That might sound strange at first, but we've seen enough now to know that this will inevitably mean that a lot of manufacturers will follow this model.
I can imagine deals where you get a huge 'rebate' if you permanently enable the ad-feature (the on-screen wizard will blow one of those tiny fuses as its final step, locking the device to that setting). That effectively mandates that the price for the device is its selling price minus the huge rebate, and the whole market will adjust to that.
"Telly" [1] is a real 55" TV that is available for free. It is designed to always, constantly be running advertisements.
> To reserve a Telly, you must agree to use the device as the main TV in your home, constantly keep it connected to the internet, and regularly watch it. If the company finds that you violate these rules, Telly will ask you to return the TV (and charge a $1,000 fee if you don’t send it back).
Also because just because something is done "willingly" doesn't mean they fully understand that it may not be in their best interest, long-term. This is why drugs are illegal.
From another posts recently, just the fact some of the greatest minds in our planet are mostly working in advertising and trying to squeeze the most out of consumers just tell us everything. Our society is so rotten. This time of the year it gets even worst.
Intelligence and empathy aren't necessarily corrolated. I'd imagine many people in the ad industry are very intelligent, and earn a lot of money though choosing to work in that industry, but care very little about what their work is actually doing to people beyond squeezing every cent out of them, or are able to use their smarts to rationalise their work actually being good.
Already done! You agreed to it in the Terms and Conditions - you did read them, right?
But yeah I agree with you, there needs to be a way for people to get away from ads without relying on the existence of some benevolent alternate company
Terms and conditions can't just force anything on the buyer. like, you can't enslave people and point at the terms and conditions. It should also be outlawed to enshittify products with terms and conditions.
Despite what the average multinational will have you believe, terms and conditions usually don't hold up in court. If they write some illegal bullshit into it, it's just that, bullshit.
That may be true but doesn't help if not accepting the terms prevents you from using the device.
On a practical level you then at best have a battle to get a third party (the retailer) to give you a refund and most people faced with the option of removing and returning a huge expensive device like a fridge with no guarantee of a refund are going to just leave it.
It does need some stubborn and tenacious people to make a stand and set a president - perhaps backed by a consumer rights group but it's an uphill battle.
Sure, but that depends on the thing actually being illegal first. Genuine question - how often in practice are terms and conditions successfully challenged? My thought is that companies like that would be able to drain plaintiffs out before it getting that far very often
If ignoring them is your only option, and challenging them would fail, we would expect to see a lack of challenging them. Which we do.
Unless there's a solid track record of people consistently challenging them and winning, we can assume, based on bayesian priors, that most people cannot.
Hmm, maybe there's a simple legislative fix for this problem. Basically vendors that want to make you "rent" devices would have to allow termination for convenience at any time by customer including repayment of any fees paid by the customer for the device.
Termination for convenience is a standard term in contracts, hence well-understood by corporate lawyers. The repayment could be reduced using a depreciation schedule so the longer the device is in your hands the less that's returned.
I think this would work. The legal machinery is already there. The market would work out the details.
Outlawing this specific scenario sounds pretty hard. I can see only two reasonable options:
* Ban all advertisements. (I'm all for it, at this point.)
* Make sure smart-devices make extremely clear that they can be used to show ads, and include trivial instructions to disable ads
Forcing ads onto stuff we pay money for is not okay. Ads to fund free content is probably unavoidable, but even then, it needs to be clear up front what you're subjecting yourself to. Unexpected ads on devices you don't expect them from, can be confusing and disorienting for many people. For people with schizophrenia, it can clearly be dangerous.
And I think this is not just true for smart fridges, but also for those billboards at bus stops that seem stationary at first until they suddenly start to move or talk to you. Ban those please. Or make it clear upfront that they're video. Don't spring this on unsuspecting people.
> Make sure smart-devices make extremely clear that they can be used to show ads, and include trivial instructions to disable ads
The other way around — make it clear that the devices are capable of showing ads, and provide instructions on how to opt-in to them (and no cookie-like prompts either)
Can we talk about billboards too? As in, giant, increasingly bright ads intended to catch our attention while we're supposed to be carefully operating giant speeding hunks of metal?
> Ban all advertisements. (I'm all for it, at this point.)
What would that actually look like though?
Take something that could be considered an ad, but probably most people agree is a good thing. Say you post on here that task X is such a pain in the butt to do all the time as a general gripe, then I say hey, I built a cheap subscription webapp to solve task X easily that you might want to check out. You sign up for it and use it and like it. Seems like everybody wins - you get a problem solved for a small amount of money, I make a little money and get my project used and my work validated etc. But it's still technically an ad.
Lots of stuff like that could be considered an ad. Every "Show HN" could be considered an ad. Suggesting people vote for candidate X or party Y could be considered an ad too - plenty of organizations do pay for actual ads just like that already. Product placements is a type of ad, but it's pretty hard to not do. I don't know how you even make a movie or TV show with people driving cars without showing a particular model of car.
I don't expect that's the kind of ad that everybody is complaining about. Okay, but then how do you legislate the difference? Can you, or anyone, actually write down a definition of the ads you want to ban and the ads you don't? And how will people distort or abuse those definitions? There's billions of dollars in advertising (maybe trillions?), it's not going to all just go away because somebody passed a law. What happens when all of that money gets poured into attempting to abuse such individual personal recommendations? That's already happening on Reddit now, though at small scales for now.
And are only the visible part of the iceberg. The part you don't see is the collection of personal data. That is linked to habits - and to deviations from habits - and that is shared with third parties.
At this point I'm convinced that ad spending has nothing to do with sales, revenue or any real business principal. It's about power and influence. Advertisers control the culture, news and the public discourse by always paying more than any self funded model would pay. They don't care how much it costs, the control over society is always worth more.
I'm going to keep this sort of on topic and this will not be a popular opinion.
No, this does not need legislation. If you don't wants ads on your refrigerator, how about not buying a refrigerator with a screen built in, it's not necessary.
People said the same thing about cars. People said the same thing about smart TVs. Do you know any cars currently being manufactured that respect your privacy?
They have had to walk that back, because it cost them dearly in market share. Turns out most of their customers don't agree that touchscreens are unwanted.
There's also the fact that the problem was never about touchscreens per se, but inappropriate/incompetent UI design that happened to use touchscreens.
Try to buy a new TV without « smart » features. It’s nearly impossible and all of them will come with some kind of ads on it.
I fear it will become impossible to buy a fridge without screen and ad if we don’t find a way to stop this. It’s pure profit for manufacturers and the consumers are fucked since fridge are basic necessities.
My last two televisions both came from the "Sceptre" line at Walmart which seemed to be the last holdout of non-smart TVs. I don't know if they're still holding the line; the model I checked just now says it has "V-chip" but doesn't say anything about a "smart TV" operating system or any of that nonsense. It's not very well-advertised but it's still around. I don't know of any way to find a normal TV that isn't from Walmart or a thrift store, though.
There are still a number of TVs marketed towards hotels who don't want their guests being able to mess with complex states that smart TVs provide. They tend to be a bit behind on the tech side tho.
And what if the manufacturers decide to sue you for disabling the screen? Or decide to simply disable your fridge? This isn't a far out scenario either, the whole right-to-repair movement was based on a company not allowing you to do things with the tractor you bought.
I've long wondered what would happen if, say, NYT sued me for blocking their many ads (despite being a paying subscriber). My argument would be that I'd never click on the ads anyway out of principle, so the ad blocker is just me delegating the ignoring of ads that I would've done myself regardless. Also that if I couldn't turn off ads, I wouldn't have subscribed and they'd make even less revenue.
That said, I doubt these companies would sue because of the risk of setting a precedent in favor of the consumer. Scary legal letters (e.g. cease & desist letters) perhaps. But given enough customers, at least one will have the resources to hire a good lawyer and fight it all the way to court.
If a company intentionally spoiled my food out of spite I would sue them. If they did it to all of their customers that becomes class action. They cannot force their customers into a contract which would include allowing them to spoil your food out of spite, that contract would not be legally binding.
It would be with merit, because it would be part of the contract you signed when you bought the damn thing. We already live in a world where any attempt to bypass DRM on things you've bought is tantamount to a potential legal battle if they really wanted to be assholes about it. Where you don't really own the things you buy.
Drm is one thing, taping construction paper over a screen is another. That contract would be unenforceable. Shit is dystopian lately, but you're being hyperbolic.
No one can force you to watch ads, they're your eyeballs. There will always be a solution to this problem; if it's in your domicile then no one can stop you from spending time coming up with solutions
It's a fridge. We are not talking a server, a raspberry pi, a phone, we are talking about a fridge.
Do you want to talk to my 70 year old father about how he should come up with solutions to ads on his fridge? Yes he can grab a garbage bag and some tape, we can all probably agree that the day stuff like that is commonplace we have very, VERY evidently failed as a society when it comes to dealing with this specific issue.
I haven't come across a banking app in the UK that doesn't work with GrapheneOS. HSBC insists you use the AOSP or Google keyboards but otherwise no issues.
Santander at least used to not work, I haven't tried it with the new app they launched. The old app certainly wouldn't work and I was told by customer service there was no way to access it on a phone with an unlocked bootloader.
This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad, bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as that.
There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.
The laws are only moderately popular in the abstract, but when you show people the reality and the future implications then popularity drops. The key is educating people about the dangers of this type of legislation, including dangers to privacy and authoritarian control over information. In the US especially both major parties hate each other with a passion; this animosity can be leveraged with proper framing.
What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?
If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive...
Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
That's a powerpoint of somebody really trying to push an agenda and has nothing to do with age verification. The 88% support is for "social media platforms to protect minors from online harms, such as the promotion of eating disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation."
I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit.
The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here.
I'm disappointed that you call my motivations into question instead of engaging me in good faith. It's not possible to solve a problem without being honest about the pertinent facts, and I think you (and the person I responded to) are engaging in denialism.
My experiences are all in the UK but everything I've read and everyone I've spoken to (outside of tech circles) reinforces my belief that this is popular. If you disagree then fine but I don't think you can find any polling to support that.
If you can then be my guest - I genuinely would like to see it. I'm not happy with my conclusions.
Well either you didn't read what you cited, in which case you sort of owe us an apology and need to back off your claim.
Or you did read it in which case you'd realize it has nothing to do with people wanting government age verification, and then you also need to back off your claim and owe us an apology.
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
I have an on-again-off-again relationship with macOS - the deep integration with Apple hardware is stellar and IMO the new MacBook Airs are tremendous value for money, but otherwise the OS seems to be suffering from some deep technical debt and MBA-brained decision-making.
I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.
I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
For those of you not closely following UK politics: the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) mistakenly published their Economic and Fiscal Outlook (EFO) document 40 minutes early, pre-empting the announcements by the Chancellor.
Technical errors are faults caused by technology, like a software or hardware bug. That's not what happened here. WordPress behaved exactly as it was supposed to.
The true cause is revealed later in the article,
> staff thought they had applied safeguards to prevent early publication, there were two errors in the way in which they were set up
I don't think that's a worthwhile distinction. All software bugs are human errors, since the machine is correctly following the human programmer's incorrect instructions; whether that's at the level of assembly instructing the CPU; or a higher level like Wordpress instructing the PHP interpreter; or an even higher level of a document hosting solution instructing Wordpress.
A well designed system would reduce the risk of human error.
Given the importance of keeping this information confidential, they really ought to have a custom system for releasing it, not just configuring a third party Wordpress plugin.
Yes, it’s getting quite ridiculous now. Labour, for sure, have not done themselves any favours in their first 18 months in charge, but the level of attack and vitriol is exceptional and beyond any reasonable level.
The fact that they were elected as a 'change' government and have barely done anything that really faces up to the scale of the challenge the country faces? If you're below the age of about 55, then the budget did absolutely nothing for you except put taxes up, and not even to improve services.
I appreciate things time but so far the government have enormously walked back their planning reform proposals, which was one of their few pro-growth policies, and haven't really made any dent in anything else substantive. It's been pretty clear since even before the election that they didn't really have a plan, and they got a fairly light scrutiny through the campaign because the Tories were so appalling. Then since they got in they're just scrambling around looking fairly incompetent and the dearth of talent on the cabinet has been pretty plain to see as well. Largely I want Labour to succeed but they're not making it easy to like them.
They have done a lot of sensible, boring things that are objectively positive but are going largely going unnoticed (plus of course a few massive footguns that make the headlines).
I keep recommending r/GoodNewsUK on Reddit. It’s often just a lot of press releases and government announcements, but there seem to be a continual stream of them, and it’s hard to hear about them by any other source.
It’s telling the outrage over the stamp duty cockup of Rayner (which had it been sold a couple of weeks later wouldn’t have been a problem), and near silence of the stamp duty evasion of Farage.
Farage’s mate - the leader of Reform Wales, was literally thrown in jail for 10
Years after he admitted she was a Russian agent. Barely anything in the media about it.
Due to the way FPTP works though it’s likely Farage will get a majority in 29 off less than 30% of the vote.
> The fact that they were elected as a 'change' government and have barely done anything that really faces up to the scale of the challenge the country faces?
They have done a lot. But they haven't even stopped the runaway train yet. And the fundamental mistake they have made is not explaining to people clearly enough, during the election campaign, that it would take the first three years just to stop it.
Then you have the absolutely shameful, racist, nihilistic, fact-free intervention of five MPs that the media thinks will run the country in future so they are getting ten times the airtime of anyone else.
I really don’t agree. Look at the first year of 1997 Labour:
* Good Friday agreement signed and referendum
* Introduction of Minimum Wage
* Human Rights act introduced and passed
* Scottish and Welsh devolution set out, Parliament voted on it, referendums passed
* Bank of England independence
A government coming into a mess of a country on a platform of change cannot just fiddle around with minor things, which is what many of the changes they have done, though positive, are. And at the same time, they’ve also wasted so much political capital on some really stupid things that it’s hard to see where they can go from here.
This is an unfair comparison. The economy Blair inherited was very different, thanks to Ken Clark's preoccupation with eliminating the 'Public Sector Borrowing Requirement'. The pressure on public finances we see now, in part because of privatization under Blair, wasn't there in 1997.
I don't think it's unfair at all, stuff like BoE independence was planned prior to the election and implemented quite quickly.
The planning reforms of Labour have been held up largely by their own MPs. I don't particularly care about it but House of Lords reform seems to have been abandoned. Their 'charter for working people' has been largely unworkable and they're arguing internally an enormous amount. Lots of these don't have a huge amount of bearing on them based on the economy at all, they're largely cost neutral to the government itself.
Instead we've had (a) more bungs to pensioners via the triple lock which they're too scared to deal with at nearly a 5% increase this year (b) getting rid of the cap on benefits for more than 2 children, which is terrible optics for everyone working who can't afford more than two kids and doesn't get any support (c) a rise in employer NI which has hit hiring and pay rises massively for anyone working (d) a rise in employee NI to pay for all of this via stopping salary sacrifice, which only hits private sector employees.
Yes and I'd argue that this is because they have not been elected on merit but because the people rejected the Tories. I believe that Corbyn got more votes than Starmer!
They have neither talents nor a plan. So far it seems that Starmer has picked policies to make him survive and he knows that this means placating power bases in the Labour party, not generally good policies for the country. Opinion polls are scathing.
It put up my taxes a little with the NI removal of pension contributions. It put my employers tax up a ton though.
The freezing of threshold just continued Tory policy.
While I’m annoyed the extra money has been given to those who don’t work, and marginal rates advice 60% still exist, I just see this as lost opportunity. They could have increased income tax and reduced NI, thus raising tax on non working people. But truth is all governments are beholden to the elderly for the next 20 years.
However the attacks on reeves have been vitriolic since the start and there’s a significant amount of misogyny in them.
I largely agree, expect I think my expectations were lower than yours to start with. The ruling class all think alike regardless of party.
They have pushed ahead with the Tories Online Safety Act. Legislation I have looked at or that affect things I know about such as the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act is terrible.
There is a lot of smoke and mirrors. For example, if you assume the justification for the "mansion tax" is that people who own higher value properties should be taxed more, why does someone with a £50m house not pay more than someone with a £5m house? Its designed to hit the moderately wealthy but not the really rich.
Although I agree it should be proportional to value, a £5M property puts you in the top 1% of property prices in the country. Even within London, it’s also within the top 1% of all but the most expensive boroughs. The average home property sale in the UK is less than £275,000.
A tax on a £5M home is not a tax on the moderately wealthy, it’s a tax on the wealthy.
No, it's designed to maximize what they can raise without pissing off too many voters. Even as it is, it's going to raise barely half a billion pounds, which is relatively insignificant in a budget worth hundreds of billions; but it's something, and something they (think they) can sell to their core electorate as a bit of token redistribution, when in reality it's just a cash-raising exercise.
If they'd targeted the really rich harder, it would have looked more consistent but would have probably raised even less (because, when a tax starts being significant, the really rich have the means to find ways to avoid it). As it is, it looks insignificant enough that the really wealthy will just pay it and move on.
> because, when a tax starts being significant, the really rich have the means to find ways to avoid it
Taxes on property are something they cannot avoid though.
One of the reasons the rich are able to find means to avoid taxes has always been government reluctance to stop them. There are many deliberate tax breaks for the rich - think of how long it took to get rid of non-dom status, so I really do not think the government has ever tried very hard to stop avoidance by the rich.
There are plenty of loopholes and corner cases, you just need skilled accountants and lawyers (companies registered abroad, etc etc). That's why there is legislation about "ultimate ownership" and such: authorities are increasingly desperate about being able to prove who owns what.
Starmer does not really care about not pissing off too many voters. He already has but he is also safe from them as the next election is far away. On the other hand, he is at risk, high risk, from his own party so he does what placates them. We've seen it before with private schools, now again with the 2-child cap, for instance.
Starmer was already the most unpopular PM on record before the budget, and Labour's voting intention is the lowest it's ever been. It's just a really, really unpopular government so of course it gets a lot of attacks.
The public do not see or agree that they have done well in any areas, hence their appallingly low popularity. And that was before this budget announcement.
It does not take a crystal ball to understand that the British media, which are vitriolic on a good day, will have an absolute free-for-all. It's nothing new.
This is politics so attacks will always follow blunders on either side.
In this case this is an extremely unpopular government to start with that increases taxes across the board while handing out more benefits and claiming that they had no choice because of the state of the public finances, and we learn that they possibly misled the public on that latter point. So, yes, in politics and especially British politics this means a riot against the Chancellor (who was also caught recently having let her house without the required legal licence, btw, after the [now former] Deputy PM was caught dodging taxes on the purchase of a second home...) because everyone "smells blood" but that's the game and it's not completely undeserved, either.
They were elected with 33% of the vote thanks to our FPTP system, the lowest in history. They were unpopular when they were elected and have done nothing to change that.
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