fouc

If you want to do business with the US (either directly by selling/buying to/from them, or indirectly by using US equipment) you need to comply with US export control regulations as they apply internationally. Even if you are a Dutch company wanting to make chips at TSMC you need to make sure your chips are US export control compliant. TSMC may be a pure play foundry in reality they can’t make anything nor sell to anyone. Don’t get me wrong, it is messed up but that’s the reality. The EU has similar regulations but they only apply to the internal market which makes more sense.

Ubuntu was a fantastic distribution to start early on. Especially in the pre-10.x days there weren’t many beginner friendly ones. Your alternatives were Debian with very outdated software, SuSE which was kind of OK, Fedora which was also quite unstable and lacking packages (remember hunting RPMs on the old RPMfusion?) or Ubuntu. At some point I’d outgrown Ubuntu and moved on to greener pastures. Nowadays I’m not sure I’d be recommending Ubuntu to new users, Fedora is quite good and without all the snap store shenanigans. Even Debian installation experience is not too bad and it’s not lacking too much in software.

Unfortunately what’s going to happen in reality is that any non-standard ad consumption (including non consumption) will be flagged as fraudulent. “We cannot verify your activity, please disable your add-ons to continue”.

It literally lists countering ad-blocking as a use case.

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.

While I’m not opposed to paying for YouTube (it is a service after all) the only way to do so would be by being logged in to YouTube with whatever black box algorithmic tracking and curation that entails. There is no “proper” way to anonymously access YouTube without ads.

There are enough power hungry people ready to jump in the first opportunity they get to moderate