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I use dedicated Ad Block software (or a customized host blocker) on all my internet enabled devices. I have no moral qualms whatsoever about doing so. Why do I block ads on the Internet? They are annoying and detract from my browsing experience. In addition to serving distracting ads that I never click on, online advertisers want to "hijack" and redirect my browser to sites I had no intention of visiting not to mention throwing up pop-up banners that I didn't ask to see. These tactics are the Internet equivalent of shop owners and proprietors grabbing people off the street and forcing them into their stores. I wouldn't put with it on the street and I won't put up with it on the Internet.

This is hardly proof of anything but in my experience the vast majority of people do not use ad blocking software of any kind. The people who do make use of such software tend to be slightly more savvy than the (usually older) people whose Internet experience consists of browsing the surface of the surface web (Yahoo!, Facebook, first page of Google search results etc). This demographic also tends to leave default settings unchanged unless there is significant hype or FUD to make them pay attention, e.g., Facebook privacy settings.

The people installing ad blocking software or writing their own host blockers are specifically seeking out ways to limit their exposure to advertising. They are not likely to be enthusiastic ad clickers and likely do not make purchasing decisions based on sponsored text or images shown next to their search results. Really, how valuable are potential customers that go out of their way to avoid being exposed to advertising?

Advertising companies - Google and Facebook being the most ubiquitous and powerful examples - are already data-mining every piece of information they possibly can and finding new ways to collect ever more intelligence. Never in human history has mass surveillance been practiced on such a large scale. Google and Facebook then sell or auction amalgamated data bundles to a robust industry of data brokers who in turn attempt to monetize the information they have paid for. The end user (whose attention is the product being sold by the providers of "free" content) has no control whatsoever over their data. More than a few large SV corporations have a close relationship with the state. Google being the most notable here...Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen wrote a book that was, in part, about the company's partnership with the DoS. These same companies despite some impressive lip service often roll over very quickly when the NSA and its pals come knocking.

When state intelligence agencies and a handful of powerful corporations collect and store massive amounts of citizens' data without any meaningful oversight or checks and balances we have a problem. Oh sure they all say "trust us" and "your privacy is"...wait for it.."important to us" (do a search for that phrase) but were it not for the painless under-the-radar data collecting methods employed, and the amount and content of information harvested and stored was made obvious, many more people would give more of a shit about what kind of future we are building. And it is advertising that drives the corporate data-mining industry.

So all y'all will excuse me if I laugh out loud when some random forum poster launches into a stern lecture about the immorality of blocking advertising on the Internet and on mobile devices. Oh, and I also block as many trackers as possible and am absolutely okay with that, too.

I should add that I am not opposed to all surveillance. Indeed, many of the benefits the Internet has brought would be impossible without it. Government surveillance, in specific instances, is also justified. However, ever increasing mass surveillance with little or no oversight controlled by some of the most powerful entities on the planet is definitely cause for concern.

Yup, only a sucker would take the righteous bullshit spewed by by corporations at face value. Corporations are essentially asking one to "do as I say, not as I do". The game is rigged as the events of 2008 have clearly proven.

They are absolutely being played. Corporate America lecturing people about morality should be dismissed as the disingenuous hypocrisy it is. Or perhaps greed and Randian (Ayn) selfishness really are virtues? Nah, only the truly self-deluded would think that.

Please...stop the madness! The trend of prefacing every criticism or, indeed, observation with an apology to the fanbois or a cheery positive "Apple is awesome, but.." statement has gone too far. It's actually quite amazing how many articles and comments follow this template. And it has to stop. The Cupertino Thought Police is not going to kick your door in and drag you to the Infinite Loop basement for a Think Different session. The Internet won't grind to a halt, you won't be named and shamed...everything will be okay!

Sure some fanbois with advanced symptoms might possibly berate you publicly or even downvote your post/article and that's it. It really is okay to not love Apple. Or point out that Apple isn't perfect. It's even okay to not own any Apple products whatsoever. Full disclosure...I do own Apple products and OS X is my daily driver of choice. But I have no emotional attachment to Apple's products, I don't buy Apple products exclusively and I do not worship at the iAlter or have a man crush on Steve Jobs.

The over-the-top reverence for Apple even by people who are far from being fanatical iCult members really is extraordinary. If you find some of their products useful, great, if their products aren't a good fit for you, that's great too. Apple is not the mafia (yet) and you owe the company nothing.

My post was a response to a claim that the Canadian media offers a higher quality product than its US counterpart. I disagree and gave my reasons and provided a couple of examples. I did not, however, claim that US media concentration isn't high. It is, but it's not as extreme as the Canadian example.

Independent media is almost non-existent in Canada, online or otherwise. Viewpoints that deviate from the mainstream are far and in between. The only online independent journalism site I can think of that has gained a wider audience is The Tyee based in Vancouver. The Canadaland podcast, created and hosted by journalist Jesse Brown, also seeks to provide a wider variety of viewpoints and it directly addresses the sad state of Canadian media culture (something Brown is intimately familiar with).

You picked one example I provided and took it out of context as if that disproves my point. More info about the Parks Canada/CBC story http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/what-exactly-did-p...

No...lol I mean the mainstream media toe the government line. @themeekforgotpw has it right.

No, Canadian mainstream media reporting is NOT reliable! Canadians tend to believe everything Canada does is just a bit better than what the US offers. Definitely not the case with the media. In fact, Canada's English-language media is in a pretty sad state. See my other post in this thread for more info.

I disagree. Three or four corporations own almost the entire Canadian media, from traditional print publications to television and Internet. The range of viewpoints on offer is extremely limited. For example, the two daily newspapers in Vancouver are owned by the same company. The two (or is it three?) private "over the air" TV networks are run by the same companies that own the two national daily newspapers. This type of media concentration would be illegal in the US. The Canadian media is incestuous and prone to nepotism and corruption. The CBC network took government money to produce a series run on their flagship nightly newscast that sent their chief correspondent (who was also a Bilderberg guest) on a tour of the Northwest Passage aboard a Coast Guard ice breaker. This coincided with the government's ramping up PR about a "strong northern presence to assert Canadian sovereignty". A CBC business corespondent was on the payroll of a national financial institution, and married to a high-level employee of said bank)when she did an "independent analysis" of this institution which just happened to show them in a very positive light.

And Canada is the only Anglophone nation without a tradition of media criticism. So, no, Canadian journalism is not in any way superior to US reporting. Quite the opposite in fact. Canadaland, a weekly podcast started by a dude who has worked for a variety of Canadian media outlets directly confronts the sick and feeble nature of Canada's media landscape.

They generally toe the official government line, at least the mainstream media does. The opinion pages contain the odd piece here and there that deviates from this narrow perspective. But don't rely on the English-language (or any language) media to present an unbiased viewpoint that gives equal weight to both sides of an argument when it involves the US or an ally/client state and an "enemy" state like China or Iran.

Just want to add my thanks for sharing this link. Appelbaum is always worth checking out.

All the English-language mainstream media outlets have a broadly pro-Western slant so it's not unusual that they present the viewpoints of their allies, playing up attacks against the West and downplaying or simply not reporting Western nations attacks against their "enemies". Stuxnet was one exception and the US government admitted, IIRC, that it and Israel had developed it and deployed it against Iranian targets. But generally it's only widely reported when the "bad guys" ostensibly attack the "good guys" and no verifiable evidence is provided and we only have official government sources' word to go on. It is a given, I think, that governments spy on each other and strategically launch attacks on each other's networks and databases. However, after the Snowden revelations the US/UK and their allies lost the (bogus) moral high ground when it was revealed they do the same covert attacks that were blamed on China, Russia etc. Only the really naïve were surprised by this. The mass surveillance of their own citizens is a different matter.

Bruce Schneier's latest book 'Data and Goliath' examines the implications of mass surveillance in a calm, levelheaded manner. He also outlines detailed, and realistic, solutions that recognize the benefits of data- mining and covert surveillance while reining in the excessively secret bulk data collection practices of state intelligence agencies and the bulk data-mining practiced by corporations like Google and Facebook.

I can't recall the source at the moment (it was linked to a military history site), but the U.S. apparently took similar actions when its geopolitical power was on the rise. It didn't create artificial islands but it showed up in areas far away from home and claimed them as U.S. territory. The British didn't ask if half the world wanted to be subservient to its empire.

It's not a simple matter of right or wrong, it's just what countries with power do. Although where the line is drawn is ever shifting. It's generally agreed Germany invading Poland in 1939 was wrong but European nations prior to the mid-20th century claimed large parts of Africa, Asia and, of course, the Americas, and felt perfectly justified doing so. Invading ones neighbor became more of a taboo after the creation of the nation state and whether an aggressive annexation or expansion is "right" or "wrong" depends entirely on who is writing the narrative. The U.S. is always in the right and justified according to...the United States. China is always right according to China. Which narrative prevails in the historical record depends upon which nation or group exerts the most influence over its competitors. Sometimes acts are universally condemned as atrocities if they go far beyond the unwritten rules... the Holocaust being the most obvious example. OTOH the decimation and subjugation of indigenous people in the Americas by the European colonialists and later the United States, Canada and the Latin American nations barely registers on the contemporary "atrocity radar" even though the effects are still present today.

It's a funny old world... or perhaps it's a nasty mess of a world or a combination of the two, depending on who is doing the assessing. It will be interesting to see how China's island building adventure pans out in the long-term.

Everybody wants to be Elon Musk but the way post-industrial unregulated capitalism works leads to a handful of Musks and their corporate entities controlling, well, pretty much everything, and fierce competition among the masses for scarce resources. AKA feudalism.

The era of the middle-class was a blip on the historical radar. Feudalism ruled supreme for thousands of years and couldn't be clearer that we are currently backsliding into an era of "digital feudalism".

It's not like Google, to name the obvious example, is really hiding their intentions. Larry Page just a few weeks ago said he thinks government is becoming more irrelevant and "outdated" and nobody even blinked. Well who's going to replace the outdated dinosaur government? The writing is on the wall. Anyone who seriously believes in the pipe dream of a libertarian utopia is a deluded fool. The innocently named "Internet of Things" is bringing the big SV players into every corner of every home and it's not about controlling your toaster with a smartphone, but it most certainly is about control. How exactly things will play out is impossible to predict - I mean a 2010 podcast of academics and students discussing Facebook Twitter and MySpace sounds quaint and old-fashioned - but history shows what happens when power is concentrated in a few hands. And the USSR was supposed to be a Utopia too...

Personally I quite enjoy living in tumultuous times but it's worth remembering the Chinese saying "may you live in interesting times" was used as a curse ;-) Don't be evil, now!

Have an upvote!

Pop-psychology's obsession with "introverts" has spawned a profitable industry consisting of various "experts" churning out a steady supply of papers and articles claiming that...well, what are they claiming exactly?

Pretty much every article on the subject I've read or skimmed characterizes so-called introverts as fragile, overly-sensitive misfits suffering from some form of crippling shyness who are perfectly normal but have to be treated with extra care and respect (a helpful howto guide is often included) by the segment of the normal population that happens to be more socially inclined and outgoing.

Basically, introversion is a perfectly normal yet agonizing condition that causes psychological suffering so extreme that the non-afflicted normal people have to recognize that this normal yet horrible-sounding condition exists and that its sufferers need special treatment to help them function comfortably in, er, normal social and public settings.

Yeah, that makes no sense whatsoever. But when the bullshit layer is removed that's what the vast majority of articles about introverts are saying. Where does this "introversion", that science is now apparently studying, come from? It comes from the mind of C.G Jung and gained popularity via the decidedly unscientific Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment that is popular in certain HR departments, with poorly-trained psychologists and with people who obsess over their four-letter MBTI code and what it ostensibly represents.

My take (as someone who self-identified as an introvert in high school) is that Myers-Briggs and the labels it spawns are pseudo-scientific bullshit that triggers the same cognitive distortions and biases as astrology and horoscopes. According to Jung a person inclined towards introversion needs alone time to relax and "recharge", whereas the extrovert feels most relaxed and revitalized in a stimulating social environment. Jung's concept, while not scientific, makes more sense than the twisted version peddled today where a person is either extremely extroverted, or extremely introverted. People who invest a big chunk of their identity in an essentially meaningless label are then reluctant to let go of it and end up stuck in a confirmation-bias loop that reinforces the fairy story they've bought into.

Maybe one problem here is that many people actually think it's weird or abnormal to not feel 100% comfortable and at ease in all situations at all times. This is a society (US/Canada) so obsessed with attaining a mythical non-existent level of "happiness" that frauds like Deepak Chopra make a very good living writing "definitive" guides to happiness and contentment etc. and people keep buying and buying rather than wondering why, after reading a decades worth of happy books they're still not happy.

The related absolutely-normal-yet-horribly-defective introvert scam gets more outlandish every six-months or so. I mean a website called introvertdear...aw,how precious. And now "science" has identified four types of introversion! And I have some prime real-estate in the Everglades for sale...and I'm investing in this new bridge project that...actually I'll tell you all about it over a drink. My treat.

Libertarianism, i.e the deluded belief that unfettered capitalism is perfect and the panacea for all the world's ills, is very popular in certain SV startup circles. Uber, for example, blatantly ignoring local bylaws and regulations makes perfect sense when seen through libertarian tinted goggles.

"[T]the Soviet Union did not save "the world."

The point is that every year on the anniversary of VE Day the Western allies congratulate themselves for saving Europe from the Nazis, conveniently downplaying the critical role the Soviet Union, or to be more precise, the Russian people, played in bringing the Third Reich to its knees. Politics aside...the people of Russia, civilians and soldiers alike, fought the Nazis with everything they had and paid a heavy price for it. Compared with the brutality and suffering on the Eastern Front (e.g. Leningrad, Stalingrad) the Western Front was a cakewalk.

FWIW, the Tweetbot client (iOS) filtered out ad content by default. Haven't used it in a while, however, so this may have changed.

> Does anyone else think there might be less rioting in these situations if people had more trust in their institutions?What if someone could actually count on the fourth estate to keep the government accountable long enough for justice to finally prevail? Would you riot if Respectable G. Newsanchor (the G is for gravitas) solemnly swore to you on air that no stone would remain unturned, until all the worms in the story were revealed and illuminated by journalistic sunshine?

Firstly, rioting isn't that common, at least not yet. That it seems to be becoming more common indicates people are finally snapping out of their apathy and taking action even if it is, at the moment anyway, often compulsive and self-defeating.

I don't think solemn promises made by news media types and politicians are taken very seriously by the demographic they are aimed at. How often does a public official solemnly swearing to rectify x, y or z, actually translate into action and meaningful changes being implemented? As for "trusted" news anchors...they are basically just teleprompter jockeys with no real resources or power to do anything other than, well, read the news.

Lastly, as has been discussed, journalism is in the midst of a metamorphosis and investigative journalism isn't a priority for mainstream news organizations. The few journos that do stick their neck out are often harassed, or worse, by the TSA/NSA et al. if they start getting too close to uncovering facts that threaten the status quo.

This. Your comment succinctly sums up the sad state of journalism in 2015. I sometimes wonder how, or even if, journalism school addresses the challenges a serious journalist will face in a market dominated by "clickbait news".