Why just pick on Meta? YouTube is also a haven for scam advertising. That robot AI puppy ad has been running for *weeks*, despite thousands of people reporting it and tweets to @teamyoutube on X who simply say "leave it with us, we'll look into it" -- yeah, on what timescale?

The reality is that big-tech is not interested in protecting users of their services, they're only interested in the bottom line and a scammer's money is as good as anyone's.

How is it that YouTube can take down *millions* of videos and masses of channels for "scams and deceptive practices" yet can't act in a timely fashion when blatant scam ads infest the platform?

It's not because they can't, it's because they choose not to -- and that ought to make them every bit as culpable as Meta.

In fact, I think there's an argument that if, after being made aware that an ad is a scam, the platform continues to run that ad then they should be charged with conspiracy to defraud and face criminal charges. That might smarten-up their responses a little.

Are we, as a sapient species facing an uncertain prospect of continuence in a world full of rapidly-advancing bullshit going to learn from this catastrophic and absurdly predictable failure of information security, personal and professional ethics, civilian government, market economics, basic common sense, and consumer psychology?

Eight-Ball-Based-On-Cursory-Reading-Of-Literally-Any-Slice-of-Human-History says "no".

What do you say, and why is it also "no"?

Damn, I was a happy Firefox user for years... now I'll have to try and avoid AI using some other browser.

Don't you think a smart company would have surveyed their market before making such an announcement?

It's much easier to keep customers happy and attract new ones if you give them what THEY want, rather than what you think they want.

Damn... another botched Windows 11 update from Microsoft? :-)

I guess, given the recent social media ban for under-16-year-olds in Australia, these kids can't apply to enter the USA now... hahaha!

Yep - absolutely agree with you. Just because a devices is locally controllable and has opened up localhost:8080, that doesn't prevent it from also opening a connection to https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbadthing.example%3A9999%2F and uploading everything it can find to it. Concepts are orthogonal.

I must admit I haven't got round to doing it yet, but a common thing to do these days is set up a specific IoT network in your house and have it all connect to that, then limit access to the internet for that network. A lot of routers support doing this out of the box now.

HomeAssistant's main strength is in tying otherwise incompatible devices together. Local first is not unique though - HomeKit is local, Matter is local, I don't know much about the Alexa/Google setups but I believe they can be controlled locally too.

Don't get me wrong, Home Assistant is an excellent bit of kit with lots of standardisation and automation. But this article is pushing the wrong part of its strengths - local-first isn't unique. Pick the right ecosystem and it's all local-first anyway.

I have many different smart vendors in my home - Google (originally Nest), Philips, Meross, Aqara, Eve, Ikea, LightwaveRF, Shelly, Eufy, Switchbot...none of them require the internet. All of them can work locally. All of them work in the same ecosystem. Then I have oddities which I use HomeBridge for to bridge the gap - Roomba (older, non-Matter, Worx Landroid (robot lawnmower), Dyson Hot'n'Cool thingy, Logitech Harmony...even plugins for Synology which show the NAS's temperature and allow shutdown. Through the use of HomeBridge, I can draw them into the same ecosystem too. None of this requires the internet.

The meme is completely overblown and quite often you can tell by people that don't actually use this kind of tech. Obviously if I want to control this kit from outside the home then I need an internet connection, and if I want to update any of the kit then I need to download the updates from the internet for that too, but operation from within the house? Just a HomeKit/Matter hub, that's all.

Should you choose to believe the gossip, this is apparently being seen as a good thing amongst Apple's staff.

Seems to be a case of the Gene Wilder's Wonka scene "oh no, stop!" while doing nothing to actually stop it.

Sorry - as a full-blown human-caused climate change believer, I am also old enough to remember being told that we were in an inter-ice age era and that it would end in my lifetime. I'm in the UK, and I clearly remember a school textbook with drawn pictures of Trafalgar Square fully iced up. This would be early 80s.

Let's not deny that bad information has been given in the past. Bad information is also likely being given today, and will be tomorrow as well. Mistakes happen. I like that this paper has been caught and do not in any way see it as a problem.

I'm seeing a lot of scepticism in the posts, whereas in fact this approach works really well. I'm going to use the example of the Mac - Rosetta 2. I play games running x86 code all the time on my M2 ARM chip, and it's not really noticeable at all. Taking exactly the same approach and applying it to Linux - yep, why on earth not? Already proven to work well.

Google's motto was once: Don't be evil

YouTube's motto is now: Don't be honest

That's what LibreOffice is for.

Nobody asked for this but legions of YT creators have been screaming for fairer moderation and an appeals process that works. Even more YT viewers have been asking for an end to the relentless onslaught of crappy AI-generated scam ads for obviously bogus "7 second health hacks", fake AC units, ridiculously ineffective heaters, pressure-washers, robot dogs that are just stuffed animals, etc, etc. Don't even get me started on AI-slop.

Last time I complained about a scam ad, @teamyoutube told me just to block it. Yeah, that's right, if I don't want to watch these obviously fake scam ads it's up to *me* to block them. But if I use an ad-blocker -- oh no, that's not allowed!

It seems that YT spends far too much time working on the "nice to haves" and nowhere near enough working on the "need to haves".

The future of user-generated VOD is not YouTube. Big changes are coming to that part of the market quite soon, lead by open-source software that supports self-hosting along with multiple access and monetization portals. Stay tuned, this will be big and YouTube will regret its infatuation with AI, short-form content and repurposed video from other media.

Commenting to undo an accidental mis-click for moderation - please ignore.