Why just pick on Meta? YouTube is also a haven for scam advertising. That robot AI puppy ad has been running for *weeks*, despite thousands of people reporting it and tweets to @teamyoutube on X who simply say "leave it with us, we'll look into it" -- yeah, on what timescale?

The reality is that big-tech is not interested in protecting users of their services, they're only interested in the bottom line and a scammer's money is as good as anyone's.

How is it that YouTube can take down *millions* of videos and masses of channels for "scams and deceptive practices" yet can't act in a timely fashion when blatant scam ads infest the platform?

It's not because they can't, it's because they choose not to -- and that ought to make them every bit as culpable as Meta.

In fact, I think there's an argument that if, after being made aware that an ad is a scam, the platform continues to run that ad then they should be charged with conspiracy to defraud and face criminal charges. That might smarten-up their responses a little.

Things are OK. Eh.

Rabbit ear antenna?

So, play the TikTok card. French email clients to be owned by the French. Or crazy punitive laws will be passed.

What's good for the goose ...

Elon should just have blocked X in the EU.

Or perhaps a tab between peace and war.

Damn, I was a happy Firefox user for years... now I'll have to try and avoid AI using some other browser.

Don't you think a smart company would have surveyed their market before making such an announcement?

It's much easier to keep customers happy and attract new ones if you give them what THEY want, rather than what you think they want.

... there's still lynx.

There's already a brokerage that strives to improve customer equity by passing all of its traffic through a fiber optic delay line.

The other option would be to detect some level of cancelled trades or dropped connections and, upon passing some threshold, lock out that account. It can be reset by having Bob Cratchit head down to the server room in the basement and manually log on to a console. Please be patient. The stairs are steep, Bob is old and has nothing more than an oil lamp to light his way.

... Slashdot editing continues to wreak havoc with the English language.

Really? Turn it off and some old but critical piece of gear fails. Quick! Turn it back on.

Years later: Does anyone know why this crufty piece of garbage is still enabled? No? Turn it off. Again, some old but critical piece of gear fails. Rinse and repeat.

It's often cheaper to move the power to where it's needed than to move the workers to where the power is generated.

True. I used to work for one of those. They were always trying to figure out how to offload maintenance and construction onto subcontractors. And just sit around, read meters and collect bills. It turns out that the meter-reading (which they had also sub'ed out) is easy to do. And the market took note of that and cut their ROI to the bone. They were de-listed from the stock market and went private as a subsidiary of an investment fund. Which is principally held by the construction companies doing their heavy lifting. And making big bucks doing so.

It turns out that capital markets are pretty good at spotting situations where the marginal cost of a product is low or zero. And then cutting the fair PE ratio to match. Except for where it will take a few years to figure the market and products out (AI for example). And then the salesmen drop that segment like a no longer hot potato and spin up a new scam.

It turns out that there is always money to be made as a reward for continuting real efforts. It's just not the sexiest part of the economy.

... where there is a spare nuke just sitting around, unused.

Leaving the groomers aside, there are probably more than a few people here involved in building digital products for kids. And one of the most important features of those products is leveraging peer pressure to create demand among its community of users (kids).