given most of it is lies spoon fed to kids still having life paid for by mommy and daddy by the gray-hair dirty hippy wannabe back-room *nix geeks who were left behind by the real computer revolution of the ’80’s and ’90’s…
Can you tell I’m a fan? (I actually am… of ACTUALLY giving stuff away as opposed to the FSS’s lies, propaganda and bunk)
That is really the silver lining of the situation. It’s making an opportunity — now all it takes is someone with the proper backing to jump on it.
Take your meds grandpa, you’re leaking again.
I’ve dumped google and gone without them. between the NSA and Google doing it’s own spying for profit, i see no reason to keep them.
there ARE alternatives – cyanogenmod without gapps, the fdroid market, duck duck go search, kolab or owncloud for cloudy stuff.
Owncloud is an awesome idea but it’s nowhere near ready for daily use, especially across devices. The Android client is still broken, and the server runs way too slow even on top notch server hardware. I’ve tested it on everything from a Raspberry Pi to virtual cloud servers to a quad-core i5 with 8GB RAM and an SSD, and it’s pathetic across the board.
I would say Spideroak would be the best non-Dropbox option when it comes to balancing privacy and usability.
i’ve been using mykolab.com. so far so good.
That quote in 2005 was from Marissa Mayer. She is no longer at Google so why would you expect it to be the same?
What the heck is os-d netline???
OS News pages suddenly started taking forever to load. Checked the blockable items just to see what was going on, and I noticed many instances of os-d.netline trying to run a script.
So I blocked ox-d.netline.com, and now the site loads lightning fast again.
Seems this is some sort of ad loading script, but I never saw any ads.