"Can you put my site as the first result on google?"

I can add SEO to your site, just give me your preferred keywords, a description, and let's make sure we follow white hat best practices etc.

"No call someone at google and ask how much to go to the top of the list"

So you want to pay for ads or..?

"No get a figure I can pay to get to first page"
"Or can you just edit the google"

... And so I never renewed that contract ever again, the end.

Yea google, your machine learning is doing great. Good job!

Customer: IT is completely useless! I’m getting PORN ADS on my work computer!? This is ridiculous!!!

Friend: Oh that’s not good, perhaps your computer has a virus of some sort let me take a look!

Friend takes a look and sees that the porn ads were all provided by google ad service, they weren’t related to a virus.

Friend: so, you don’t have a virus, but so that you know google gathers metrics on the sites you visit so that it can target ads at you better. Looks like that’s what’s happening here.

Customer: .............

Client : Can you make some adblock?
Me : Why? There is a lot of good things already...
C : I mean... Listen carefully.
M : ok
C: i have some google ads and user blocks with adblock
M : yeah, that is normal
C : so i implemented adblock blocker which blocks adblock so that i can show the webpage plus ads when the user disables adblock.
M : i bet users hate that.
C : yeah, so users found out a way to disable adblock blocker which disables adblock blocker which i implemented to show the ads! So i cant earn revenue..
M : so what?
C : Can you make ad block block block block?
M : Sure. How much will you give me ?
C : 20 to 30 dollars
M : great ( the most generous client ever seen)

*couple of years later*

Client : can you make ad block block block block block block block block block block?
Me : i cant understand
C : count the number of block
If there is odd number of block i means to block ads.
If there is even number of block ads, it means to show ads making user to disable ads.
M : so just tldr your request this time
C : even number
M : ok how much will you pay
C : 20 to 30 dollars

*next day*
C : can you..
M : offline

Who in the fucking world made ads, made adblock and made adblock block?

I'm not an iOS expert, I just wanted to get Google ads on my iOS app so that I could make a few petty dollars at the expense of my users. Is that too much to ask?

I started by following Google's instructions: install cocoapods, copy and paste some swift code... Compile failed, app broke. Carefully retrace my steps. Nothing.

Stackoverflow (praise be with them) suggests upgrading Xcode. Go to app store and click to upgrade Xcode. No progress bar, no status updates, just that pissy little spinner for several minutes. I become impatient try a few more times. It ain't happening.

Stackoverflow (holy of holies, defender of the weak) points me to an alternate source for Xcode, on the app store dev console. 4GB and some time later, an attempt to unzip gives "unknown error". Genocide of sorts.

Stackoverflow (all that is pure, all that is kind, all... I think you get it) says upgrade your OS. I tried months ago but I had issues with that pissy little spinner. Persist. 5GB and a "heavy-year" of time later (sorry), it installs. Then Xcode installs. Then bar a few errors, the app compiles.

So after almost 24 hours, life resumes. The lesson.. respond to all obscure iOS errors by upgrading. If fully upgraded, calmly acquire a baseball bat and destroy your machine. Make sure you have a good book nearby in case of either event.

Thank you for reading my rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay Apple
$150 so that I may list my app in the app store.

Fucking wix advertisements! Getting real tired of the "want a website? Why not make it yourself?" ads. You're already logging all my fucking google searches to display relevant ad info so maybe wrap your head around the fact that I'm a web dev and make my own fucking sites??

Twitter: We use your tweets to analyze your preferences and target ads for you..

Facebook & Whatsapp: We monitor your posts, locations, private chats and target ads for you..

Google: We spy your mails, sms, location, pretty much all your activity and tailor ads for you..

All of them combined: No one can beat us in breaching privacy and bombarding you with ads..

Amazon: Hold my beer 🍺

Google ads are annoying

What kind of supercomputer you have to use to get these fucking websites to work smoothly????

I'm on a fucking gigabit connection, ryzen 7 7700x, 32GB ram, and a fucking nvme, all it takes is opening a fucking recipe site and I'm instantly transported back to the 80s. I swear if i see another 4k asset I'm gonna punch something.

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO FUNCTION OVER FORM????

Oh do you want me to disable my addblocker??? How about: you make a site that works you fuck. No i will not fucking subscribe to your brain-dead newsletter why the fuck would I???
And since when are cookies needed for a fucking plaintext site you asshat??? Tracking??? I swear if you could you would generate metadata from my clipped fingernails if it meant you could stick "Big data" next to that zip-bomb you call a website.

I WOULD like to read your article, possibly even watch a couple of ads on my sidebar for you, but noooooo you had to have the stupid fucking google vinegrette or however the fuck they are calling the fucking thing now.

The age of the web sucks the happiness out of life, and despite having all of this processing power, I am jealous of my fathers RSS feeds.

I'm sorry web people, I know it's not your fault, I know designers and management don't give a shit how long a website takes to load. I just wanted to make a fucking omelette.

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

I am trying to understand something for a while. devRant is full of privacy advocates and to be honest, part of it is almost taken by a group of people that call other people random swear words people because they are using a particular product of a company.

I will raise some points and will try to discuss them with other people in comments.

I will stick with Google. Since it looks like it's the most hated one. A company that has built one of the most intelligent infrastructure, the most popular mobile operating system and of course, the best search engine currently available.

The problem everyone sees is the privacy. Google tracks the search history to give users a better experience and show relevant ads. You might not need this "better experience". In case you don't know, you can turn off personalized search any time to make sure Google doesn't track. Same goes with Google Chrome, you can turn off all the data it is sending to servers in settings. You can simply not sign in if you don't anything to be synchronised.

An argument is Google should be opt-in rather than opt-out. But the general users are not tech-savvy. And yes, going to settings and turning on personalised search is a lot of work for a huge amount of people. Trust me, I worked in IT before. If they find other search engine giving them a good experience without changing anything in the settings, they will just simply move to that engine.

What interests me most if how people back DuckDuckGo. First of all, not all parts of DDG is not open source (it's fucking not, you can argue all day). Parts of it is closed because of licensing issues.

That is perfectly fine to privacy community. But it's not when Chrome is closed source for almost the same reason. I mean when you're using DDG, you are supporting a US-based company that has privacy all over its face and using closed source application on their server. Have you not learned anything from history?

You might be wondering about my obsession with Google. It hurts me when I see a giant company whose popular software is open source is bashed like this. Google has made huge contributions to open source communities. Chromium, Android, Kubernetes, Angular, GoLang, TensorFlow etc.

And PRISM, how do you know that DDG is not part of it? it's US-based after all.

I just saw an article that used a video with a title "TNW - Aral Balkan - Free Is A Lie | The Next Web" while asking us to switch to DDG. Ummm....DDG is also free right?

Maybe we should raise concerns with the US gov first rather than Google.

Hey, this is my first day and first post on DevRant ! :D

I just wanted to share with you how much i hate the WIX ads on YouTube!

"Hey, want a website? Build it yourself !"

What's wrong with their dumb algorithm at Google? I'm very familiar with web development, just use my cookies and understand that I MAKE MY OWN WEBSITES!

Me: Buy a cover for my phone online.
Google: Let's bomb him with ads about phone covers for 2+ months..

Great

What the hell Google???!!!

Apple doesn't trust Google and they seem to host their YouTube ads on another server xD
They ads ain't got no YouTube ID.

Project Cortana: Day 1

I have seen a lot of people switching to Linux or other services to get away from all the data collections. It makes a lot of sense as no one would want their data to be sold without their consent.

But I am going to do something different. My aim is to integrate with Microsoft apps as much as possible and review the experience. So here is what I have done so far:

* Use Cortana in desktop and mobile (Android)
* Use Microsoft launcher in mobile
* Outlook as primary email provider (I was already using them as my default provider)
* Use Microsoft To-Do and calendar to keep track of things
* Use OneDrive to store all my files (I am moving them from Google Drive)
* Use the default Mail app on the Windows 10
* Use Onenote (I was using Evernote before)
* Use Edge on desktop and Mobile
* Use Skype instead of Hangouts

It's day one but I think I have already found it quite useful. For example:

* Adding reminder is much easier. I get them on both desktop and mobile which is nice.
* Mail app has been really useful. Especially the focused inbox really helps to get rid of the clutters. Also, I can immediately add a mail to the calendar (like Inbox by Google) which is really helpful.
* One of the features of edge that I have found really useful is that you can send web pages from mobile to desktop in one tap. That is extremely useful.

So far I am loving it.

Also, I tried to make sure that I am not sharing my data with third-party apps as I have turned off "relevant ads" feature.

Ok Google

I think I misled Google because it just serves me German ads the last three weeks while I am Dutch.

I am not using a VPN.
I listen German music and watch some tutorials in German.
I rarely talk Dutch online and I talk quite a lot with Germans.

Google Having ads in Television is like a Advertising Company Advertising to advertise it's own platform of advertisement.

"we use cookies to give you a better experience on our site"

A better experience? Really?

It looks like you're using more than 100 external parties for whatever fucking reason. It is nearly impossible to disallow these, except for some stuff like analytics, which I don't like since it includes mass surveillance parties like Google and Facebook, but I'd at least, to some extent, understand that better.
But, the amount of dark pattern here is staggering and this kind of 'consent' you're using wouldn't, in a million years, hold up under the GDPR.

You know what would be a better experience? No tracking and no ads.

Go fuck your better experience (would that be a better sex experience....?)

It blows my mind that Google, advertisers, and a lot of companies seem to not understand the concept of a need fulfilled.

Google news: If you notify me of an article, and then I click on that notification, you can assume I read it. And you can also assume that I don't wish to read it again 2hrs later! So stop notifying me!!!

Amazon, AdSense, Facebook, everyone else: just because I bought new headphones, doesn't mean I wanna see ads for headphones. Actually it means the exact opposite. I don't want new headphones. I literally just bought some. And I especially don't want the exact same ones. I already have them.

Somehow, the targeted ads are worse than random. That's annoying.

How is this hard?

Google Ad > Page Rank Lol

Not letting Google (overtly) use your data has its drawbacks.

For example, lately I've been getting senior dating ads in my Gmail app.

I mean really, Google, I know you know I'm 30 and married; who's kidding who?

TL;DR: No YouTube Music! Fuck you.

Disclaimer: I could use an Adblocker but my old one always crashed and YouTubes Ads are short and not that bad - mostly just banners in the video player.

Rant: Yes google, I AM listening to music on youtube. I am your target audience for YouTube Music. But I am NOT interested.
You see, I wouldn't listen to music on YouTube if I had the spare money for Spotify, Apple Music or some other stupid overpriced service that gives the actual artists not enough of what they charge.

And giving me the same ad over and over again just annoys the fuck out of me. I DON'T WANT FUCKING YOUTUBE MUSIC. I am not interested in a free trial. I am not interested in buying it.
The most stupid thing is that Google provides a dislike and like button for ads. I pressed dislike so often yet it still comes up. GOOD QUALITY!

Why on earth is every fucking big company lost in copying every shit that others make and that has success? Where is my loved innovative Valve?! The innovative Google? They all just crave for fucking money making stuff. As if they still needed more...

Fuck these google home ads, keep triggering my google home in the kitchen. I just want to watch youtube while cooking not "ok google, going go bed" and then TURN OFF All MY FUCKING LIGHTS.

I made a simple HTML site for watching Google I/O live without all the ads that third party websites try to stuff up your face. It also has the official countdown from the event website 👌 (The countdown will disappear as soon as it runs out)

Check it out at adless-io.firebaseapp.com

I don't understand why people are making a fuss about Facebook.

It's free to use, the amount of users kept increasing (thus the cost of maintenance) yet the company kept getting bigger and bigger. Obviously they're not making all their money off the advertisements on Facebook's own website.

So why are people so surprised that they're "selling" user information?

This is really funny to me. Especially the media joining in saying that it makes all your information available to everybody when they're actually talking about the fact that the majority of Facebook users have their profile set to public and they can be easily found with a simple Google search.

People are so fucking hypocritical it makes me want to puke. If you don't want anybody to know what you posted, just don't fucking post it on a SOCIAL MEDIA in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that facebook is all flowers and love, they clearly didn't handle this situation well. They could have done something about this whole situation when it started instead of waiting for things to blow out of proportion.

However, people are just being assholes now. I highly doubt that they're reading all chats nor are they sending it over, they're probably just sending out some words you mention often so that it is pertinent for advertisers (ex. If you use the word computer next to buy, then maybe that triggers something). I could talk extensively about it but I'm way too lazy, the point is, they most likely aren't sending the nudes you sent to advertisers because that does not provide any benefits.

If you don't like Facebook, don't fucking use it. Delete your account and shut the fuck up. When you screw up in real life, there's no takesies backsies, why the fuck do people think it doesn't apply online? The government gathers up quite a lot of information on you yet I don't see you crying your eyes out.

Why the fuck do you care so much if an advertisement is tailored to specifically? Yeah, you talked about dildos and now you see dildo ads from Amazon, not happy? Just download adblock and shut up. If you're gullible and the moment you see an ad about single women in your area you click on the ad because you want to get laid right now, that's your problem.

Don't want people knowing about some aspects of your private life? Don't share it online.

Stop acting like people are any better at keeping secrets, I'm sure you had some people leak your secrets at least once, yet I doubt you sued them and you brought them to court.

===========

I'm sorry about this, it's just that Facebook is all over the news and I'm getting sick of it.

Also, I hate facebook, I'm not necessarily defending it, I'm more pissed at the medias for blowing this situation out of proportion.

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

YouTube, why the fuck do you put ads at the end of the video? Who's gonna watch those?! I'm not a marketer but I do know that people watch ads in expectation of something better. Who.. who the fuck thought this would be a good idea?! Fire that certified piece of shit marketing cunt already! What the fuck is even wrong with you nowadays Google?! Pinnacle of tech company my ass.

Hey Google, maybe I'd subscribe to YouTube Premium if you weren't throwing midroll ads into my tutorials every 3:45.

It's stupid, because they're trying so hard to annoy me into subscribing that they've done the opposite and annoyed me into NOT subscribing. I'd have considered it before, but ever since their recent changes it's so frickin' annoying that I refuse to subscribe just on principle because I won't financially support those pieces of trash anymore than absolutely necessary.

I really like how Opera Mini says it has an AdBlocker implemented, yet the app 'Contains Ads' according to Google. Guess it's not an effective blocker.

A product owner recently joined the team and wants to run Google Ads on the website just to make a little more money.

We have 4-5 features already built that would have gotten the job done but he's focusing more on selling out user's data to advertising companies, and he put those features in the backlog.

I know I'm just a developer but I took the website development when it was nothing and put it where it is now. It has 8000 subscribers paying $19.99 each every month.

The feature we've all been waiting for: Google Maps ads.

Why the fuck does YouTube shows me ads about wix and other Website creation Tools? Google you know better then anyone what Job i have and even know that i have a Google play developer account connected with my google account.

There should be a way to let Google know ok I have purchased this item already, can you please stop showing me this ad on every website I visit.

The overreach by a single company near or close to near monopoly on the internet is beyond bone chilling.

To be precise, I am talking about Google extending its reach by forcing people to use AMP in the webpages.

I get insta furious when i see my favorite webpages using them and effectively my entire browsing activity on that page is happily recorded for clicks and ads.

To just bypass that i have to unnecessarily add more and more addons to lock them out of my browsing which in turn WEAKENS my entire browser.

And sincerely saying, this sort of outreach is becoming really annoying. Because plain JS and Cookie Blocking will not work. and slowly people are running out of options.

If posts about AMP are being made earlier, I apologize.

Many people on here have ranted about YouTube showing wix ads to people who are clearly web developers. Well after I didn't react to the ads YouTube now decided to show me the same fucking ad in Spanish. What the fuck Google why Spanish of all languages?

Ads are no longer in green

Just found an implementation of Google Ads Remarketing api on Facebook's domain.
FB users are basically fucked with two big sticks!

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

Google: buys Android
Makes tons of $ from Ads
Meanwhile 7 year old bugs
Are still not fixed

A bug reported in 2012: recently created files are not visible when using MTP protocol.

Guess what? I still have this bug on my 2017 phone, like many other people.
Probably has something to do with file cache.

Because obviously 7 years is not enough to fix a stupid bug. Especially when Google is busy implementing all the other features nobody asked for except marketing department

How did targeted ads become so...accurate?

I did a search for a new service on Google last night.

Today, an ad appears on my Facebook feed highlighting my search term on Google the night before.

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

So I tried to set up Google AdSense on my website to show ads and earn some $... Next day AdSense console tells me that they've found "Adult: Sexual content" on my site. Like, WTF? There was nothing of such sort.

Do you wanna be a software engineer at Google?

Go to AlgoExpert.io. Pick a question. Read the prompt. Write some code…

JUST FUCKING STOP

Fucking shitty ad popping up every time I watch anything even remotely related to tech or science.

Being Honest,
I never had any problem with Google tracking my activities. I love their services and I feel like they're using my data to really serve me better.

But I do have problems with Amazon and Facebook.
Amazon keeps disturbing me with their annoying ads recommending things I've already purchased.
Using Facebook on the other hand is like standing nude in public.

Interesting. A few hours ago I had a nice domestic conversation with my coleague about robot vacuum cleaners. He was talking about iRobot Roomba and I was talking about Xiaomi. Here's the result!

Interesting thing is that we talked in a *voice* conversation. Over Slack. Over Chrome. Over corporate VPN (openconnect).

Where's the spying link? Slack or Chrome?

My bet's on Chrome.

What does that tell you about the privacy of your sensitive conversations? :)
Hide behind VPNs all you like. If you have proprietary software (or hardware in the case of Huawei) - you're being watched and listened to.

EDIT: I'm on Linux, he's on MacOS

Google Business Profile is probably not meant for developers. "Help customers find your business by industry." Dev: set primary category to "Web Developer". Google: We didn't understand your category. Please select from the suggestions that appear when typing. Dev, typing: "Web D"... Google suggests: "Web Designer, Web hosting company, Well drilling contractor, Waterbed shop". Okay, Google, nevermind.
Google: "Update your customers. Keep your customers up to date about your business!" Dev clicks "add update", adds info about that customer should use different phone number temporarily due to broken phone. Google: "Your post has been removed from your Business Profile on Google because it violates one or more of our post content policies." Okay Google, at least you let me add an additional phone number on my profile without requiring to verify my primary number that I currently have not access to. Anything else?
Google: "Claim your €400 free advertising credit" Dev: clicks "claim credit" Google: "To access this Google Ads account, enable 2-Step Verification in your Google account." How to combine idiocy and deceptive patterns in a single UI: Google knows! Apart from their search engine, their unique business advantage is simple that they suck a little less than Apple and Microsoft. Sorry, not a day to be proud of our profession, once again.

Okay so today I opened a link to buy a screen for my Raspberry pi on my phone(Chrome browser) and was simultaneously using FB on my Laptop in mozilla.

And that very moment I had ads on FB to but that screen.

Now I know it's nothing new, but at the moment of realization it just felt so creepy.

Privacy literally doesn't exist anymore!

Google got rid of the awesome Inbox app, only to force us back on Gmail with fucking NATIVE ADS! This one really triggered me

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

So enlighten me here. Am I the only one that doesn't lose his absolute shit when it comes to privacy?
I know that some companies are collecting data, and to a certain extent, I'm fine with it as long as the trade-off is good.
I like that Google is "learning" who I am and what I like, cause now, I only see news and articles relevant to my interests, and search predictions are much better. Same with targeted Ads. On an off chance that I'm not using Adblock I like seeing products that I might like, which I otherwise probably wouldn't even know existed.
Except for Microsoft. I have no idea why, but that's where I draw the line.

I don't understand privacy advocators.

Am I the only one who wouldn't give up practicality in exchange for "potentially more secure"?

I don't understand so much what the deal is with people who avoid Facebook, or don't trust Google or Microsoft, just in the basis of "privacy" or "security".

Websites tracking you to serve ads? Well, it's pointless because I very rarely buy something from the internet or let myself be influenced, ads are waste of time, just use an adblocker.

I can pretty much upload my whole life or documents on Google drive, even if I made it public no one would really care or read it all. It's like that GitHub project you uploaded but never documented, so no one cares. I usually use alternative software not because of "privacy" but because it has features other software doesn't have.

In reality you realize people aren't that interested in your life more than their own life.

I feel guilty for using YouTube Vanced and being unable to support content creators.

Shouldn't there be a feature that allows you to toggle ads on certain channels you want to support?

I really want to support such folks who are creating valuable educational content but Google being the biggest piece of corporate shit, makes me angry when it comes to compensating the creators fairly when they make Billions off their hard work.

The world is a better place because of such teachers who spend time, energy, and efforts to create valuable and useful content for rest of the world.

Funnily, back in days when we had awesome stuff, the tech was shit to document all of it. Now when we have advanced and easily accessible tech, we have shitty TikToks.

Why can't the creators of good content get more visibility and why is the world so fucked?

Google search can get fucked in the ass.

Greedy fucking bastards deceptively including ads as normal results.

It used to be just one, but I've seen crazy shit, like 4 ads in one search results. FOUR.

And it's not just the ads. It's all the fucking litter that they put above the results.

I'm talking about all this fucking Google Maps and web cards bullshit.

It takes too much goddamned space, and most of the times I DO NOT GIVE SHITS ABOUT THEM.

And if you want to hide that shit, guess what, you gotta go into the settings. How about you include a fucking corner X that I can click so I can hide immediately hide that shit when I want to?

Now, let's analyze the unholy mess that the image I included is:

The search I did is a simple "html form". Notice that the fucking Adblock is turned ON, yet I still get a "chameleon" ad.

The first real result is from w3schools that also expands on two also hideous things: sitelinks.

Sitelinks are nothing more than spacehogs that I very very rarely click. They look fancy, but they just add CLUTTER.

What are search result n 2 and 3? w3fools again. And I shit you not the next 2 results to those are also w3schools again. So 5 w3fucks links TOTAL.

Wow, google, I'm fucking mindblown, excellent fucking job for a trillion dollar corporation.

Get fucked in the ass.

I started using duckduckgo about ten years ago and have evangelized it ever since, including on devrant, but I think I've just about had it with it. Let me explain.

I was more than happy to accept the less-than-google results for standard searches, because I could force the site to only show me results that matched an exact string if I put quotes around it, or force the results to include or exclude results with words with minus or plus characters before them.

But that's all gone now. Now, plus just means, "show me more results with this word," and minus means, "show me fewer results with this word." Wrapping a string in quotes doesn't mean you require anything exact anymore. The name of the game with DDG now is the same as Google: engagement. Narrowed results or fewer results means less chance of clickthroughs, and you can't sell ads that way.

For normal searches, I'm off duckduckgo. It makes me sad.

Let me clarify though that DDG's bang searches are still fully functional, and are still an absolutely indispensable part of my workflow. I use them well over a hundred times a day, every day. I updated my rofi script for web searches to use qwant, but still go to DDG if the search string begins with a bang.

i heard if you turn off the lights, light a candle, and yell google three times in the bathroom mirror, you'll get ads about lightbulbs, candles, and google products for the rest of the day

We don't sell your personal information; hopefully, by our definition, "personal information" doesn't really mean anything. We track you on 75% of major websites and store every bit of data you generate. My takeout.google.com was 14GB large. FUCK YOU

Oh f*ck you Google. You can't tell me you don't collect my data (which option I selected) but ask me to answer surveys to make my ads better. It can't be more obvious...

Basically everything. Let me explain.

It's now.. okay what time is it? Ooh there's some dust on the clock, I wonder how do they form.. I guess I'll check Wikipedia. Page is loading, might as well scroll fb while waiting. Ooh a video on the home feed! Oh wait it's loading, I wonder what's on YouTube. Ugh, ads, let's just mute it and scroll devRant. Oh cool there's something called Google FooBar challenge, imma try searching Arraylist Java. Nice, lv1 done, let's take a break by getting a drink from the fridge.

*Walks back to room after drinking a sip of orange juice* hmm.. what time is it? Oh it's late, imma go to sleep!

*Shuts down everything and goes to bed* Maybe I'll just browse devRant before sleeping.. Ooh I have an idea for wk51!

I was looking at some info about how much ads pay, CPM and all that, came across a guy who answered a question related to this on quora (FUCK quora piece of shit content farm :/ but that's a story for another day) and put links to his apps on Google Play in it.

I always had low self esteem and think that I know nothing and I'm shit but seriously fact that people who make apps like this exist and are proud of their shit makes me feel better.

His entire collection of apps are garbage like this, like a "driving school" with images from Google Search and other games screenshots and "top 10 search engines" with just logos of search engines. 😂

EDIT: Typos

My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.

So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.

Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.

I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.

Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.

Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.

Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.

I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P

Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.

Hey guys, does someone knows if Twitter colludes with other websites and/or services to collect data, because I thought that privacy-wise, Twitter wasn’t as bad as Facebook as I just use Twitter to follow youtubers and Donald Trump(to keep up with his craziness) and never post anything. But I just got a Python Machine Learning ad just. And it’s spooky because I’m currently (trying to be) learning Deep Learning and Google knows it (🤬🤬 you udemy ads) but Twitter!!?? Do they have a way to link my account??

So I made a bit research about voice control /alexa /Google Home..

I came to the conclusion that when in like 20 years voice control is in every household, it WILL play ads randomly every hour. Yes. They'll do it!

What do you guys think about coinhive vs ads? Opt-in coinhive? Non-intrusive ads on the side? Which would you prefer?

For whatever the fuck reason google decided you should not be able to select text when writing a review, at least it's the case right now. Therefore I had to make a guilty screenshot.

Peel remote is successfully nails it to be as annoying as a single application can get and I should consider blocking ads on my phone completely.

I would really like to know why Google decided that it will only show me video ads for one specific brand of cereals and freaking feminine hygiene products. I have a freaking google home and a chromecast, there is more than enough info for them to know that I am NOT a woman. I never searched for feminine higiene products nor talked about them. Like wtf Google.

Google ads at its level best
(See time stamps)

Fuck these fucking youtube ads! I got blocked on youtube and cant play any video on desktop unless i disable adblocker. Shits so fucking LAME. Fuck off. Switching over to brave browser now and never looking back. Fuck off chrome.

Get fucked google. Now Google dropped to the last place for me from cloud providers. I'll prioritize the pedophille childfucker bill gates Azure cloud over GCP Now! Fuck Off. Shove ur ads into someone elses ass just how bill gates shoves his dick into childrens assholes on the epstein island!

Brave browser found a solution to all this fuckertry! It has built in adblockers for everything including built in vpn IP cloaker trace blocker and so much more for privacy and data integrity. Playing yt videos on brave browser works like a charm with no fucking ads or extensions installed! Everything is the same like chrome including layout development etc, minus ads tracking and data harvesting!

Before:
AWS > GCP > Azure > OCI

After:
AWS > Azure > OCI > GCP

Google ur now worse than a pedophile azure. Deserved to get spot #3 now. Shitheads

Google doesn't seem to understand. I don't want more personally targeted ads and block what goes against their definition of inappropriate advertising. I want to block some very annoying advertisers like the Chinese TEMU crap shop. So I will have to use an ad-blocker again, I guess.

Fuck Tik Tok or whatever shit that thing is

That shitty commercials are all over google ads. Ok, I have seen that girl enough changing scenes, so please fuck off.

So.. Google Analytics is not working..

Again..

(mostly !dev) Fuck humans! Really: what a scum bag race. All that shit talk about human dignity, the highest values are just sugar coating the low base motives we mostly live by. Like people have such fine antennas for your income, social status, the power or lack thereof you exert over other. They know it before you open your mouth, that they can pick on you, harass you, because you're the one on the receiving end, the one that bows away. The bullies feel that. On an overcrowded chicken yard you'll find more dignity than in human society.

Everybody drooling over that polished photoshop life on facetubeinsta: materialistic, consumeristic, masturbatic wastage. At least we now say it openly: that if we were the winners, we'd also take it all, live that empty luxury, life of fame. But 99,99% of us, we aren't in that position, just working off our arse to only keep afloat. And for the stars, those fake images, we're just rats to click on ads to better train Google.

No wonder that software, as a picture of human communication is such a shitfest of arbitrary, entropic conventions and endemic epidemic of quirks, bugs and evil trap doors. As a whole: an insults to reason, a challenge to sanity. (...Conway's law)

And I'm still a bit pissed at our profession, that, you know, as engineers, scientists, physicists, we still see us in the lineage of that "great" age of enlightenment and reason,.. while it's all just a cover up. Sure science and their ideas are nice as long as you serve a purpose or make some money. Sure democracy and free speech are great achievements, but in the end some elites and monopolies rule the world at their gusto - and will not stop destroying the world unless we're already one feet in the abyss (like 1962, be we ain't had enough of that shit, hadn't we?)

In a time where a web dev is expected to know, well.. everything... Backend -JAVA, python, nodejs and C++ would be great.
Front- angular, react, other 10 libs
DBs -sql, mongo, redis, elastic, kafka, rebbitmq
Also be devops on the side with AWS and docker kubernetis and more stuff

How the f is that possible?

In my real job for the last couple of years and different companies, I usually use 1 language/framework & 1 main DB.. and although it's possible in some companies, but in mine, ppl dont get access to AWS etc..

So let's say there's me.. a server side dev for years.
So I decide to be better and learn Golang.. cool lang, never needed in my job, after few days of not using it I forgot all I learned and that was it.

Then I realized I gotta know some frontend cause everyone want a fullstack ninja nowadays.. so I tried Vuejs.. it was amazing .. never got to use it at work, cause i was a backend, and we didnt use frameworks on our products back then..
Also forgotten.

Then I decided to learned nodejs, because this is the coolest thing ever.. hated it, but whatever... Never got to use it at work, cause everything was written in other lang which the whole team knew... Forgot the little i knew.

Then I decided, its time to see what Angular is, cause everyone started using it... similar idea to vuejs which i barely remembered, but wow it's a lot of code to remember, or I'll have to google everything.. so I went over it, but can't say i even learned it.

Now Im trying to move on to python, which, I really am learning in depth.. however, since I dont have real experience with it, no one gives me a shot at being a python dev, so again i feel like I'm trying to memorize syntax and wasting my time..

Tired of seeing React in all job ads, i decided to have a look what's that all about.. and whadoyaknow... It's fucking the same idea as vue/angular with again different syntax..

THIS IS CRAZY!

in how many syntaxes do i need to know how to make a fucking crud api, and a page with same fucking post form, TO BE A GOOD PROGRAMMER?!?

'Google knows everything about you.'
'Facebook records conversations.'
'Personalized ads manipulate you.'

Guess that's why YouTube showed me an ad in Spanish yesterday. Or why I never clicked on an ad. Or why only every 1 in approx. 10 ads is somewhat relevant to me (and thats with me explicitly stating my interests in ad personalization options).

I don't have anything against shielding your privacy. It's your right not to use a product if you don't want to, but I don't see how people can make these statements without providing solid proof.

Just my opinion.

If there's a screen, there will be ads

Conspiracy theory:
There is no parent CSS selector because Google effectively controls web standards, and if that existed then it would be extremely easy to hide ads, ruining their business model. Do you a-- help help they've got me hehgxh dry jvcgk cc d

!rant

Okay, I try not to swear even when I am frustrated and I’ve had it up to my neck with a certain issue; it’s my personal ideal, and I have my reasons - I also have my ways of venting anger.

I searched for bootstrap on Google just once. Since then, I’ve just been using the actual website to get where I need to. Now, at the beginning of every YouTube video I watch, I get a Udemy ad asking me to enroll into the Bootstrap class. I use Adblock (I know it doesn’t protect me from all their ad scripts) but seriously, can they please tone down on the aggressive ads.

It’s so infuriating. If I have clicked the ad link to be redirected to Udemy, perhaps your AdSense should understand that I don’t want to learn Bootstrap from Udemy. If I see one more f$&@?!#g Udemy web development ad... I might just make it my mission to become a l337 h4x0r and wreck Google. Hehe

Now that that’s out, thanks for reading.

I see ads on marketing tools every fucking where.
Do I look stupid to you, Facebook and Google?
I don't fucking need them.
Who needs those stupid products anyway?

I even saw a reskinned XAMPP being marketed as 'local testing for your WordPress website', like what the actual fuck? Isn't that fucking scamming?
Oh, right. They were targeting WordPress monkies. Oh.

Anyway, please show me some more keyboards instead.
I've been in keyboard market for like 2 weeks you know.

Holy fuck.

If your company(startup) now adding google ad for revenue....

It's time to switch.

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

Oh my dear internet,

FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT, WHO BUILT THIS HACKED TOGETHER ORWELLIAN SWAMP PIT?

Fuck the same fucking Envato template on every content page with 70 layers of sidebars, inline ads, popups, cookies and content shifting as if I was playing CATCH UP WITH YOUR FUCKING CONTENT.

FUCK the same fucking annual upselling 'plans' on every 7-day trial overengineered scam app that requires me to sign up for 1 fucking, falsely advertised task where my fucking password generator doesn't even recognize the input as a password field so I have to cmd+, to my FUCKING BABYLONIAN PASSWORD ARCHIVES PROMPTING ME FOR THE MASTER PASSWORD.
Thank god I can at least CREATE A BURNER CREDIT CARD THAT FREEZES ITSELF BECAUSE I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM YOUR FUCKING STEAMING CRAP.

FUCK every fucking step I take being recorded by our CYBERPUNK OVERLORDS REQUIRING ME to sign up for 5 different fucking privacy protection tools' annual plan or duct tape some open source shit onto my browser just for some BASIC PRIVACY WHILE TRYING TO NAVIGATE ALL THE OTHER 5000 annuals plan naval mines like A FUCKING FRENCH SUBMARINE IN 1940 GERMAN WATERS.

FUCK my walled garden scam ecosystem not being compatible with your walled garden scam ecosystem prompting me to reactivate my old SATANIC GOOGLE DON'T BE EVIL ACCOUNT from 2012 sending me on a DANTE ALIGHIERI STYLE ODYSSEY THROUGH THE 9 LAYERS OF PASSWORD RESET QUESTIONS, UNEXPECTED ERROR, 2FA MY PHONE DIED HELL to come out on the other side as a broken man.

Thank GOD I have your useless SUPPORT PAGE to aid with my signup problems that is actually just an FAQ with a hidden EASTER EGG HUNT for your support form CRISP AI BOT THAT IS ALSO 'currently experiencing high demand due to COVID' which is peculiar since that has been 3 years ago, but fortunately for you enabled you to fire ALL YOUR SUPPORT STAFF AND REPLACE IT WITH THIS BANNER.

I might as well just SCRAPE your fucking content, it'd be faster.

And although it is quite funny, FUCK THIS PAGE TOO for having me create another of 10.000 accounts to write this shit, where my browser firmly placed a newly created burner email into the PASSWORD FIELD.

I do not know how we managed to create something that is even more unwieldy than 56k DIAL-UPS, but I know that if this shit continues I'll have to train my own AGI to proudly interact with of all this STUPID SHIT on my behalf or I'll have to move into THE FUCKING MOUNTAINS AND LIVE WITH THE DEER.

You'd think with all the data Facebook and Google collect, they'd be able to air some halfway relevant political ads.

Having ads I don't agree with shoved down my throat isn't going to make me change my views, it's just going to make me resent that particular group or person more.

Eavesdropping by phone's microphone and speech recognition to serve targetted ads by Google? Anyone here had a feeling this happened to them or knows is this already a thing?

Happened to me on my Android phone multiple times over last year on different subjects, that I was talking live with a person, for example how someone had eyelid surgery (my phone was locked in my pocket the whole time and I didn't google search what that is, or made any text input into device whatsoever) and couple minutes later an ad came on my phone for exactly something we were discussing before. Weird coincedence or something more? 🤔

Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.

The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.

iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.

Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.

Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.

On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:

Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.

Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.

Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.

Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.

Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.

Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.

iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.

Even google apps working better on iOS.

The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:

I’m never ever coming back to android.

I hate the current state of internet based service providers. They are collecting so much data, it's scary and borderline stalking.

A simple search on Netflix changes ads shown by Google. I watch a lot of Japanese/Korean drama and now my ads are in Japanese. What the actual fuck.

I run windows 10 on my main rig because of steam and windows only games. One day I was searching for filezilla in windows search. Since it is now handled by the same UI as cortana, it searched it on the web too. So now I have ads related to ftp hosting in Japanese.

Sometimes I feel like just formatting my system and install debian on it. But those games man. May be I can live without them.

Can we bring back the internet from 2008. It was so much better back then.

Any marketing advice? It’s difficult building an Instagram audience.

Any other ways to reach your targets? Are google ads any good?

I am afraid to search anything on google without private mode. Once I used to search universities on normal browsing. But once I started to find lots of universities ads on my browsing, I was afraid. Now I am using incognito mode since year. But I am afraid how secure our private browsing is because our browsing activities is still visible to ISPs. Fwak this world.

I forgot to re-enable ABP...
Good job google....
you know everything about me (us)
and you cannot even detect the correct language for ads?

I've recently moved from google to duckduckgo for my searches, Having in mind the growing concern of user privacy, what do you guys suggest for search engines, browsers, os, recommended addons, apps, vpns etc?

Google's user data selling business is a MEAN bitch

Why does Google have to buy big billboard ads at the bus stops to convince people to use Google search?

Did Google finally realize that despite being the best search engine, many of their results are still pretty shitty?

Or do they merely want to distract from the anti-FAANG (don't) be evil discussion?

Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .

Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?

Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .

All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!

IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .

Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .

IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.

One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .

I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.

After two years of being in (metaphorical) jail, I once again was given the a privilege of unlocking and rooting my phone. Damn. Frick Huawei, never coming back to that experience.

I gotta say, rooting... Feels a tad less accessible nowadays than when I last practiced it. All this boot image backup, patch, copy, reflash is crying to be automised, only reason I can think of why that changed and magisk can no longer patch itself into the phone's initrd is that it's somehow locked? Was it a security concern? Or can sideloaded twrp no longer do that?

Oh, and the war... The war never changes, only exploits do - fruck safety net... Good for Google that they now have an *almost* unfoolable solution (almost). The new hardware-based check is annoying af, but luckily, can still be forced to downgrade back to the old basic check that can be fooled... Still, am I the only one who feels Google is kinda weird? On one hand, they support unlocking of their own brand of phones, but then they continuously try to come up with frameworks to make life with a rooted or unlocked phone more annoying...

On the other hand, I do like having my data encrypted in a way that even sideloading twrp doesn't give full access to all my stuff, including password manager cache...

Any recommendations what to install? I do love the basic tools like adaway (rip ads), greenify (yay battery life!), viper4android (More music out of my music!) and quite honestly even lucky patcher for apps where the dev studio practices disgust me and don't make me want to support them...

DevRant has many privacy-conscious people and honestly just people who don't like when their personally identifiable data gets shared.

Yet, DevRant uses Carbon Ads owned by BuySellAds. Here's what their privacy policy reads:

"Some Personally Identifiable Information may also be provided to intermediaries and other Third Party Service Providers (defined in part (4) below) who assist us with the Services"

You know what's the funniest thing? In "part 4 below" they never actually state which companies do they share personally identifiable information with.

Just a quick reminder that when you use DevRant, your personally identifiable information may be shared with any amount of third parties, and you could bet a lot of money that the list includes Google and Facebook because of remarketing. Remarketing is a fancy term that means not selling personal data but instead giving it away for free.

Use AdGuard or any other browser extension that blocks analytic scripts. Buy a Raspberry Pi Zero W and make yourself a PiHole. When you're using DevRant mobile app, use analytics-blocking VPN.

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

So i was putting finishing touches on an android game i was building in Unity3D as a fun side project - implementing google play leaderboards and google ads.
Luckily google is nice enough to include 2 unity plugins for ads and leaderboards/achievements however, THE FUCKING PLUGINS AREN'T COMPATIBLE. TWO PIECES OF SOFTWARE THAT ARE LITERALLY MEANT TO WORK TOGETHER HAVE COLLIDING .JAR FILES PREVENTING ME FROM BUILDING THE APK.

i had to spend fucking days trying to figure out how to unpack the jar files and what to remove from them so they would stop colliding.

WTF GOOGLE?

LOLOL, my grandma goes hellish when I entered her password to google, she has seen some videos on the internet like "people deploy fake medical ads for seniors" or "phishing.

Fuck youtube.

This is a continuation of my previous rant about admob being not very informative when it comes to invalid traffic and the resulting restriction in ad delivery.

I then wanted to use admob mediation to hang in facebook ads. My app is written with Xamarin.Forms.

So first I needed to make some facebook configuration - create an account, let my app review, create some ad placements and other shit. I came to the point where I had to put in a link to my privacy policy and the link could not be accepted due to some SSL fuckup -.-'

I then found out that there is an issue with my SSL Chain. With the help of whatsmychaincert.com I solved that issue. Little side note here: I have limited knowledge of that stuff and my cousin helped me set up my homepage so I had no idea what I was doing. Did a snapshot and luckily I did not needed that as everything worked :)
This took me around half an hour just so I can paste the fucking link to activate my app in facebook developer portal.

After that I made the whole mediation configuration shit - not an issue as google documented this quite well but it took some time.

Now comes the shitty part. To use admob mediation you need adapters to the other ad network. I found a nuget package with exactly what I needed just to find out that it is outdated. So I pulled the repo and saw that this thing is an aar binding library. Never did that stuff so I read some docs again. Updated the package and consumed it in my app.

The google docs then said "Use this mediation test shit to check if you did everything correct before going prod" - aar binding nr. 2 (but I am now familiar with that :P). This thing then told me that facebook ads could not be loaded because the SDK version is outdated -.-' SDK version comes from another nuget package which is referenced by the first aar thingie. I tracked that thing back to a repo where I found out that they are indeed totally behind. So I downloaded the aar, made a binding lib and bound that to my first aar binding lib as that depends on this.

Put that all back in my app - tested mediation and fucking finally after 6 hours everything comes together! all lights are green and things work.

Sorry if this is not quite a rant but it was quite a journey and I just had to share it.

When Google Gmail added Ads in application? Come on,
Is not that too much?

Is digital marketer really a legit profile? I mean, anyone can run ads on google and facebook.

Life is to take decisions. Which u prefer
Google vs Shodan vs 🦆 🦆 go
Angular vs vue vs react vs other
Gnome vs unity vs KDE
Atom vs vscode vs sublime or other
iOS vs android vs other
Natives bs ionic vs react native vs xamarin vs flutter
Gmail iCloud or outlook or proton mail
Camel, pascal ,snake case
C# or Java or python
Sql or not sql
Debian , fedora ,linux mint or kali
Server side rendering or client side
Aws vs gcloud vs Azure vs ibm cloud
Firefox vs chrome vs safari
Free without privacy or ads or paid without ads or privacy
Nintendo vs pc vs ps4 or xbox
WhatsApp or telegram or other
Sleep at night or not

Coment your favorite

One easy way to watch YouTube without ads on a smartphone is Firefox + Ad.blocker

HoWeVeR... Page loading time on YouTube went up to 1 minute for me lately, all out of a sudden. Nothing changed on my device. I have auto-updates disabled

A coincidence? 🤔 Or Google looking to make life hard for me. YouTube was already caught making loading slow on FireFox deliberately, so they deserve 0️⃣ trust

So I have this habit of googling weird things, obvious things and random things. Over time, I've stuck to using incognito all the time because Google suggestions and targetted ads annoy me (almost) like nothing else. It's a really nice thing to know that some algorithm out there is not judging you.

On the downside, you'll have to constantly explain to people around you that you're not a porn addict. :/

1. To get all the wishes from everyone else
2. Unlimited wishes
3. Clients that know what they want and how to explain it.

Just saying

- looking for a specific device in a single e-shop
- browse the listings of available SKUs
- find the one I want, buy it

And after I buy it, for some reason ad services think I need another one (or perhaps several other ones) from the same shop, as they keep showing me ads with the part I've purchased. And this goes on for weeks...

Talk about AI and clever advertising algorithms........

We devs are installing adblockers. Meanwhile, Google shareholders are clicking all ads to increase Google's revenue...

Wtf has happened to Google webmaster tools / ad(word)s / analytics? There used to be so many valuable insights before the current version, now everything is hidden in the new UI or Google just keep the info to themselves? Does anybody use Google anal/ads anymore?

Omg has Google placed a new ad scheme online or something? It's fucking huge! Almost an entire screen of ads before seeing the first search result.

AAARRGHH 😑

I pay for Youtube, because I'm a Google music (now youtube music, and much worse than it was) subscriber. Youtube pisses me off because if I curiously watch some video, their algo swoops in and starts recommending videos from r/youseeingthisshit or Craig ferguson clips, or fox news, or pbs kids or some other bullshit I don't want in my feed. The only way to disable algo, as far as I know, is to browse "incognito," which then forces ads on me.

Has newpipe been broken for everybody else for a while too?

Had to add a privacy policy to my app because of some google ads identifier bullshit. No one is going to read it anyway.. However, I found a beautiful privacy policy generator so I didn't have to read it myself.

A note to the team designing recommendations on google ads:
Just because I search for deep learning concepts for personal learning, does not mean I will be purchasing every paid online data science course on the planet.

What Google does with ads, God does it too... We just call it coincidence...

Getting the word out about your new shiny app:
Posting in relevant communities > Throwing money at Google Ads

Google Ads isn't even using up half of my daily budget lmao

Just had a memory popup about my uni days about 5 years ago. I was in my Junior year in business school and was doing a "consulting" project involving the whole Class (200 students). Groups of 4 were assigned an international company in either Europe, Asia, or South America. We'd visit them (as well as do some sightseeing) and learn about them (performance, market positions, products) during Spring Break and come up with a real proposal. We would then compete with other teams, and the winning pitchs for each would be presented in the school auditorium in front the entire class.

Our team didn't get that far but that's not the point. We did win the individual classroom competition. Our company was Deutsche Telekom (owner of T-Mobile).

This was in 2010, when the iPhone/smart-phones started to become mainstream... And our team's idea was location-based advertising.

Looking back, we basically predicted the future... though we got the wrong industry...

It's also sort of funny though because I remember the main reason we came up with the idea was to be different.

All other teams just went with some expansion plan to a neighboring country or cutting costs.... pure MBA/business plan. But I guess I was being a natural techie so thought of a tech idea instead.

We had a meeting with our professor after he picked us and he told us he had a history of spotting future hits. We were like "hm... ok... let's give it a shot... we definitely got an A!" but at that point I was sort of skeptical if this would actually work in real-life (the basic idea was they would sell ads to local businesses and if you were nearby, you would get a text message with an offer).

But guess he was pretty right... we just needed to have Google or Facebook to have been our company... though Groupon or Yelp works too... basically a tech company with larger scale rather than a mobile carrier...

I never click ad part in the google search and whenever I see people clicking the ads, A part of me quietly dies inside.

This partnership gives Google advertisers access to Unity’s mobile gaming network through Universal App Campaigns (UAC). This means Unity mobile app developers will be able to monetize with Google’s ads without any additional required development work.

To date, the partnership has resulted in video completion rates of 87.3% compared to the average benchmark of 32.5% (Source: Moat Analytics Benchmarks: Q4 2017). Furthermore, Unity has consistently scored 97.8% for valid and viewable rates, well above in-app benchmarks of 54.7%, providing a brand-safe environment for advertisers while also creating value for developers and gamers alike.

Today i was searching for vpn on google now guess what i am getting vpn ads everywhere. Google is evil

I fucking hate what Google Feed has become. Is the Google Feed team composed of infinite monkeys on infinite computers trying to churn out the worst possible user experience with each update? Adding to the existing clusterfucking mess of unswipeable cards and unintuitive tabbed design that is inconsistent all over Android, they are now testing fucking Ads on the feed. Fuck Google Feed. I miss the old Google now cards. Listen to your users!

I feel searching for documentation of things is getting difficult day by day. The actual documentation sites get very low page ranks and they end-up on 2nd or 3rd page of search results, while all the first page search results are links to articles filled Google Ads everywhere. If you search for say Apache Hive String Functions, you will get 10 different websites talking about Hive String functions, and the actual documentation site is on Page 2. For less popular tools, the page rank can be even lower.

On top of this, none of those 10 articles have and reference link to the actual documentation page in case you read the article and want to just quickly glance at the actual documentation which is the source of truth.

Client wants a cricket based website made so I gotta search Google for images and shit.

Getting every cricket related update+merchandise ads on all possible apps/platforms..

I don't even watch cricket

Help, please.

I have an only HTML(CSS and JS) app. I want to put it in Play Store. How?
I saw somewhere Phonegap can convert HTML to apk, but if I do it, will it work well?
I mean, if I want to put google ads or any other ads can I choose where to put them?

Is there money to be made in android app development via ad revenue? I'm learning more Java for a different purpose related to a job and think it'd be a fun side project. Maybe utility apps, but probably games.

Prediction:

1. Broadcast (free) TV will consist 100% of live programming

2. All series will be bought and available on streaming services like Amazon, Netflix, Disney+

3. Cable channels or TV episodes can be bought individually (iTunes, Google Videos, etc), basically they will be their own streaming service (it actually that already exists, IPTV? just not in the US?)

Why:

Everyone will use DVRs to record TV shows so can skip all advertisements

Therefore only way to get viewers eyeballs for ads is live programming where you need to cast votes which affect the outcomes (supposedly)

Streaming services obviously don't have this problem and don't need to run ads since there's a monthly subscription fee that more then covers cost.

good evening i would like to know how google takes how much percentage of admob revenue and does interstitial ads make money when someone watches them without clicking, thanks