I don't think it matters for Google. Google is an ad company. Every customer with an ad-blocker is not a customer, it's just a cost. The same goes for every single site on the Internet that has ads. None of them will care if someone who doesn't see ads can't access the website any longer.
I don't really "use Youtube." The algorithm has a ridiculous recency bias so it's full of the newest drama, which I dislike. And even then for a lot of things I'd rather have text than video. But I know a lot of people spend hours every day on Youtube and they will not purchase a subscription to get rid of ads, and they will instead use an ad-blocker. They won't donate to Youtubers but they will use extensions to skip parts of the video that talk about sponsorship.
It makes me think... if people won't pay a subscription to watch hours and hours of video online, they won't give money for anything less either. I've seen some say that they use ad-blockers because some ads may contain malware, or because of some privacy concerns, trying to keep their high moral ground while they access content without paying. The alternative of just... not accessing Youtube or ad-infested websites if you don't like their business model doesn't seem to cross their minds. If the entire Internet was really so full of malware ads trying to steal my private information, I would have uninstalled my web browser ages ago.
To make matters worse, the few websites that do not use ads have paywalls. Guess what happens then? If you post paywalled content, people complain it's behind a paywall. Paywalled contained is looked down upon, compared to freely accessible content, which contains ads, but the ads are ALSO looked down upon. Someone will copy the paywalled text and post it on social media for others to access for free, without ads.
It makes me think that the problem was never the ads.
the problem in my opinion is the perceived value of an individual video.
if youtube videos were looked at, as must have, viewer support might tick upward a bit. the value is probably connected to the creator of the video rather than youtube itself. i personally look forward to hearing from the creator,rather than the conduit, if there was a way to just mail a 5er to the actual video creator, no problems, i would do that.
You have a weird definition of "trust." I keep asking this, but how would open sourcing the software prevent the global rollout? "Open source" doesn't mean "no auto-updates." Strictly, it doesn't even mean that you are legally allowed to modify the source code to make it not update automatically.
>Strictly, it doesn't even mean that you are legally allowed to modify the source code to make it not update automatically.
Most definitions of open-source (e.g. OSI) include rights to modification. Without modification and distribution rights, programs are normally referred to as source-available instead. This is a common complaint on this very forum when companies misleadingly market their SA code as OS.
That requires trusting that the available source is actually what's running on the machine, which is not much better than trusting that a closed-source program is correct. Open-source software is more trustworthy not only because it's inspectable, but also because you can decide to run precisely the code you see, so there's also accountability for the code that is run.
>The first and easiest is simply to try to reboot affected machines over and over, which gives affected machines multiple chances to try to grab CrowdStrike's non-broken update before the bad driver can cause the BSOD.
I thought it was BSOD'ing on boot? I don't understand how this works. It auto-updates on boot? From the internet?
One of the first things the falcon driver does on boot is connect to the server, report some basic info, and start loading these data files, the "channel" files that Crowdstrike frequently updates.
The BSOD is because one of the data files that they previously pushed is horribly mangled, and their driver explodes about it. But if you get lucky, the driver can receive an update notification on boot, connect to the separate file server, and finish overwriting the broken file on disk before the rest of the driver (that would crash) has loaded the broken file
And they do all of that very early on boot. The justification being that you don't want the antivirus to start booting after a rootkit has already installed itself
WTF? Trust in the kernel should be Microsoft's responsibility and only theirs. Actually why is MS even allowing this crap code to run in their kernel? Isn't that a trust-destroying event?
Drivers have to run in the kernel in order to access hardware and other low-level system resources. That's how pretty much every mainstream OS works. For example, here's the guide for writing kernel-mode drivers in Linux: https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/driver-model/overview.htm...
One might ask whether an anti-virus really needs to run inside the kernel, but the answer might reasonably be yes.
It is also possible to access hardware or any other low-level system resources from unprivileged user code, if its process has been granted appropriate access rights by the kernel.
This second solution requires more work, but it is much more secure as the access can be limited to only the strictly-required resources and system crashes become impossible.
The extreme of this solution is a micro-kernel operating system, but there is no need for extremes. Even in a Windows or Linux system you can use this method. You can have a very reduced privileged code in a driver or kernel module, which does nothing except providing access to the permitted resources. Then anything like attempting to access not mapped memory would happen in user code and it would crash only the user process, not the entire computer system.
Yes, I'm no security expert by any means but I'd assume that e.g. a rootkit would be best defeated by a kernel driver.
So, this isn't really what's getting on my nerves here. Just how it auto updates and get pushed throughout the organizations without a smidge of quality assurance. Smaller businesses... Sure, I get it. They don't have the resources to set up infra for this, but those... airliners... and hospitals. WTF. I read some org thinking they might not even be able to provide anesthesia. Seriously. What.
Probably history and then some possible anti-trust litigation. As asking market leader not allow access to kernel like this would somehow be anti-trust violation...
What, the auto-updating part? Obviously the client is verifying signatures (or using TLS with a client certificate, whatever), not just accepting whatever random file comes down the pipe.
Even then, how many affected machines there are? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? Compromise these servers and even possible signing server and you have largest bot net or general compromise in history...
It is not unreasonable to think that this sort of software could get compromised.
A few more years and maybe they will add this newfangled super-innovative thing, invented by those esoteric academics at U of Haskell ... this new thing -- umm, what was it called -- try-catch perhaps.
I mean, this is every antivirus software. "Let's run some antivirus vendor's code on your system that opens literally every file on your system, regardless of how it got there."
Yeah, that's a great idea and not at all a huge attack vector.
> because of Windows’s silly pessimistic file locking
To be honest I prefer that over the #nix way of doing things. In Windows, you have exactly one file any given path can refer to - in Linux or Mac, it may depend on which directory's inode is seen as the root node by your process (e.g. chroot or container), or whether mounts are at play, or a file/directory got deleted and replaced by something else.
Particularly the last scenario keeps tripping me every once in a while.
That would seem crazy. Maybe there is a crowdstrike onprem “master server” that is supposed to be available internally? Just spitballing, have no idea really
The real problem imho is that Google's and other search engines' design are fundamentally flawed and can't be fixed.
They want a single box that can do everything because they don't think an user can be given a minimal amount of training to use a search engine, and they want all results ranked in a single, linear list similarly.
It's becoming increasingly clear that when you do that, all long tail results turn into garbage.
Google has become essentially a phonebook. If you type the name of a thing, Google can quickly find its official website. Anything more complex than that and it quickly derails.
A good example is reviews. Google literally can't find reviews if you type "reviews" in the query, because it can only find webpages that strictly contain the terms you typed. This means that for a review of something to be found, the writer would have to literally write "reviews" in their webpage, or Google would have to interpret the query non-literally and heuristically categorize webpages as reviews, which is error-prone, because then you'll have lots of webpages that aren't reviews appearing when you search for reviews and the word "review" you typed is apparently ignored completely.
The whole authority concept also feels fundamentally flawed.
If the most brilliant researcher in a field has a blog that is a gold mine of information, that blog is never going to appear in any search result because this person would be too busy doing their research to waste their valuable time building backlinks to rank.
There are too many cases where "ranking" will go wrong. It's wrong to assume Google can deliver the best result as the first result, as it has no way to make value judgements on the content of articles, but this assumption apparently drives Google itself to implement policies to hurt its own results. They seem to only care about the first result. They don't want users to browse a whole list of results. I believe "browsing" is the key word here. If it's not possible to browse, it's not possible to find it yourself, and you depend entirely on a machine that is a black box to do the finding for you. When the machine fails, there is no recourse.
> I don’t mind big companies training on generally available data, I mind the IP-laundering
large platforms saw AI and instantly closed their platforms making it hard or impossible for external actors to mine that "generally available data," hurting their own users and the open web in the process, and then they mined the data themselves.
As long as a "user" can access those platforms then that data can and will be mined. The people working on such solutions just dont publish them publicly until the debate is settled. If I can view information on any website, authenticated or not, then I can build a bot that will do the same. This does not mean its being done for nefarious reasons. Simply automating the process of bringing what I consider valuable information to me is enough motivation to do it. In my case, the only profit I make is saving time not manually clicking around to access the data I read over morning coffee.
The internet routes around censorship. Its impossible to hide information as long as its meant to be accessed by a human. If companies want to spend engineering hours putting locks then thats their waste.
Many businesses will fail by wasting time and money creating locks that can and will be circumvented.
I agree that a new social contract is inevitable because the only way to prevent data from being mined is to not produce it to begin with. Period. This I know.
When I was young I used to upload fan art of Naruto to DeviantArt. My badly scanned drawings sucked. Everyone else's sucked. It was cool.
Today DeviantArt has its own AI which it promotes over their own users' work. I've read some threads by artists discussing where to go next, between DA, Instagram, ArtStation, and several other new and likely not much better platforms, and one comment that struck me was someone saying it was just not worth it, and their time was better spent networking offline at a gallery.
AI art might actually kill online art communities.
We've taken the Internet for granted as grandma and grandpa joined it. Tomorrow people may just get sick of all these algorithms, let go of their smartphones, and go touch some grass. Then every website is just going to be AI bots regurgitating each others' content ad nauseum.
Humans are on the web because of the reach. If AI-generated content steals all the reach, why would anyone post anything on publicly accessible venues instead of just using private ones?
"A new social contract is inevitable because the only way to prevent data from being mined is to not produce it to begin with." But is it though? You are assuming that "not produce it to begin with" is impossible. I'm afraid it's not impossible and the web experiment is at real danger. Maybe not immediately, but will it survive another 20 years in this environment?
I don't really "use Youtube." The algorithm has a ridiculous recency bias so it's full of the newest drama, which I dislike. And even then for a lot of things I'd rather have text than video. But I know a lot of people spend hours every day on Youtube and they will not purchase a subscription to get rid of ads, and they will instead use an ad-blocker. They won't donate to Youtubers but they will use extensions to skip parts of the video that talk about sponsorship.
It makes me think... if people won't pay a subscription to watch hours and hours of video online, they won't give money for anything less either. I've seen some say that they use ad-blockers because some ads may contain malware, or because of some privacy concerns, trying to keep their high moral ground while they access content without paying. The alternative of just... not accessing Youtube or ad-infested websites if you don't like their business model doesn't seem to cross their minds. If the entire Internet was really so full of malware ads trying to steal my private information, I would have uninstalled my web browser ages ago.
To make matters worse, the few websites that do not use ads have paywalls. Guess what happens then? If you post paywalled content, people complain it's behind a paywall. Paywalled contained is looked down upon, compared to freely accessible content, which contains ads, but the ads are ALSO looked down upon. Someone will copy the paywalled text and post it on social media for others to access for free, without ads.
It makes me think that the problem was never the ads.