It’s not about ‘Google’ vs ‘the other search engines’. It’s about transparency. You’ve probably read some news about how AI crawlers have been destroying infrastrucure and half the time does NOT declare themselves as crawlers in their UA.

Can confirm that nealy 90% (read hundreds of thousands) of daily visits to several of my websites are made by crawlers from datacenters and I HATE not knowing whose who. Because when I don’t know, I block and report. Website owners already have enough between AI, Page Rankings, and Research Agencies who all exploit free infra for their own business.

Do I make exceptions for Search Engine crawlers? Yeah, I do. I’ve seen Google, Bing, and Mojeek, but weirdly enough, never Brave. Now I know why. And frankly, if they can’t be bothered to be transparent about their crawlings, then I won’t be bothered to make exceptions for them. They’re freeloading just as much as the rest. If they act like shady chinese crawlers, then they have no right to go pikachu face when they’re treated like one.

I assume the malicious part is that it phones home without permission, likely tracking users without their consent or informing them.

Soon!

Have they? I couldn’t find any information about that online. As for the rest, yeah, likely poached (or, like Mistral, not very pro-open source (◡︵◡) )

Nah, I’ve heard they stopped development. People use LocalCDN as a drop in replacement. However, by itself, it doesn’t change much when it comes to ads and tracking.

Username does NOT check out. You give too many.

You can block the main mastodon instances if you find it THAT horrible. No more hashtags in your feed then.

I’m not sure. The courts intends for Google to sell Chrome, not Chromium. Even if they gave guarentees that Chromium will become independant, the coourt’s likely to tell them to sell Chrome anyway (as they could still apply monopolistic practices like service bundling without control over Chromium, not to mention they could ‘fork’ LF’s Chromium later to make their own).

The way I see it, this is more Google being scared shitless about Chrome’s new owner being shitty, promote their own services instead of Google’s, and disrespect web standards (or depecreates the ‘standards’ Google implemented in Chromium without the approval of other browers, or standard bodies). That could cause MASSIVE issues for them, and the loss of business that could cause would be tremendous, in a way that’s far worse than giving up control on Chromium.

To me, his seems more like the nuclear option of Google saying that if they can’t own Chromiulm, then nobody can as a way to cut their losses.

Stephen Shankland’s report from 2020 notes a number of people suggesting that Chromium as a whole could be moved out of Google entirely and into an independent foundation, such as the Linux Foundation. That’s not what is happening now, but it’s another step toward larger organization outside of the web’s dominant browser and advertising provider (though Google is still one of the supporters).

One can only hope this is the first step toward a larger trend. LF stewardship of the Chromium project wouldn’t be perfect, but it’s still much better than the current situation of it being controlled by one company, be it Google or whoever they’ll forced to sell Chrome to.

I’d argue it’s not useless, rather, it would remove any financial incentive for these companies to sink who knows how much into training AI. By putting them on the public domain, they would loose their competitve advantage over other cloud providers who could exploit it all the same, all the while not disturbing the current usage of AI.

Now, I do agree that destroying it would be even better, but I fear something like that would face too much force back by the parts of civil society who do use AI.

Well, I have some good news for you!

The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.

AFAIK there’s a lot of talk about making GNU Taler the basis for the ‘digital Euro’ which is curently being debated at the EU Parliement.

AI may have its uses, but the easy counterpoint to your argument is to look at FTX at its peak and where it is now (bankrupt). The stock exchange is the exact opposite of rational, and is terrible at estimating the use one can get out of tech.

Remeber when Microsoft banned some Xbox players for screenshots they took in singleplayer, local games? Because it turns out all screenshots were uploaded to the cloud without properly informing users?

Naaah… no way they’re going to do that again.

idk most politicians are a threat to the environement like AI (if not even more so with their moronic laws)

More or less, yes.

To my knowledge, this hasn’t been the case for nearly a decade, after the backlash they received specifically for it.

Expose your subdomains as in having all of them bundled into one certificate?

AFAIK, you absolutely can request different certs for each subdomain (in fact, that’s what I’ve been doing for a while).

Well, in this case of 1 000 000 downloads, that would make a 50 000 dollar difference. Not really something ‘little’.

That’s great news! Always hated those paywalled research papers and greedy publishers who get away with freaking 100% royalty. Hopefully other organisations will follow.

(tbf that’s not a really high bar. These companies ask writers to NOT take any risk with their writing so to not “rock the boat” so to speak)