I spent a small moment wondering whether or not this was the real Olga Loiek in the video, but I guess the heuristic that says the real one is probably the one who’s not telling you how great China is or which brand of makeup to buy still works for now.

Did they change the headline, or did you come up with the more click-baity one just for us?

No wonder people sometimes say F1 is hard to follow. Are these unaccountable rumour-mongers trying to fuel the scandal for the benefit of Mercedes, or are they trying to make it look like someone else fabricated the scandal for the benefit of Mercedes?

I would not blame this on the new CEO unless there’s some evidence to support it. Wanting to incorporate more ads into the browser is one of the things the previous CEO was known for, and maybe that brilliant idea being met with hostility was one of the things that persuaded her to depart from the role. Whatever this new feature was to be, it most likely had its origins during her tenure.

It seems highly likely that you have mischaracterized the meaning of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled but it doesn’t matter. The mere existence of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled is damning enough on its own.

That’s not the difference between this and the usual kind of enshittification. The users are one side, the advertisers (and google) are the other. Nothing unusual there. The difference is that this time it’s driven by desperate grasping at straws, rather than barefaced greed.

The colour is a little unusual as well.

More importantly, you don’t need to be on an airplane to use airplane mode.

Kids should focus on the one thing AI can’t do: Stand-up comedy.

“Piracy shield” sounds pretty stupid. It needs more of a catchy name. “The Great Melonian Firewalls” maybe?

This green tea I’m sipping made my mind sufficiently relaxed and agile to see that punchline coming from a mile away.

This isn’t really the right decade for that.

Price discrimination just means charging different prices to different customers based on what you think you know about them. Its benign form would be a market vendor asking higher prices of individual people who look like they can afford it, and then really fleecing the tourists who look like they’ll fall for it. In that form it looks perfectly wholesome compared to what the big corporations get up to today: Supermarkets selling smaller package sizes in poor areas at lower sticker price but higher unit price, airlines asking different ticket prices depending what they know about your web browsing history, et cetera. I do not rate it a good thing overall. Even if we take it for granted that international borders are a thing, and services can’t be intermediated or subjected to arbitrage, the rich man in a luxury condo in Brazil paying less for some thing than the minimum-wage worker in New York does not strike me as reflecting any kind of justice.

But this is the Internet. International borders are not supposed to be a thing here, and still aren’t for the most part despite the best efforts of the most repressive governments to change that. The cost of shipping data from one side of the world to the other is effectively zero. The system where it’s broadly true that different parts of the world have vastly different purchasing power is an injustice, it’s not something we should be attempting to replicate in cyberspace. I can route my network packets so that they appear to be coming from any region I choose, and so can anyone who can afford Netflix in any country. It’s not a freedom I want to give up so that big streaming services can extract maximum revenue from each national market separately.

It’s just another form of price discrimination, a crude attempt to extract maximum value from everyone according to their demographics. If they could charge a different price based on the size of your bank account they’d do that as well and it would be to my advantage. It makes a mockery of the idea that market price reflects the value of anything, and therefore of capitalism itself.

Now that you mention it, my policy from now on is to avoid any Internet service that tries to charge different prices depending on what country it thinks you’re in.

tell us you don’t understand mathematics without telling us you don’t understand mathematics

For me it’s seemed more gradual over the past few years. I keep around a lightly sandboxed firefox install with a clean profile for the occasions where it’s worth going to that much trouble to see whatever cloudflare is blocking.

It also serves to remind me every now and then how much worse the default browser UI is compared to the one I’ve adjusted to my liking.

The comment about the lack of culture coming out of Russia and the suggestion that whatever you had in mind would be antithetical to “an open and free Internet” makes it look to me like you were proposing that Russia somehow being completely disconnected from the net would be no great loss. If that’s not what you were proposing, what on earth did you mean?

The vast majority of Russian citizens are good people, you can chat with many of them on the fediverse to find out for yourself if you want to, and if you think that cutting them off from all communication with the outside world would help in any way you’re out of your mind.

Don’t agree with verdicts of the International Criminal Court? Start your own International Kangaroo Court instead! Everyone will have to take it seriously if you just remind them often enough that you’ve got nuclear weapons. You’ll be the envy of all the war criminals.