The full list: https://swipeblocked.com/list

Created by the one who discovered the list, Derik Kauffman

the “detail” is the fact one is a human and one is a robot. That’s a pretty big detail if you ask me

You blocking bots ona platform has nothing to do with ToS. Blocking a robot is just standing in front of it, it’s not human. You are allowed to stand on a public sidewalk. If it stops moving because you stand in front if it, how is that illegal?

I don’t

I don’t think they do, it’s just a good plug and play option for people just wanting to get away from Microslop. It’s not really meant for power users, but people that want as little tinkering as possible (while still having the option if needed). Though I think they should do marketing, and get more people off of Microsoft products.

And for the record, I am still waiting for my check from Linux Mint for this ad.

God, I hope not

It tooks years to implement the whole functionality. They also weren’t working on this feature the whole time, but it was on the list. Adding another payment method isn’t the same.

Not to mention their current payment method requires play services, which has probably already de-anonymized the user

I agree it’s not great to require play services, but it isn’t going to always be the only option. It’s in beta, so clearly isn’t finished.

The users are not de-anonymized, they use a ZKP transaction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof). We don’t need to have to trust Google, it’s the whole point of a zero trust model. Zero trust is required

The way I see it, that’s next. This feature is in beta, and I imagine they wanted to rollout the payment method that would be most used, or maybe easiest to implement first for testing. They have already officially said more payment methods will come, but they have not said what those payment methods will be. Given they already have their own crypto, that will almost definitely be one of the options

Their original post says this:

Can I buy an account on a device that has no Play Services?

Not yet. We have plans to add more payment methods, but currently only offer Play Store in-app payments, which requires Play Services.

I do not think this is suspicious. They are starting where most of their users are, and whether we like it or not, is play services.

Their implementation with play services seems to be correct if it were done for privacy, though we can’t ignore the fact it’s still supporting Google.

The fact that they won’t even accept their “super private” shitcoin is a huge red flag here to be completely honest.

Nobody uses this. Signal also never processes a card. You have to transfer money from another crypto. That is not user friendly, and people would be pissed about this implementation too.

None of the other private app competitors have ever needed a phone number or payment and a lot of them let you self host too something signal is vehemently against.

The open source decentralized projects? Those a great, and important, but they are different. Signal is balancing security with convenience. Most average people would give up the moment it asked for an instance. Signal is easy to use, even for the tech illiterate. It works just like their other messaging apps, but only because it’s centralized.

Its like using the Tor browser or something but you have to do a “zero knowledge proof” payment through google pay to access it. Would that make you feel comfortable? No? Then why are we acting like its ok for signal?

It’s about where the users are. Most tor users are going to be on a desktop device, probably Linux, maybe Windows, then everything else. A very small percentage are going to be on Android. It would be very weird to be on a Linux device in a Tor browser being sent to Google services for payment. Signal is a mobile messaging app, which means basically two ecosystems. I assume they started with play services because of number of users and/or the fact Google already had ZKP payment as an option.

And ZKP isn’t new, and it is real, and it’s exactly how more things should be implemented.

Look at how many scammers use WhatsApp, and how much spam there is. Signal is clearly trying to make it tje best user experience they can without compromising security. This is just one step further, and it’s only the first payment method, not the last.

And if it does support gift cards and prepaid cards?

This seems to me like a mild annoyance for someone using it legitimately, but a bigger barrier for scammers trying to get accounts in bulk. Sure they can get a lot of accounts still, but it’ll no doubt be lessened.

Rare does not mean good. I could write a novel, and it would be fucking atrocious. If I released 5 copies, it would be extremely rare, but it wouldn’t be worth shit.

They would only need a single copy of each book. They aren’t trying to get all possible copies to prevent others from getting them. They are trying to train their AI as quickly and cheaply as possible

Except when they are digitized and made publicly avaiable

That is probably the ultimate conclusion. Except there will be some bullshit exception for Disney and all the other mega media corporations.

It’s like if Fahrenheit 451 had the firefighters meticulously remove the spines and digitize the books before burning them. Amazon is buying a single copy of these books, and destroying the books to make it faster to digitize. Just not at all book burning.

You should be pissed about them using other peoples works to train their AI behemoth for profit. Not make a false equivalence to book burning…

They were purchased from Biblio. Literally Biblio’s tagline: “Used Books and Rare Books from Antiquarian Booksellers”

The answer to that question is obvious. They can do it 1000x faster cutting the spin and sending all the pages through a scanner. Otherwise you have to have something flip through every page and take a picture.

What is mediocre about it? What would be an example of a good browser, and what are the differences?

That’s what I said. AI haters are attacking, and he was defending against them, telling them to look in a mirror

It’s not a matter of technical implementation, but a procedural one. It was never a secret, it was just too expensive and impractical to do. If you changed how you implement ads every single day, the ad blockers would have to change their rules every day. Just keep going forever, and eventually the adblockers won’t have the resources to keep up.

It’s like if a food truck driver was trying to operate without a permit. If they sat in the same spot every day, officials would see them and easily catch them. If they moved to different apots around town every day and repainted their truck, they could evade officials. That’s not a secret, it’s just that it’s more work than it’s worth. While not a great analogy for many reasons, the idea is that it was never a secret how to get past ad blockers. It was just never worth the money. You’d spend more money implementing the evasion than you’d get back from the ad revenue.

At this point yhey are probably using AI to do the job of adjusting ad formats, so humans especially couldn’t keep up. Perhaps AI could be used to counteract it, but that’s expensive to setup and keep running. A free software obviously can’t aford that.

Sure, they could have been silent about it, but they would still get reports about missed ads. There would be enough hubbub online they’d eventually have to address. Maybe this way they can use the attenion to get more contributors