Ads aren't just annoying, they're often malicious and downright dangerous. Linking to apps with 0 click subscriptions, illegal porn or with recurring card payments and banking trojans. God forbid you're in the crypto space, every fucking ad is a scam or malicious, people lose their whole life savings to scams pushed through Google ads every day and there is no easy way to stop them. I run an ad blocker because Google is useless at stopping illegal scams and has been for a very long time. Google should have a policy to ban any crypto services name from adwords unless the ad is from verified from the service the word is about. It's not rocket science, but it'd hit the bottom line so until then eat adblock.
I've been a victim of google's vastly inadequate ad vetting on at least three occasions and I'm pretty savvy.
That's a lot of words, and I'm sure the pain you feel and need for Google to maintain a registry of crypto ads you find acceptable is real. But, an excuse is an excuse.
I'm all for conspiracies when they don't cause harm, you think the earth is flat and chemtrails control your mind good for you buddy, now I know not to trust your judgement. But once you've go nevermaskers and antivaxers running around infecting and killing people, or pizzagaters shooting up restaurants the hands off approach becomes a public health issue. Conspiracy theorists have gone from benign to damn dangerous to have around.
It seems to me that conspiracy theories have also evolved from being mostly apolitical to being very based lately. It could be argued that the act of voting when being so blatantly misinformed and misled is itself a danger to the public.
Yeah, That pissed me off too, It stank of petrochemical company bribery or willful ignorance.
That said they still produce some quality journalism and I wouldn't write off an entire news organization for one shitty decision (to back a bad review).
Just like I don't judge all of Tesla for the fact they don't separate their freeway and street driving data so we can properly analyze their self driving crash statistics misleading potential customers.
A lot of the issues you raise with popcorntime come down to not enough users and not enough seeders, and those problems are caused largely because people are scared of the legal repercussions. So it's an artificial limitations to the service's success not technical ones.
OK let's go with that hypothesis and say you do have enough seeders and there are no legal repercussions for seeding. Let's be even more generous and say the protocol incentivizes seeding with Bitcoin. If you take all the seeders' content and put it in well connected data centers that have high bandwidth connections to ISPs, would you not at the very least provide faster streaming? Why would users choose the slower 1000-seeders network over the 10-high-bandwidth-data-centers network?
> Why would users choose the slower 1000-seeders network over the 10-high-bandwidth-data-centers network?
Because Level3's peering agreements with Verizon/Comcast are under negotiation and the 10 high bandwidth data center owners don't want to set a precedent of paying more for a pipe because the end users want it (and are paying both services already), so the streams get throttled. But with a decentralized world, maybe it's harder to track a bunch of small packets that never leave the Verizon/Comcast network.
The post I was replying to was talking about us discussing technical limitations, not artificial ones. Whether or not ISPs throttle streaming is an artificial limitation. You're right that the decentralized solution would have censorship resistance so would be free of this limitation. This is the biggest (only?) value in decentralizing a system. However, it still would be less performant than its centralized alternative if you remove the artificial limits.
Another advantage is that the costs would be lower for the streaming provider, which could mean that the costs for the user are lower (although it should only be marginal for services such as Netflix). Furthermore the speed could be higher because the data often doesn't need to travel far and I don't have to worry about if my ISP has good private peering. While those limitations could be considered artifical, it is much easier to prevent them by having a distributed network and thus not be bound by a few agreements and have hundreds of thousands alternative routes, some which might be ultra fast because they are your neighbor.
But the customer info turned over is not necessarily the guilty party either. If you have free wifi in your cafe now you're responsible for anything illegal your clients do?
I've been a victim of google's vastly inadequate ad vetting on at least three occasions and I'm pretty savvy.