A deepfake version of Mark Carney keeps trying to get me to sign up for scam crypto exchanges. Clicking the report link does nothing.

With all the money that Google has plowed into AI, they clearly could solve this problem if they want to. The fact that it's still an issue means they don't care, or are happy to take the ad money from the fraudsters.

I endorse the view that everyone should use an ad blocker, but for what it's worth I keep seeing this techcrunch article and the original advice offered by the FBI [1] is actually much more limited.

> Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.

So the specific recommendation is that you turn on an ad blocker while performing searches. Why are they so concerned about searches? It's because of a specific form of fraud, where someone purchases an ad pretending to be the business you're searching for, but actually takes you "to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage" - that is, a phishing scam.

That's way more limited than the "FBI recommends ad blocker" statement would lead you to believe. From the FBI's point of view, pitching a bullshit supplement in an ad (what you're talking about) is an entirely legitimate business practice, and selling supplements is legal in the US so long as you don't make certain medical claims or imply FDA approval.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221222162340/https://www.ic3.g...

I see it as part of the same general package. The censoring for any reason at all (including real time, via AI, in the comments, which were already! ruined by Google+ integration going back years)

Youtube Rewind 2018 - before they got rid of dislikes, to make ad videos harder to spot - was one of (was the?) most disliked videos in Youtube history

A very far cry from the halcyon days of ~10 years earlier

100%. I can't count the amount of times I've seen an AI-generated Elon Musk promoting a Tesla coin lol. I've lost count.

There is middle-ground: anti- ad-blocker changes cause a large number of ad-blockers to fail entirely.

It would make sense too, Youtube wouldn't care to make their videos viewable to a large number of ad-blockers, and ad-revenue would be near steady because ad-blockers were not generating any ad revenue.

This is the last thread I would ever have expected to see those little striped monsters mentioned.

Not sure about the chainsaw analogy, but I guess Aedes Aegypti is a fair metaphor for the cumulative effect of the tiny daily (hourly?) annoyance of the free-with-ads model.

The people using ad-blockers were not watching ads, so it would not make a difference to revenue streams. If anything, profit would go up because Youtube server capacity is not being used as much by ad-block users.

Yeah exactly, sometimes I just give up entirely. If it's a podcast I might persist, otherwise it's just not worth it.

The compromise for Google would be to limit ad-blocker users to a reduced quality version to save on bandwidth...

After using Peertube, it would make a lot of sense if pretty much all media assets went the way of decentralisation. It lowers bandwidth, reduces server overhead and increases availability.

For quite a few people, they would have had to manually pull in an updated ad-blocker change. This would be the case if they run the source release, or have disabled updates.