Talk of Google monopoly getting split up - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 05:53:03 pm
content: Hello. Today I see the Google holiday video way up top of phone screen. With a tiny bit of sloppy typing, that gets a click, and goes into playing the Christmas tree video, or whatever.However, even with clicking the 'Go back' key, like it usually works, 1 or 2 clicks and you get out.This thing, though, just keeps playing. I'm wondering if that's deliberate forcing the VIDEO play, whether you like it or not ?The reason I say this is because, on Android system, that's also a Google entity, and they have, or can manipulate, the power to ignore my clicks, basically requesting the Android system to do the 'go back'.Four clicks, five ..no,...that 'go back' desire getting thwarted. How come virtually every other video feed gets stopped, but not this case ?Seems like they (Google developers) are maybe leveraging their monopoly. Consumers F*** ,You ! They seem to imply....Break that monopoly up, now.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 05:54:33 pm
content: And, er... in this hypothetical world where Google are plotting to get you to watch a video of a Christmas tree... what exactly is their end goal? Is Big Santa behind this?

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 06:30:35 pm
content: Like I've said before:Every last little tinyest bit of observation and critical thinking gets met, fast, with the debunking and, uh, yeah, Conspiracy Nut-job just blathering on, like (I'm ) an old man, whining about 'the cloud' appearing above.Ok then, you are right;There are no imperfect things, every criticism needs be met with doubt. Every last bit of negative feedback is met with gaslighting...(Assuming you even know what gaslighting definition is....I wonder.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 06:44:48 pm
content: No, I just think you clicked on a wrong thing and didn't know that you can just press the back button at the bottom of your phone's screen (if it's an Android device) to exit that. I don't see where the conspiracy is and no, this is not gaslighting, this is Google's annual Christmas logo thing, they do one every year along with all sorts of "doodles" and the like. They have several full time artists/programmers on staff for these doodle projects, sounds like a pretty cool job to me.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 07:13:28 pm
content: Imagine this completely delusional guy here posting 100% politics (and non-electronic related Youtube videos) and 0% electronics here all day long, semi incomprehensible, andwe banned treez because people could not stand his purely electronics related threads and were mentally unable to ignore him.I'm not suggesting of banning RJSV, I'm ignoring his posts, just pointing out this interesting difference in treatment.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 08:34:39 pm
content: I don't mind, it seems google is in everything. It used to be like a good thing because it was almost somewhat charitable but I think leadership changed and they are trying to squeeze everything under their umbra, so it started to seem that google was doing services a discredit. Plus search engine optimization has really gone too far, kind of like how some magazines got worse and worse by giving you way too many ads. If you search for some topics you get three pages of ad's on a big monitor And then most of the results are fake web pages that seem to be put together by AI analysis!I am naturally starting to see anti monopoly measures as like a protection circuit for customers. If they trip it, usually they are not doing favors for you as a individual anymore.Lets see the youtube service, what did it turn into? 3 minutes of advertisements after you decide which 'funny face' to click on. Then you get up to three advertisements (often split up) built into the video, and 3-4 advertisements that are added to the video by robots, and advertisements on the side too shuffled into the videosI thought about making some kind of flexible LCD punching bag mouse, that shows the video picture title on the bag so you can punch whatever smug dirt bag in the teeth before you start it.And if you pay you just need to deal with (what will probobly increase with video editing easy tools) of a split sponsor advertisement in the video acted with less skill the a 6th grade play. Whatever offshoot of square space and nordvpn they have now.So I feel like kind of they are asking me to pay to dig through alot of garbage. As far as a paid service, cable TV is already bad by making you skip through channels lol, which were at least carefully managed, currated etc.I saw this scam before, a long time ago.https://www.amazon.com/Goldn-Gold-Paydirt-Eureka-Panning/dp/B01MF8ORC1It makes me think about another cultural shift too, where people seem to try to inject humor into everything to cover up deficiencies by trying to make you jolly (perfume mask). I notice it the most when someone is operating way outside of their knowledge area.. that sure seems like a easy way to get 'in' to something. I notice it the most with reboots of stuff, where they just are trying to follow a formula of rebooting something by making it better, but they don't understand the source material at all (or comprehend what went into it or what made it stand out and be worthy) and basically spam jokes.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 08:56:11 pm
content: Apparently there are complaints about Google automatically rewriting other peoples webpages, WITHOUT their permission or consent. For Google Searches, and to partly force users to stay within the Google Eco-system (Search).https://readwrite.com/google-begins-inserting-search-links-into-webpages/On the face of it, it sounds rather bad of Google, to do that.EDIT:(Seeing later post(s), and on reflection) I haven't explained it very well, sorry.Because I DON'T know that much about this thing (the antics Google gets up to, to try and maximize profits, while being (arguably) inconsiderate on the users rights etc), and DON'T know/understand when/how it can change webpages.Also, partly because I have NOT spent a lot of time, reading up on this development.Presumably (and the article seems to indicate it, from a quick skim of it), it is when the Google app, loads the web page) and/or Google's Chrome web browser is used.But I DON'T KNOW!But, I've seen the articles, raising concerns about it, and it doesn't sound fair at all.I.e. Google SHOULD NOT, be changing other peoples websites, so that it has Google links in it, by force (as I just stated, I'm NOT clear, when and how, Google is able to insert its links into the webpage).

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 09:02:41 pm
content: Lol it sounds like a manager, I had someone re-write my instruction manual and the result is approximately... oh boy... I can make a equation here... equation percent more wear and tear on the fixture.If we say for a any sample size, we have a 'wear unit' of 2. The rewritten instructions made the wear unit sample size times 2.So sample of 100, you get 'wear 2' with my instructions. With the clarified instructions, you get a wear unit of 200.And it would take at least 10 times longer and carry a great risk of damaging a certain part.....With a sample size of 1000, the total wear is 2 with proper instructions. With improved instructions it would be2000.Not to mention there is a penalty to measurement repeatability.This is because they thought they saw repetition. No sir, I had 2 pages of instructions for a reason, instead of 1 page. This shows how just reordering or clarifying something can be disastrous, assuming you don't delete or add something (potentially even worse, and it could happen). I assume it was somewhat skimmed, and maybe it looked annoying, but this is what a educated paid person can do. A computer..LOLAnd this is because they were given the task to make things presentable and fit within some kind of standard, the instruction was not related to improving my process. So a computerat bestwould do the same thing, because its just being tasked of 'neatening things up'.I am sorry I am telling you something, if you are not fighting with your editor, that is a big red flag. Its a discourse. Of course they have improvements, but the author needs to verify the edits to make sure the exact message is preserved.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 09:13:21 pm
content: Quote from: MK14 on December 20, 2024, 08:56:11 pmFirst of all,fuck Google and the horses they rode in on.Of course anything they touch is going to turn to shit. (Just look at the hatchet job they did on Usenet!) "Don't be evil"? They chucked that one out a loooong time ago.OK, with that out of the way, this is interesting:First of all, there may be a misunderstanding here, that Google can somehow reach into somebody's website and actually fuck with their code (HTML or whatever).This just isn't possible.However, Ithinkthat this refers to their displaying a version of somebody's web page that has extra stuff injected into it, which I believe is done via the URL. Like when you do a search on some text, and the search result pages show the web page with that text highlighted.This is not done by actually altering the text in the page, but by adding metadata to the URL that causes the user agent (browser) to highlight that text.I'm pretty sure that's how this works; please correct me if that's wrong.I find this annoying, especially when copying URLs to post somewhere (forum, email, etc.). However, it's easy enough to strip this crap out of the URL. In most cases you can simply look for the first instance of a question mark in the URL, which marks the start of metadata, and delete it and everything that follows. (There are cases where you don't want to use such a brute-force method, like if you're posting a YouTube link that starts at a certain time in the video; you need to preserve the?t=<start time>tag in the URL.)

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 09:17:15 pm
content: bro your talking like a doctorate in computer science to the lay man. the way more people use google is a magazine. they give you a message, it has your name or website on it, and its been reworded.chances are even if there is a easy countermeasure, the end user will get it wrong. its bad, end of storythe defacto result is that your getting something between censorship , obfuscation and the telephone gamein a high speed world where people have little time and experience, it can put your content in the dustIts funny how teachers used to tell us about the evils of internet research (because they had a classic education in research methods) in the 90-200's, but it was kinda bullshit, but now its not. Its like all those scenarios they postulated were non viable at the time but it became pretty plausible now

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 09:38:11 pm
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on December 20, 2024, 09:17:15 pmYeah, probably.BTW, the word you want there is "you're".QuoteI think a lot of teachers still forbid their students to use Wikipedia for research on papers. At least I hope they do. At least good teachers would.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 09:43:33 pm
content: well the thing is the topics they give typically work for wikipedia and it makes it seem fake but if you actually get a job doing some things and try the same stunt you will get completely ownedbut that is the usual problem of trying to get people to believe that whatever ur telling them will be required in the 'real world' even if it works in the training scenarioI think I ran into this problem when trying to write about nuclear reactors, which are a political subject. I started cross referencing the easy to get data I gathered because I thought a few things were suspicious and when I finally got into like... the sources that would be considered classically approved by research advocates with the correct trust level, I had a totally different idea about the subject then when what I got with the usual half assing. And I don't mean anything related to secrecy, just what a university would consider 'approved' for research writing.Scary to think about what policy would look like if someone writing a brief for a politician used those kinds of bad sources, the resulting policy decision and debate topics would be ridiculous, regardless if it was a pro or anti position.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 10:40:41 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on December 20, 2024, 09:13:21 pmWhat we use now is Google NT. They took the "n't" out of Don't be evil".

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2024, 10:52:56 pm
content: So anyway, no harm done, or meant. It's called playing hard, by various Native Americans where the tribe-mates play hard (and vicious, then they all 'forget the competition' and fall together in peace.I saw a jerky, repetitious comment, and reacted, done in 20 seconds.Some folks say to never react, in anger. But then I read an essay, where the person tried to argue that a person should ONLY react badly when angered. Basically saying to never react badly, unless under heat or passion of anger.(Don't strike coldly).Disagree, fine. But don't dismiss...that says the communication / info came from a habitual, 'complainer', that never has any real, substantial valid point...just wanting to complain about 'a cloud' hanging in front of house.Frank Zappa expressed the thought, that Rock Musicians are harmful, according to his critics.He responded, in sarcasm with:'My guitar wants to kill your Moma'.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2024, 02:40:10 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on December 20, 2024, 09:13:21 pmSorry, my original post was not very good. I've added an edit, to try and clear it up.Basically, I'm now saying, I don't really understand how Google are inserting links, into other peoples web sites, nor do I know when (e.g. possibly using a Google app and/or a Google web browser, Chrome). Additionally, I'm NOT sure, if the Google search results, can do stuff, to the links, which will subsequently, change the following web page. Etc.So, since I DON'T know or understand (how), I can't really answer your question.In summary. I've seen complaints about Googles interference with other peoples web sites, but my knowledge of how and when exactly, they are accomplishing it, is limited.I could guess, but it could easily lead to mistakes and misunderstandings, so I won't. (except to say, it may only or especially apply, when Google are displaying the web page(s), i.e. Google app and/or Google Chrome).

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2024, 03:16:57 am
content: To clarify, I had thoughts of Google getting into the low level coding on user's actual smartphone hardware. The URL stuff is, quite frankly, over my head in complexity.I was thinking, in terms of what I think is termed as a 'Vertical Monopoly', that is, where one single corporation has the whole ecosystem covered in their IP domain.Not even sure if that's a legal criteria, but it's when the company has the Android smartphone, the web interface, and much of the server software, although I'm not sure how much Google owns, in server territory, legally speaking.Server and URL details I don't know, but then, at tip-top of this vertical stack, would be the actual search engine, which obviously is IP or even the main IP ownership.So, if they (Google) own the hardware designs and do periodic firmware 'upgrades' it's easy to figure that they can do things like place a (tm) symbol, next to my name, Everytime I type it...a lame example but it's the low level activity right at the phone that enables all kinds of mischief.(If Google can get intimately involved, in the traffic flow of political news and dispensing search results, etc. then I've been figuring Ithat I, should be, also, able to freely bring up political subject matter, otherwise it's a heavily lopsided terrain, out here.HOWEVER, I can appreciate that many readers just don't want more, even if Google has the (heavy) politics oozing out of their pores.(So I'll try keep in mind, more technology and less ranty.)Main problem with the vertical monopoly thing is that Google can accomplish a kind of market dominance that has exclusion effect, to some very small start-up firms.Keyboard firmware, network interface, search engine, hardware and displays, all integrated and expensive to complete against.A start-up with some new networking functions has a steep uphill battle against the big guys...(That's probably getting into Monopoly law.)

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2024, 03:38:36 am
content: I don't know if keyboard firmware is such a safe nook someone can figure that out. High speed networks on the other hand might be somewhat harder due to the problems that you will only see when you work with a giant system.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2024, 04:05:57 am
content: Ok, I've looked into the issue, further.There are a number of articles about it, here is one of them:https://www.ghacks.net/2024/11/26/googles-ios-app-is-injecting-search-links-on-websites/Basically, it seems to only apply to Google app on IOS (Apple).Using 'Page Annotations'.The article seems to explain that (I might get this partly or more, wrong), it uses AI and adverts, to create selected links, and put them (insert) into the webpage, for advertising reasons, based on the AI, even though the original webpage, doesn't actually have any adverts.EEK, what a horrible, crazy, nasty thing to do!They (Google) have absolutely no right, to add AI generated advertising links, to other peoples websites, especially when the original website, doesn't even (necessarily) have any adverts on it.On the other hand, some apps (mobile), do incorporate adverts of various types, especially for free versions of their apps. E.g. Free Game apps.Even so, the webpages should be shown in their original presentation, in my opinion. If the free app, requires it, it should show the advert(s) independently of the webpage(s) and not interfere with them.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2024, 05:34:49 am
content: The really sucky thing here is that there are plenty of technophiles out there who will defend shit like this as great leaps forward for mankind and for "access to information" or some such bullshit.I don't hold out any hope for it, but I would totally rejoice if Google were to be broken up someday. The smaller the pieces, the better.

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2024, 06:09:58 am
content: From now on, though, I'm still going to try to not irk or irritate those who wish to have more purely electronics posted, generally.(It's just so tempting, to contribute political 'snark:.)- - Solstice now just a few hours ! - -

author: Shock
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2024, 08:08:50 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on December 20, 2024, 07:13:28 pmDon't need to imagine. When you say you're critically thinking and sprout nonsense that the other person didn't say that's enough evidence for me.There exists what I assume are webpage scripts/coding that allows the page/advert coder to exploit the browse back function. Assuming the browser isn't the cause the "go back" can normally be used multiple times quickly and preceed the page loading/script.This is going to be different on different browsers, but I've had a large amount of success doing this without too much additional thought. Unfortunately it's more annoying on mobile to land on the originial page due to how pages are closed if you go back too far and that it's not obvious where the forward browse button is.TLDR: Hit back several times fast and pray.

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2024, 12:21:05 am
content: Generally has been up to 12 pokes, on the back key. Roughly 8 to 12 pokes.Often keeps playing lPAST the 12 attempts, pushing on the back key,It even continues, playing the unwanted video, then goes quiet.In all fairness, sometimes only takes 4 or 5 presses, on BACK arrow.Any pokes there will do normal sounding 'beep' acknowledgement.But, I thought some replies imply that any confirmation efforts were 'unneeded' but I did some checking, as I do other things.When I get past about 8 pushes on the BACK arrow, and that loud shit keeps going, I try verbal cursing...in vain, or I guess I curse quietly, just moving the lips.So, nobody else views the phone itself, as vulnerable to external downloads ? Downloads to upgrade the Android system happen, periodically. Or, do we just consider the server as able to modify the 'command' response, of requesting 'go back' ?

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2024, 12:36:20 am
content: Sounds like the phone is just a bit too slow and gets stuck playing the video (which is hardware accelerated, relatively little CPU usage).

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2024, 01:47:04 am
content: Actually, now that I'm attempting to follow the server functions, I do remember noticing very quick flashes, of a screen that I recognize, from minutes earlier. That means a fraction of a second time duration, before escaping the stuff being viewed and putting up the regular 'idle' phone screen. (idle meaning ready to start typing in whichever search term a new search will get.)So that's what was meant, by the musing, to lush the back arrow repeating really fast.

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2024, 01:51:29 am
content: But NO, Google isn't, personally 'after' myself, THAT illustrated my point, right there, on the whole, cheap shot, gaslighting thing.A personal thing, with Google the perpetrator ?

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2024, 02:14:29 am
content: Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't after you.

author: Shock
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2024, 02:34:46 am
content: Running a stock android or iphone leaks endless data anyway. You might as well enjoy the free video before they paywall their advert spam.But seriously on that subject, google only offers advert space on pages and they aren't checking every single advert constantly rotated so consider it all unsafe clicking, and get a popup blocker if you want to block popups.

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2024, 03:05:11 am
content: (I've witness paranoid people, but don't know too much about it. They tend to self-treat with alcohol and lash out in a distinctive manner, that being issuing sudden spurts of loud yelling, some I've seen even crying same time.Their face seems to contort into hostile expressions. Heavy cigarette use, too, for some reason. But the whole package of those people I don't have much more about that, except to say a professional skilled in treatment knows.)But for Google, it's each person as a marketing target, that's what I meant, not like it's a personal thing, like a stalker or something.We Americans get their education on the mentally ill, by way of movies...not a sophisticated deal.So, anyway, as to the server needing 'fast' clicking on the GO BACK arrow, that sounds possible. I've been seeing what I termed 'quick flashbacks' when pressed go back and had assumed it's just Android Chrome failing to clear out an old screen, from 10 minutes ago.I've seen that happen, maybe couple times a week, or less.