Good and services are still primarily purchased with fiat in most of the world. You need to be able to actually use it for it to be useful, so whether or not blockchain is theoretically better doesn’t matter there if there isn’t wide enough adoption.

I wonder how that’s going to play out with Apple and their monopoly.

To be fair, what they want is to make money off of you, be it through metadata or through advertising. It’s just that sending you videos happens to be the model which they use to get the metadata or advertising income.

Because you aren’t an individual to them, you’re a statistic providing them with valuable market research on how their service is used.

“People that watch this collection of video classifications are more likely to watch videos who’s thumbnails have these characteristics. Only 1% of them use ad blocking so we can improve our ad presentation rate if we present more videos with these thumbnails to this group.”

Yes and no. Metadata is more than just tracking info. I did mention watch history, likes, and mouse position, which are not things that can really be blocked. This also includes things such as how likely you are to click on a video based on thumbnail and screen position, how long you watch specific videos as well as how long your overall watch train is. They know what they’re showing you, where it is, and what you click and when; that’s enough to provide a hell of a lot if data. All in all, how you actually use the service is something that they pay very close attention to, and is still very valuable.

Is it as valuable as tracking info and advertising, definitely not. But it’s far from worthless.

Your metadata is still extremely valuable to them, and it’s not limited to just watch history and likes, but rather everything on how you engage in their services, including where your mouse cursor sits.

And Musk has already initiated a lawsuit against those who have shone a light on it.

Not using it helps do that.

I’ve seen more than one hour long ad. It let you skip after 5 seconds, but imagine if someone were leaving it on as background.

Just like every other conservative social network *cough* Truth Social *cough*.

Unless it’s themselves making it less reliable to push more ads.

It’s a variation of a cold boot attack. Instead of forcing an OS crash and rebooting into an OS connected to a portable drive, you cool the memory to extend the time you have before the data degrades and can then do whatever you want with it. I believe you can extend it up to a week.

https://citp.princeton.edu/our-work/memory/

Harder, yes, but still good to note not impossible. There’s some cryogenic techniques that allow them to preserve what’s on the RAM long enough to read it.

So pump n dump has more than one meaning here.

And yet, they are the ones accusing Amazon of price fixing.

Like I said, go tell them that they got it wrong.

Go ahead and tell the FTC that you know the law better than they do.

Yes, which is the price-fixing I was talking about. There doesn’t need to be an overt agreement to fall under price fixing.

Which is exactly what was described in the article.

Price fixing, whether explicit or implied from conduct, is absolutely something anti-trust regulations were designed to prevent.

I think it’s less to do with the fact that ads exist, and more to do with how intrusive they are. Early YouTube ads were pretty tame compared to the ones today, especially when it was just banner ads.