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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Apps can get woken up when a remote notification arrives that has the content-available key. Apps are woken up in background mode, at which point they have a few seconds to do whatever they need to do to refresh their content cache. This, of course, often leads to the app making a connection to the server, which exposes the user’s IP address.

    I think the sin here is that some apps always set the content-available key regardless of whether there is content to be retrieved or not. That turns the notification into a surveillance tool, allowing the app to check in periodically.





  • Dave@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldAmazon's Silent Sacking
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    1 year ago

    Among tech companies, RTO has primarily been about one thing: maintaining real estate investments. This was likely the primary reason Apple began RTO much earlier than most of its peers (Aug 2022). Apple has enormous RE investments in Apple Park, in San Diego, Austin, and a bunch of other locations, and RTO was a way to ensure their values stay up, and they can remain qualified for tax credits by bringing commerce to those areas.

    The fact that RTO also causes the most expensive people to leave was a fortuitous bonus. In 2023, interest rates went high, and money (and thus revenue) became tight, so companies like Amazon enacted RTO to force their most expensive employees to leave.

    Make no mistake: Apple, too, used RTO as an attrition tool. They fully expected some single-digit percentages of their engineering workforce to quit due to RTO.



  • Morals are subjective anyway.

    They may be subjective, but they exist as a concept and can be discussed. Morals describe the value system from which you make decisions and build consensus. Pretending they don’t matter is nihilistic and self-serving.

    Let me frame this issue a different way: when Google doesn’t make money from showing you ads, or getting money from your subscriptions, they don’t pay the creators for your views. Are you arguing this is also OK? Will you promise to support each creator directly instead? Or are you only interested in getting entertainment for free?

    While the RIAA does continue to exploit artists, it’s now possible to support many artists directly by buying their albums online, buying merchandise, and attending their concerts. Do you do any of that, or are you simply pirating music for your consumption?


  • Dave@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldGoodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish
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    1 year ago

    If you feel strongly that Google is a data-gathering evil so great that they deserve not a sliver of your money or attention, then stop using YouTube.

    Sorry, but you can’t make a moral argument for your position. What you want is to benefit from Google’s services without paying them. That’s it. That’s the whole argument. It doesn’t really matter if you like them or not, really. You’re arguing that you deserve free service.

    That is not a morally sustainable argument.


  • Dave@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldGoodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish
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    1 year ago

    Here’s an interesting idea: pay for what you consume. We can argue whether ads or a YouTube Premium are a fair price, but I don’t think you’d have a moral or legal leg to stand on if your argument is that Google must provide you with hosting and streaming for free.

    You are consuming resources on Google’s computers. I think they have a right to ask for payment.

    To me, the ad tracking industry is completely out of control, and I’m not going to disable my ad blocker. So I signed up for YouTube Premium.