I used to watch YouTube with ads since they added ads. It wasn’t too bad. Then during the start of Covid tons of people watched YouTube and googles greedy eyes lit up… they went from 1-3 (skipable) ads per video to ads every minute of video. I was like WHAT THE F&$@… then installed U-block. I couldn’t believe their greed. I also spent Covid downloading (yt-dlp) every video I wanted to archive for offline (never know if they will someday block downloads), I’m also worried for a time we loose YouTube. 99% of the things I loved about the internet is dead now, someday it will happen to YouTube too.

Actually the observer and explorer links redirect to external sites (fediverse.observer and lemmyverse.net respectively) It would be odd to single out just the biggest server instead of letting people decide themselves; I have a feeling this exclusion is to do with .world's users having a beef with the folks running .ml (and vice verse - join-lemmy.org seems like the official Lemmy site, so ran by the .ml ppl)

Worked with the US federal government for much of my professional career, mostly in an adversarial role. "reliable federal data sources" do not exist

I share your frustration. I went nuts about this the other day. It was in the context of searching on a discord server, rather than Google, but it was so aggravating because of the how the "I know better than you" is everywhere nowadays in tech. The discord server was a reading group, and I was searching for discussion regarding a recent book they'd studied, by someone named "Copi". At first, I didn't use quotation marks, and I found my results were swamped with messages that included the word "copy". At this point I was fairly chill and just added quotation marks to my query to emphasise that it definitely was "Copi" I wanted. I still was swamped with messages with "copy", and it drove me mad because there is literally no way to say "fucking use the terms I give you and not the ones you think I want". The software example you give is a great example of when it would be real great to be able to have this ability. TL;DR: Solidarity in rage

You don’t understand. The tracking and spying is the entire point of the maneuver. The ‘children are accessing porn’ thing is just a Trojan horse to justify the spying. I understand what are you saying, I simply don't consider to check if a law is applied as a Trojan horse in itself. I would agree if the EU had said to these sites "give us all the the access log, a list of your subscriber, every data you gather and a list of every IP it ever connected to your site", and even this way does not imply that with only the IP you could know who the user is without even asking the telecom company for help. So, is it a Trojan horse ? Maybe, it heavily depend on how the EU want to do it. If they just ask "show me how you try to avoid that a minor access your material", which normally is the fist step, I don't see how it could be a Trojan horse. It could become, I agree on that. As you pointed out, it’s already illegal for them to access it, and parents are legally required to prevent their children from accessing it. No, parents are not legally required to prevent it. The seller (or provider) is legally required. It is a subtle but important difference. But you don’t lock down the entire population, or institute pre-crime surveillance policies, just because some parents are not going to follow the law. True. You simply impose laws that make mandatories for the provider to check if he can sell/serve something to someone. I mean asking that the cashier of mall check if I am an adult when I buy a bottle of wine is no different than asking to Pornhub to check if the viewer is an adult. I agree that in one case is really simple and in the other is really hard (and it is becoming harder by the day). You then charge the guilty parents after the offense. Ok, it would work, but then how do you caught the offendind parents if not checking what everyone do ? Is it not simpler to try to prevent it instead ?

The biggest tech companies are still trimming from pandemic over hiring. Smaller companies are still snatching workers up. And you also have companies trimming payroll for the coming Trump recession. Neither have anything to do with AI.

No but, you can just close it.