Postosuchus

Disney (CTV) doesn't take any open auction demand. All their programmatic demand is deals - meaning that they carefully plan those campaigns with highly reputable agencies and advertisers. There is zero chance for a contentious scammy crypto exchange ad (or even a moderately innocent crypto wallet one) to show on their properties.

Which you can absolutely do, when you are Disney (read, agencies fight to run a campaign with you). When you are, let's say, TechCrunch, the situation changes - you can still strike some deals but a lot of your demand is not the same grade.

If you really read what I wrote above - there is no "monolith" (and yes, Google is everyone's favorite Boogeyman). AdTech is a primordial pool all kinds of actors, each of which has found a profitable niche to "add value" (or to bullshit partners about "adding value").

I think we currently are - but not because of online ads. :-)

My main concern is supply chain attacks. I'm afraid, the frequency and sophistication of such attacks will only increase, thanks to really powerful LLMs. From there - to running keyloggers and stealing your bank credentials etc.

I don't have any conflict of interest. I'm proud of my work and I think it is great. I personally dislike ads as much as the other guy, but I am pragmatic and I have enough sense to understand that this economics has flourished because it maximizes common good: content creators are incentivised to produce good content and get properly and sustainably rewarded, regular users don't get nickel and dimed every time they load some web page.

To paraphrase Churchill, it is a terrible model but others are worse.

Obvious sarcasm aside, I compel you to ponder on this question next time you read "free" content on the web (a newspaper, a dedicated niche site or anything in between).

You have to be specific what you mean by "ads" then. If you mean creatives that ultimately rendered - you are absolutely correct. I don't have any stats handy to check the ratio between the two to estimate the number of unique creatives, but I believe it is a) several orders of magnitude smaller but b) still very very large.

And again, we are talking about logical creative (the actual visible part). Click URLs and such will definitely be different.

No, it's not. It completely upsets the economics of content management and makes it absolutely impractical for content owners to monetize through ads. No ad revenue would be worth such liability.

Then there are all kinds of fun scenarios - from drive-by malware to landing page malware to malware served after clicking an ad ON A LANDING PAGE. Who would assume responsibility for those?

Bottom line, this is not much different from "regular" crime. It happens. Governments employ police and various deterrents to reduce it. But it doesn't relieve you, the citizen, of responsibility to be mindful and exercise situational awareness.

You clearly misunderstand the sheer scale of online advertising (compared to linear TV ads, magazine ads etc). There is no chance you can vet every single creative and a landing page (one public number is 30B daily ads just served by Google alone in 2012 - which is probably closer in spirit to the Punic Wars than to 2026).

That's the first point. Now, who should be responsible for getting the ads? The website? That will absolutely kill the monetization model and it is simply unrealistic. Which means, that responsibility now should be pinned on someone else. Who would that be? My point being that no one there has an inherent lawful obligation to provide such vetting, which would be a) costly and b) only applicable to one player (out of many).

And then we get to bad actors. If I were a really motivated bad actor as early as in 2005, I was serving different creatives and different landing pages to different audiences - a perfectly well-behaved ones to Google's crawlers (again, Google does A LOT to fight malware), a questionable quality clicky ones to general audiences and maybe malware-ridden ones to specifically targeted audiences. And you would not be able to catch me in real time - only after the fact, once the campaign was run and someone looked at the evidence (assuming it was collected, which it isn't normally)

This is probably a wrong audience. Most people here are very technical - the kind that would not put up with tiptoeing around a sacred computer from decades ago running some magic software from the DOS era. This crowd will aggressively move it to modernized architecture or at least emulate it using a more modern platform.

The company I worked at in the late nineties, used Managing Your Money (MYM) for bookkeeping - initially on a dedicated DOS machine. My colleague set up a DOSEMU-based emulator and moved the software to it (bye-bye, dedicated DOS machine!). Later, he re-wrote it in STk (Scheme w/ Tk bindings, running natively in Linux) as ageneral-purpose transaction storage. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This!

I've had a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for 2 years, constantly trying to get Linux off the ground on it. Didn't happen (well, technically, toward the end of that period, there was an unsupported port of Ubuntu but it lacked half the drivers). And yes, when I bought it there was a very similar announcement from Qualcomm promising first-class Linux support. So I wouldn't gamble on it (especially considering that prices are crazy) until there indeed is a supported distro.

Hmm... Is it an experiment? I'm seeing all reviews both on the web and in the app (Android phone).

Having said so, I am not hopeful. Amazon has gone the enshittification route with the gusto few companies have. And they've been actively (and gleefully) making some of the most useful features near useless. This can be seen most pointedly with order history search. Whereas in the past searching for a string brought up the past orders based on string match, now trying to search for a given term brings up gobs of past orders with items having absolutely no relevance to that search term. My cynical theory here is that someone "improved" order search by bolting on "AI."

It pains me a lot. I've been a fiercely loyal Amazon customer since 1994 and for a long time they've been the most customer-obsessed company out there. I can't even describe how different things are now.

Looks like you haven't seen what they've done with Order Search. Being a customer since 1994 (yes, when they just came out as a neat way to buy books online), my order history has been an invaluable reference allowing me to find that thing I bought 5 years ago, its specific and the price I paid. Now, instead of a good old substring search, they do some kind of insane fuzzy search which comes up with hundreds of absolutely irrelevant results. They've made it completely unusable.

But I'm sure a good bunch of people got promoted for "enhancing" the search with AI...

It used to be pretty popular for mathematical modeling in quantitative finance.