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>Certainly not the Linux / open-source crowd

Appealing to that crowd is not big enough to grow it's market share from 2%.


Appealing to that crowd is how they grew their market share the first time around. The techies came first, trust was established, and then they recommended it to everyone else.

Do you really think AI features are going to move the needle here? Is your grandma going to think "Wow, Firefox can summarize my emails!" and switch web browsers?


Most of Firefox user base has always been on Windows, not Linux. What OS do you think the "techies" that promoted Firefox to replace IE in the first place were running?

Sure maybe 20 years ago. But back then Linux's userbase was also on Windows, because desktop Linux hadn't really become usable yet. I think nowadays Firefox's marketshare is a lot higher on e.g. Ubuntu (where it's the default) than it is on Windows (where Edge is the default).

Optimal marketing strategies change over time. What may have worked 20 years, may not be the right approach today. Many businesses struggle with this. They remember what they did to initial gain success, but that marketing route is no longer effective so they fail to figure out how to reach new people and eventually die.

>Do you really think AI features are going to move the needle here?

It's better than doing nothing at least.


Why not include them? What's wrong with have the most resolved domain being the top domain. I think it's interesting to know the actual most resolved domain, than the top of some editorialized list.

DMA is about increasing competition of app stores. It is not about giving "freedom" to people. Notorization is an independent process from running an app store on Apple's platform.

What if I want an app store that doesn't require notarization?

Then if Apple chooses to serve this market demand by allowing unnotarized apps to be sold in their store, they must allow third party app stores to also sell unnotarized apps.

The key thing here is that the Apple App Store and third party app stores must be on an level playing field to compete on.


The problem with this reply is it starts with the phrase "if Apple chooses". My point is it stopped being their choice when they sold the hardware to someone else.

Well if you want that you will need something other than the DMA.

Well, it gives Apple editorial control over non-Apple app stores.

Notarization doesn't involve any sort of editorial control. It's just a virus scanner that's run up front and then stapling an attestation to your application that it passed the scan. It does not involve looking at the content of your app and making any value judgements about it; it's purely an automated static analysis system checking your application for known malicious code.

This is just factually incorrect. See: https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/09/apple-blocks-pc-emulator-utm-...

UTM wasn't denied notarization because some virus scanner found that it was a virus, but because it violated App Store guidelines. That's editorial control.


You're talking about notarization on macOS. Notarization on iOS is vastly different. On iOS, notarization is more or less App Store review but with fewer rules.

Honestly, iOS notarization really muddied the waters. IMO, because Apple decided to name them the same and thus presumably considers them the same, we should be just as critical of and worried about notarization on the Mac as we are of notarization on iOS.

That doesn't matter as it also gives editorial control over the Apple App Store itself. The DMA is not about giving full editorial control to competitors. It's about allowing for competition on a level playing field for alternate app stores. Since the Apple App Store also has to only sell notarized apps, they do not have an unfair advantage.

Everything you can get in an alternative app store has to be approved by Apple and they only approve stuff they'd allow in their store, making it not an alternative.

To be an alternative to the Apple App Store, it just needs to be able to match the abilities of the Apple App Store. Again, the DMA is not about freedom, but about fairness between app stores on the platform. Apple can define the playing field such as selling notarized apps only, but it must be an level playing field among all app stores.

>Similar privacy can be achieved through the combination of a VPN and a privacy-focused browser.

Mullvad sell a VPN and privacy-focused browser so how are they unable to proxy the searches themselves? They already have the needed tools developed.


A VPN and a privacy-focused browser have similar practical usefulness to a private search engine. They cannot be used to create a private search engine.

Yes, they can. You use the browser with the VPN to search sites like Bing and then scrape the search results.

You don't need a whole browser for that, just a VPN. And that'd likely get their servers blocked for their users if Google's cracking down on them already.

>cracking down on them already.

If they crack down on it then the suggestion to use a VPN and privacy browser won't work either.


The browser is free btw and a great browser. Basically Tor without all the Tor protocol parts

>but it was higher than 50%

I don't relate with this at all. I get ads for normal insurance companies, uber eats, air bnb, and gacha games to name a few. None of them are scams, so I can't understand understand why so many people on hacker news complain about scams.

Do you live in a region with barely any ad inventory?


"Algorithms". Even if your region has plenty of ad inventory, Google's micro-targeting can mean even people in the same household see wildly different subsets of the ad inventory. You could just be lucky and aren't in any of the micro-target "demographics" scams want (or at least, can afford) right now.

Micro-Targeting is one of the worst mistakes of the entire advertising industry and we'll be probably dealing with its consequences for a while to come.


Uber Eats opaquely inflates the base price of the food so that even when they advertise a low (or zero if you've paid for 'Uber One' to give you zero delivery fees on 'eligible' deliveries, whatever that means) delivery fee, you're still getting charged significantly more compared to picking up the food yourself. Call me crazy, but I would expect the delivery fee to be the difference between the cost to have something delivered and the cost to buy it outright.

Gacha games are famously deceptive and exploitative.

Airbnb has a good justification for keeping the location private, but it's typically pretty hard to get an idea of the value you're getting for your dollar until you actually arrive on site and discover just how functional the HVAC/kitchen actually are and how good the location actually is.

While you might not classify any of the three as "scams", they're certainly classic 'low-rent' advertisements for things that take advantage of information asymmetry to convince customers to pay more than they would be necessarily willing to if what their money got them was actually clear.


I don't see scam video ads on YouTube but pretty much all article/info sites like cnbc or weather are filled with garbage, possibly also served up by Google.

> air bnb

> gacha games

How are these not scams?


Being overpriced or having a bad value is not the same thing as a scam.

Isn't paying to remove paywalls another way?

If you are OK with getting your information from one or two sources - why not. You can also subscribe to a newspaper. But surely internet can do (and did until relatively recently!) better than that.

Paywall epidemic is a recent phenomenon, internet media managed to exist before that.


I suspect this is not the full story. Why would someone waste their time manually disabling a device? That makes me think that this device was doing something malicous to their servers, enough to trip an alert.

> Why would someone waste their time manually disabling a device?

What what makes you think it was manual?

> That makes me think that this device was doing something malicous to their servers, enough to trip an alert.

Sounds like a them problem, and not a problem that should affect the consumer (beyond losing functionality directly tied to the server, which bricking of any kind goes far beyond)


>What what makes you think it was manual?

The article said that someone from the company logged in to his device and edited a file on it to disable it. Even if it was automatic someone would manually have to write a script to login and edit a file.


> The article said that someone from the company logged in to his device and edited a file on it to disable it.

I can't find that in the article. Could you quote it?

The closest I got to finding this is:

> The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it.

> deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command

> So, why did the A11 work at the service center but refuse to run in his home? The technicians would reset the firmware on the smart vacuum, thus removing the kill code, and then connect it to an open network, making it run normally. But once it connected again to the network that had its telemetry servers blocked, it was bricked remotely because it couldn’t communicate with the manufacturer’s servers.

Which to me reads 'automatic script on the server tells device to delete file and reboot, causing it to brick', using the same kind of mechanism that an automatic firmware update would use, not 'human at company logs into device and tells it to brick'.


To "encourage" the owner to re-enable the connectivity. Google threatens to ban your Youtube account if you block ads. Companies will go out of their way to nudge, push, or force you to keep the data collection (or ads) gravy train going.

Not really. They probably flagged this as someone modifying the device and thought it could be someone reverse engineering it.

Might just be a "could not contact server for X days in a row" thing.

You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.

> There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim.

not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.


> some frequency

This is a weasel word you've inserted to be intentionally misleading.


Saying "some frequency" instead of "often" doesn't mean their overall point is wrong. You know that, you're just being intentionally deceitful.

>whereas people get into trouble when the code they generate and maintain starts to outstrip their ability to understand it.

If you are trying to understand code, then you are not vibe coding by definition.


Why ISO? Why not somewhere that will allow people to read the standard for free?

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