Yeah I’m here like “what are we even talking about? What company is doing this over just reading badge swipe data?”

I know smaller companies might not have badging systems that can provide such analytics (or badging systems at all), but the Amazon anecdote smells fishy to say the least.

Maybe even 'terminators'

Not to mention that they have general council, who are lawyers but also just employees.

Writable NFC cards are pretty cheap on Aliexpress and Amazon, they're writable with most any NFC enabled phone and apps like "NFC Tools" that let you input a uri.

If you don't have a Plex server like the OP, you could use a link to the streaming service you use.

This is a fine mentality when it takes a certain amount of "Internet street smarts" (a term used in the article) to access the internet - at least beyond AOL etc.

But over half of the world has internet access, mostly via Chrome (largely via Android inclusion). At least some frontline protection (that can be turned off) is warranted when you need to cater to at least the millions of people who just started accessing the internet today, and the billions who don't/can't/won't put the effort in to learn those "Internet street smarts".

Mainly the theory that, if you can’t use downloaders to download videos, then people will no longer see YT as the go-to platform for any video hosting and will consider alternatives.

And I call that a theory for a reason. Creators can still download their videos from YT Studio, I'm not sure how much importance there is on being able to download any video ever (and worst case scenario people could screen recording videos)

i'd argue that 95%+ of users (creators and viewers) couldn't care less about downloading videos. creators use youtube because it's where the viewers and money are, viewers use youtube because it's where all the content is. none of them are going to jump ship if yt-dlp dies.

also, one could assume that the remaining 5% are either watching with vlc/mpv/etc or running an adblocker. so it's not like google is going to lose ad revenue by breaking downloaders like yt-dlp. grandparent comment (legacy smart TV support) is the much more likely explanation

It's not the 95% you're concerned about, it's the 1%, or 0.0001%, who are top content creators, who both archive their own production and use YT as a research tool themselves (whether simple "reply videos" or something more substantive). Ultimately Google will kill the goose and lose the eggs.

Those creators are what drive the the bulk of viewers to the platform.

Though, come to think of it, as YT's become increasingly obnoxious to use (the native Web client is utterly intolerable, front-ends such as Invidious are increasingly fragile/broken, yt-dlp is as TFA notes becoming bogged down in greater dependencies) I simply find myself watching (or as my preference generally is, listening) to far less from the platform.

I may be well ahead of the pack, but others may reach similar conclusions in 5--10 years. Or when a less-annoying alternative clearly presents itself.

*and whose only customers are using it for AI training

They can afford it because the market rightfully bets on such trained models being more useful than upstream sources.

In fact, at this point in time (it won't last), one of the most useful applications of LLMs is to have them deal with all the user-hostile crap that's bulk of the web today, so you don't have to suffer through it yourself. It's also the easiest way to get any kind of software interoperability at the moment (this will definitely not last long).

The problem is that this was a vulnerability in Notion without any mitigations or safeguards against it.

> I'd love some case studies or anecdotes about the real-world threats that using an old devices exposes me to.

The Apple patch in the OP is in regards to a zero-interaction exploit that compromised the device to install spyware etc.

> Impact: Processing a malicious image file may result in memory corruption. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.

> specific targeted individuals.

Isnt this exactly the point? Most people who aren't the target of state intelligence agencies have little to worry about from using an older phone.

Those exploits trickle down to less sophisticated actors as they become known.

That's the idea, but I'm not seeing it

Maybe that's because of the boogeyman being feared and so people update enough to make such attacks not common enough to be worth it, so once we stop fearing it... but idk. So far it hasn't mattered to have devices with Bluetooth vulnerabilities at hacker conferences of all places