I suppose it’s not that unclear if you compare the revenue of all other industries combined to the revenue of the advertising industry. The ratio is pretty large and every type of industry buys ads, so it trickles down from everywhere.

I really cannot understand why advertising is such a huge business. Where does all the money spent on advertising really come from?

Weren’t we all supposed to become “prompt engineers”?

The Hands Resist It!

We also cannot say it wasn’t a factor in their decision.

Well, I don’t know about now, but this Microsoft employee says some time ago an outrage worked.

No, I’m not sure. It’s possible that this is a benign technology, but many believe it’s not, including people at Mozilla, people at Vivaldi, Cory Doctorow, Jay Freeman (aka “Saurik”), the developer of Cydia (via The Register), so I’m concerned.

This recent blog post also mentions the intent of disallowing unsigned software to browse the web. Perhaps you’ll find it interesting.

It seems logical to assume that there would be no point to the whole thing if it was so easily avoided just by modifying your browser. Someone who’s, for example, selling fake engagement (e.g., fake reviews), which is listed as one of the things Ben Wiser at al. want to prevent, will probably have enough technical expertise to use a modified browser that will circumvent WEI, so why would Google even bother?

Widevine has been hacked multiple times, it’s the usual arms race.

The attester will then sign a token containing the attestation and content binding (referred to as the payload) with a private key. The attester then returns the token and signature to the web page. The attester’s public key is available to everyone to request.

— The explainer, section How it works.

Websites will ultimately decide if they trust the verdict returned from the attester. It is expected that the attesters will typically come from the operating system (platform) as a matter of practicality, however this explainer does not prescribe that. For example, multiple operating systems may choose to use the same attester. This explainer takes inspiration from existing native attestation signals such as App Attest and the Play Integrity API.

— The explainer, section Web environment integrity.

Now Julien Picalausa of Vivaldi browser theorizes as follows:

To make matters worse, the primary example given of an attester is Google Play on Android. This means Google decides which browser is trustworthy on its own platform. I do not see how they can be expected to be impartial.

On Windows, they would probably defer to Microsoft via the Windows Store, and on Mac, they would defer to Apple. So, we can expect that at least Edge and Safari are going to be trusted. Any other browser will be left to the good graces of those three companies.

​Of course, you can note one glaring omission in the previous paragraph. What of Linux? Well, that is the big question. Will Linux be completely excluded from browsing the web? Or will Canonical become the decider by virtue of controlling the snaps package repositories? Who knows. But it’s not looking good for Linux.

So, AFAIU, if worst comes to worst you won’t be able to run an unsigned browser and browse the web.

Wow they moved incredibly fast, even considering the repository was first committed to in April 2023. I wonder why the outrage only started a few days ago? There was also a discussion, started in May.

This is a very good write up about how ChatGPT works.

Probably, though it might be too optimistic to assume that. However, I believe it will still result in more mistakes simply because it’s harder to spot errors in an existing text than to not put errors in the text in the first place by fact-checking beforehand and then having another person proof-read.

One of the reasons for that is that LLMs don’t feel guilty when they hallucinate while most humans don’t like to lie or be too lazy to fact check, and even if they don’t care about that, they still have to think about getting caught and damaging their reputation, which again LLMs don’t have. And you can’t call stating something false as a fact in an article an honest mistake (it’s negligence at best) unlike an editor’s missing something (due to a looming deadline, perhaps), especially when it’s assumed there won’t be too many hallucinations, which isn’t a certainty.