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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • You’re not just looking for conversation.

    Unless you get a response from the site admins, anyone’s answer is pure speculation. No one is going to be able to say, definitively, why .ml was chosen, except the site admins.

    My theory is: .ml domains used to be offered for free. So they made lemmy.ml for free, as it was just a toy project. Then, they upgraded to the paid .ml domain (which is how they managed to avoid the recent free .ml purge).

    The “its Marxism-Leninism” could be true, but unless you get an answer from a site admin, everyone asserting that it’s true is talking out of their ass. They don’t know any more than you or I know.




  • They’re lucky their content is high quality because god damn the pre-roll and inline ads are always absolute fucking garbage. I know the show host doesn’t control what ads the network uses, but they’ve literlly had USA military recruiting ads on their show, which is peak irony.

    I’ve set my podcast player to skip the first X seconds to get past the pre-roll, and my finger is trained to skip-forward through the ads, but some automated system would make life a lot easier (and listening to Behind the Bastards more enjoyable).





  • There seem to be three categories for how podcasts deal with ad spots.

    Some podcasts mark their ads inline by using Chapter Markers. For example, ATP marks its ads by putting them in a new chapter with a name like “Ad: X”. In theory, you could have a player that skips any chapter who’s name begins with "Ad: ", though I don’t know of any existing apps that do that. Unfortunately, the number of podcasts using chapter markers seems to be a small portion of the podcasts I listen to, so this wouldn’t be very useful.

    Another method that could work on some podcasts that don’t use chapter markers is identifying a delineating tone. Using ATP as an example again, every ad spot starts with the same jingle, and ends with the same jingle. In theory, an app could skip the delineated sections. Mind you, this would require work from the user to set up (or it could be crowdsourced): you would have to tell the app what specific sound snippet delineates the ad read. Luckily, many podcasts seem to be structured in this way, with a clear audio cue to delineate ad spots.

    Then, you have really free-form podcasts where the hosts may just say, in everyday speech, something like “time for ads”, and the ads will insert. Sometimes it’s always the same phrase (e.g., the use of the phrase “the money zone” on MBMBAM), but that’s not always the case (e.g., there is seemingly no consistent verbiage in the Aunty Donna Podcast). This category is the most difficult to deal with.

    In summary, I don’t know of any existing apps that enable skipping ads for any of these three categories. Of the three categories, one is very easy to implement, one less easy, and one quite difficult. All potential solutions would require a shared/crowd-sourced database of which category each podcast falls into, at the least.






  • Have you been keeping up with the story? Few people are saying there is absolutely zero value in telemetry as a concept. Most people have an issue with it being on by default. For a FOSS community, especially one who tries to act as if privacy matters, the very nature of the concept “telemetry that’s on by default” is the problem. I wouldn’t personally use the phrase corporate shilling because I think it’s not the most precise descriptor of the situation, but it’s not entirely innacurate either. I think all of their talk about “it’s anonymized” or “it’s not excessive” or what have you is just distraction: the real issue is that it’s on by default.


  • Edit: My comment below was based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation.

    Purely from a privacy standpoint, however, there has never been an indication they have violated users’ trust in that regard.

    That’s simply not true though.

    They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak.

    In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,

    In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.

    I hope you consider a customer list leak to be a breach of privacy. And seeing how they didn’t take responsibility but tried to pass blame, they didn’t take such a mistake very seriously or respond in a manner that instills further trust.




  • 133arc585@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat is the most opinionated linux distro?
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    1 year ago

    I consider their past behavior to be counter to their stated goal of privacy, and counter to the notion that they deserve to be trusted.

    They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak; also I’d take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn’t the most savory:

    … Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.

    On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance

    In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,

    In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.

    With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance. He also spreads COVID misinformation.

    As others have pointed out, it’s also Chromium based, and so it is just helping Google destroy the web more than they already have.