Tired of your #phone tracking you? Try a Google alternative +win a Volla Phone!🤩
As we know our #community is always interested in learning about more #Google alternatives, we keep our eyes and ears open to introduce you to like-minded companies.
Answer the following question in the comments and maybe win a Volla Phone 22 for yourself! 🏆
👉 Where are Volla Phones manufactured?
Open to participants based in the EU, UK, and EFTA.
#OrganicMaps is here. Use it while offline and feel good about a #privacy-respecting app that doesn't suck you dry of your personal information. Based on #OpenStreetMap this app is gonna blow #Google#Maps out of the water (hopefully ;)
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
Hello #Mastodon, I am seeking comments from the community to include in my next newsletter about #Google's change in their privacy policy. (They now say that anything you post online will be used to train their AI models.)
I am especially interested of thoughts from #writers and #artists.
How do you feel about this move? What do you think about placing your content behind a wall to protect it? And will this change how you post online in the future?
So Google is now preventing people from removing location data from photos taken with Pixel phones.
Remember when Google's corporate motto was "don't be evil?"
Obviously, accurate location data on photos is more useful to a data mining operation like Google.
From Google: "Important: You can only update or remove estimated locations. If the location of a photo or video was automatically added by your camera, you can't edit or remove the location."
Hello #WritingCommunity
Apparently #Google has changed their privacy policy and now says that they'll scrape everything you post online to train their AI tools.
I even post my #Fiction online on #Substack & my #Wordpress blog and now wonder if this is a bad idea.
They say paywalls could deter the scraping.
What do you think writers can do to protect their content? Or should we just roll over and accept that this is the way things will be from now on?
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
“Would you like to use the browser by Company X, or the browser by the company that survives on half-a-billion dollars a year from Company X, or the browser by the company that gets paid an estimated $20 billion a year by Company X even though it can survive without it?”
We desperately need a web browser by an independent organisation funded by EU taxpayer money and maintained for the common good.
Google will soon start testing a new ‘IP protection’ feature for Chrome users, offering them greater control over their privacy. The tech giant the upcoming feature prevents websites from tracking users by hiding their IP address using proxy servers owned by Google....
Perspectives is a tab that will showcase social media posts in their search results. This will give -- you guessed it -- "perspectives" on current events and other matters as well.
While Google is positioning this generating results from all social media, this also has massive implications for the #Fediverse.
I've been saying for a long time that if we Fediverse developers didn't nail search soon, Google will eat our lunch.
Well, it looks like they've just set down at a table and are studying the menu right now -- because I completely expect that the Fediverse will be present on that Perspective tabs, especially since the Fediverse is now generating 1 billion+ posts each month.
What is the next logical step for Google?
If I were putting on my Google product development hat, I'd push for full text search with near-instant results. This is very easy for Google to do. Their engineers could probably build it fast.
Meanwhile, the Fediverse is practically giving away Fediverse search to Google -- Google is what most people use to find posts on the Fediverse right now.
Are we just going to allow Google to extend their search monopoly into the Fediverse, and without a fight too?
This is hilarious. A #Google engineer invented #zx to make command line scripting easier with #NodeJS, because at a certain point #shell scripts get too complicated and you need a Real #Programming Language.
This is exactly #Perl’s use case from thirty-six years ago. But the kids want #JavaScript everywhere and would rather it take more work to convert their ascended #Bash scripts to a vastly different syntax.
We are currently witnessing the fallout from monopolization in the browser space. Back in 2007, Internet Explorer received much criticism for its phishing protection mechanism which transmitted all visited websites to Microsoft servers. Mozilla paired up with Google and designed a different system which performed most checks locally and preserved users’ privacy. That’s what healthy competition looks like.
Fast forward to 2023. Almost all web browsers in use are either Chrome or based on the Chromium browser engine. With the competition pretty much eliminated, Google is now pushing its “Enhanced Safe Browsing” down everyone’s throats – which is a nice sounding name for “every website you visit is sent to our servers.” The Internet Explorer approach from 2007 all over again, only that now it’s Google getting all this data. And they certainly won’t do anything evil with it. Yeah, sure.
Reminder: Firefox and Safari are the only remaining browsers worth noting which are not using Google’s browser engine.
Some blind Android users really want the Eloquence TTS engine back. It will die when 64-bit phones become the norm. They went as far as seriously debating of they could ask phone carriers to step in. It's sad, both because Google could easily have licensed Eloquence, put it in a 32-bit ARM container, and there you go. It's sad that Apple is the only big corporation that spent five minutes and thought "Oh hey we have a license for this now, let's containerize this and ship it for VoiceOver." It's sad that Google doesn't inspire confidence from the blind community at large of Google's ability to uphold an accessible OS and a competitive screen reader. And it's definitely sad that another TTS engine hasn't come along that is any better than Eloquence, which is from the 90's.
Google announced that starting in June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin #uBOwill be disabled in Chrome 127 and later with the rollout of Manifest V3 (#Mv3).
The new #Chrome manifest will prevent using custom filters and stops on demand updates of blocklist. Only #Google authorized updates to browser extension will be allowed in the future, which mean an automatic win for Google in their battle to stop YouTube #AdBlockers .
#ManifestV3 is deceitful and threatening to your privacy, and now is a good time to switch to #Firefox (@mozilla) and/or #TorBrowser (@torproject) if you haven't done so already!
EDIT for clarification: MV3 in Chrome will still allow some ad blocking extensions, but will severely limit their blocking ability and even restricts pre-set filters to 50 MAX.
#Google just announced that going forward, any account not logged into for two years gets deleted.
This means huge amounts of rare or unique #video is about to disappear from #YouTube as accounts get flagged as inactive, such as when the user dies. Families' #HomeMovies (often posted by an older relative for their family's benefit), historical footage, rare #television clips, etc. What an incalculable loss to human #history and culture!
If there are videos important to you on someone else's video channel, find a way to download them. And if you have rare #media of historical importance, consider leaving it to institutional #archives or lending it to archives for digital preservation.
@keno3003 Sorry euer #Passkeys-Werbevideo klingt nach Lobbying für Großkonzerne.
Passkeys hat mit dem Wegfallens des Schutz des Secrets im Vergleich zu #FIDO2 eine deutlich geringere Vertrauenswürdigkeit. Passkeys wäre nur dann sicherer, wenn man den Betreibern wie #Apple, #Google, #Microsoft absolut vertraut, dass die mein Secret ordentlich handhaben. Aktuellstes Beispiel ist Microsoft mit dem Verteilen von Generalschlüsseln zur #Cloud. 😔
Normale 2FA ist somit sicherer als Passkeys. #TOTP
The state of the internet 2023
Google Will Now Back Right-to-Repair (gizmodo.com)
The Android phone maker says go ahead, fix your own phone....
Google Chrome to soon get a new ‘IP protection’ feature: Here’s what it does (indianexpress.com)
Google will soon start testing a new ‘IP protection’ feature for Chrome users, offering them greater control over their privacy. The tech giant the upcoming feature prevents websites from tracking users by hiding their IP address using proxy servers owned by Google....
Google Domains shutting down, assets sold and being migrated to Squarespace (9to5google.com)
Google Domains is "winding down following a transition period," with Squarespace taking over the business and assets...