Oh yeah, it's totally JavaScript that's the reason that news and magazine websites suck. It's totally not the financial incentives of advertising that cause them to only care about the user experience so far as they get clicks. This totally wouldn't have been the exact same result if new media did everything on the backend and underfunded their backend dev teams. /S Jesus Christ, why do these inane articles keep coming up? The authors have the reasoning skills of "when I look into the sun my eyes hurt, therefor the sun is bad".

The funny thing is, advanced data protection was optional, and not on by default. Apple just stopped offering it in the UK https://support.apple.com/en-us/108756 When it’s enabled, they can’t access iCloud data at all, even with a warrant due to the fact it’s E2E with keys they don’t control. That’s what the UK got really mad about. But Apple shut the whole feature down for the UK in response to the backdoor ask. It’s not different from the UK banning signal because it’s E2E encrypted and they can’t access it. They’re likely only backing down now because of consumer/media backlash

Very true. And the fine will be raised for next time, so you really dont want strike one.

fyi, the way you write seems like you are upset over something. It's somewhat odd to write that on a website that is hosted by volunteers on a shoestring budget for thousands of users "against the onslaught on the net." So you better understand, anything besides youtube videos (i.e., the majority of the content on the net) is fairly economical to host. Of course it depends on the system, but a small group can easily stand up something dynamic like a lemmy instance, and an individual can host their static blog for basically free -open to the wide internet. Youtube is hard because video uses an incredible amount of bandwidth. Google looses money on it, despite it being plastered with advertising. So even capitalism hasn't figured out how to do it yet without being subsidized by another revenue stream.

The tech community came up with a technical solution to the ad problem. If the solution you're looking for isn't technical, why is your focus on the tech community? Anyone can learn this shit. Use any search engine, type "how to block internet ads", and you'll see results with "firefox" and "ublock origin", that can then be put into "how to get" follow up searches. The current state of ads is being accepted by those who don't block them. Everyone who does block them (or refuses to visit ad cancer sites) has cut off that source of revenue, but those who just choose to accept the default option enable them by not just seeing the ads but even sometimes clicking them and buying shit.

Not today anymore. Social-media and the state-of-stupid of the web inhibit that. The masses don't even know what to protest for or against. And without MASSIVE numbers you'd achieve nothing. Someone just needs to throw enough moneyz at the problem (or pay thousands to flood the net with "I love our overlords because XYZ") until it's gone. It was hard to topple a king some 100yrs ago, but today? We don't even know our kings anymore. Besides those few media-clown-babies that so desperately crave attention to fill a bottomless void of darkness inside them.

Linux, MacOS, BeOs, NeXTOS, OS/2, FreeBSD, Solaris. There were more choices than today.