A man who was 18 years old when he began dating and then moved in with George Santos—while the future congressman was married to a woman—says he was lied to, too.
“He used to say he would get money from Citigroup, he was an investor,” Pedro Vilarva told The New York Times of his 2014 romance with Santos, who was then 26. “One day it’s one thing, one day it’s another thing. He never ever actually went to work.”
Vilarva said Santos once gave him tickets to Hawaii that did not exist—and then he found out he was wanted on theft charges in Brazil.
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff is telling the story of how Google, back in the old “first do no evil” days (a quaint memory) was struggling to monetize its search engine. Soon enough, as Zuboff tells it, Google’s leadership started getting calls from the venture capitalists who had been funding them. The VCs were getting “impatient,” Zuboff writes. So Google said fuck it, let’s do lot and lots of evil.
The VCs were thrilled, of course. And here we are. But don’t make the mistake of thinking Google is evil all on its own.
You know, post.news’ posts show up as minimal crap in discourse’ onebox. No title, no author, no website, no date. Maybe you could add some of your own words identifying the original poster, and why you think this particular author is worth reading? Or if that’s too much work, just stop using post.news until they fix their site.
will require that the true, human owners of companies formed in the U.S. disclose their identities at the point of formation and upon any change—effectively banning anonymous shell companies.
Nasir and Moss expressed dismay that Google failed to stop PapayAds and the piracy sites sooner.
One of google’s issues here is the risk of false positives. You crank up the automated fraud detection and removal a notch, you burn some legit sites. Those legit sites you burn get very angry (rightfully so) and very noisy and very energetic about taking their business elsewhere (when possible).
The Fortune article is two years old (December 2020) and I haven’t looked into its effect, but it would be easy to circumvent “companies formed in the U.S.” if the act does not include companies doing business in the U.S.
I am feeling sad and reflective on January 2, 2023.
I remember the summer of love followed by Altamont and speed kills.
I remember the promise of the internet followed by porn, fraud and catfishing.
I remember FaceBook and finding old friends followed by spreading disinformation and facilitating genocide.
I remember the early stories about young entrepreneurs starting businesses with daycare, snack bars and gyms followed by ultimate greed and cutthroat monopolization and strangulation of creativity through patent buying and lawyer wars for the rich.
I remember Twitter and the Arab Spring followed by the attempted destruction of American democracy by a Twitter happy president.
I remember the joy of the Voting Rights Act passing followed by 60 years of dismantling and ultimate destruction by the SCOTUS.
I remember the legalization of abortion and the ultimate reversal by that same corrupt and stacked SCOTUS
I remember the miracle of the polio vaccine and the current anti-vax insanity fed largely by internet disinformation and greedy frauds
I remember loving science and discovery as a child only to find there are significant amounts of people who now profess to believe that the Earth is flat
The great equalizer that is the internet also gave megaphones to some of the dumbest and most evil among us. I only have a few more years and it pains me to think that my children and grandchildren are inheriting a country that now has less rights than existed 50 years ago and is pointed directly backwards into the future.
When I think of what we could have accomplished in the last 30 years compared to what we have actually done because of our firmly entrenched kleptocracy, my heart breaks.
Good catch, and this is why we should link to actual articles, when available, (and one hopes, read them before surfacing them here) instead of tweets/toots/burps.
At the point of ingestion of an ad view (when a website is visited and a request is sent back to Google’s servers to load an ad), the URL of the site and whole bunch of other information about that site is easily surmised. It’s a basic part of the technical transaction that goes into displaying an ad. All of Google’s responses in this article are pure bullshit and display a total lack of desire to use the data they already collect by the galaxy-load to do anything about the issue. They’ll take some actions when they get caught, but with all of the wild/crazy technology (for example a nosql db that I evaluated when I used to work in ad tech, Aerospike – https://aerospike.com/blog/aerospike-connect-for-spark-3-0/) that goes into serving ads available there is NO REASON Google can’t do a whole lot more to clean up ad sales. Instead all of that fancy stuff is focused on delivering the “right” ad, rather than doing anything to determine if the request to show the ad is even legit in the first place. VC money doesn’t want it, Google doesn’t want it, and they’ll play whatever game is necessary to not change it because it’ll drain milk from the cash cow.
