As far as we know, Google is not giving up any data. The crawler still must store a copy of the text for the index. The only certainty we have is that Google is no longer sharing it.

Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem:

Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.

From the article:

“was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” (emphasis added)

Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search.

You can also use 12ft.io.

Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the “Google Bot” web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

The pages aren’t necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

“Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we’ll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”

It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world’s webpages.

The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.

Bingo. When I read that part of the article, I felt insulted. People see the web getting increasingly enshitified and less accessible. The increased need for cached pages has justified the existence of 12ft.io.

~40% of my web access is now dependant on archive.org and 12ft.io.

So yes, Google is obviously bullshitting. Clearly there is a real reason for nixing cached pages and Google is concealing that reason.

This is probably an attempt to save money on storage costs.

That’s in fact what the article claims as Google’s reason. But seems irrational. Google still needs to index websites for the search engine. So the storage is still needed since the data collection is still needed. The only difference (AFAICT) is Google is simply not sharing that data. Also, there are bigger pots of money in play than piddly storage costs.

Normal users don’t have these issues.

That’s not true. Cloudflare marginalizes both normal users and street-wise users. In particular:

• users whose ISP uses CGNAT to distribute a limited range of IPv4 addresses (this generally impacts poor people in impoverished regions)
• the Tor community
• VPN users
• users of public libraries, and generally networks where IP addresses are shared
• privacy enthusiasts who will not disclose ~25% of their web traffic to one single corporation in a country without privacy safeguards
• blind people who disable images in their browsers (which triggers false positives for robots, as scripts are generally not interested in images either)
• the permacomputing community and people on limited internet connections, who also disable browser images to reduce bandwidth which makes them appear as bots
• people who actually run bots – Cloudflare is outspokenly anti-robot and treats beneficial bots the same as malicious bots
• …

There are likely more oppressed groups beyond that because there is no transparency with Cloudflare.

It’s an abuse of the fediverse and antithetical to #decentralization to use Cloudflare. And ironically your comment comes in response to broken functionality manifesting from links to exclusive venues appearing in an openly public forum.

#digitalExclusion

Shame this is posted on a centralized Cloudflare instance, which causes problems for people using Tor,VPNs,CGNAT,etc:

Ungoogled Chromium indeed reproduces the issue. But so does the public library, which likely was Firefox in Windows. So i guess it might be hasty to conclude that it’s browser specific, particularly when other videos on the same instance behave differently in the same browser.

It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.

Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped – just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd… Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?

I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.

You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.

Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?

If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.

That’s is how I got around it in the past. For some reason that was not an option where I needed it (perhaps the browser I was using was locked down in some way). In any case, I’m wondering why the variation in behavior. Is this a bug in Invidious?

Why would a browser handle it incorrectly for one video on one invidious instance, but not for most other videos and other instances?

Note that I’ve seen this broken behavior both in my own Chromium installation as well as Firefox in Windows as a public library.

Thanks for pointing that out. It works for me too. I just happened to select a different instance where it actually works. Here’s the instance where it’s broken:

https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

First time I’ve seen this bot. I would be interested in learning how to cross-post from #kbin to #Lemmy in a way that preserves the original username the way this bot did. Is that possible without 3rd party tools? I can login to a Lemmy instance and then crosspost any Kbin thread to a Lemmy community, but then the author becomes myself, not the original Kbin author.

#askFedi

The difference is that grabbing it pre-FTA is also grabbing a perfect copy. The quality may not matter to many of us, but to some it does. And because it matters to some, major copyright holders have started to treat unlicensed exchanges as “competition” from a business PoV (which is a concession from strictly seeing it as crime). So their business strategy is to compete with the unlicensed channels by offering perfect quality media at a price (they hope) people are willing to pay (also in part to avoid the inconvenience and dodgyness of the black market).

FWiW, that’s their take and it’s why they get extra aggressive when the unlicensed version is perfect.

I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.

Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.

We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.

1. I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).

I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.

oh, that’s interesting. I wonder if card-issuing banks are blocking balance inquiries even if ATMs offer it. I don’t think I saw Ing ATMs in Netherlands, only the conglomerate they are partnered with (geldmaat). The Geldmaat ATMs print “credit limit” on the receipt.

If you search, you’ll learn several privacy-abusing ways to do that via enshitified exclusive walled gardens which share the site you’re asking about with US tech giants and treat users of VPNs, Tor, and CGNAT with hostility.

• ❌https://downdetector.com/ ← avoid (Cloudflare)
• ❌https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ ← avoid (Cloudflare); I think #downforeveryoneorjustme was one of the 1st of this kind but then it got greedy and became exclusive
• 🤷https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ ← meh (inclusive of everyone for the moment, but uses CF DNS so could spontaneously proxy through CF; broken on lynx because 1st party js req’d)
• ✓#downinspector ← decent, lesser of evils (CF-free & always inclusive of everyone, but does not work on lynx and requires JS; it pushes CF JS but still works if you only run 1st party js)

I only listed 2 bad ones (the 1st two) but when you search the first dozen results are shit. What could be more shitty than being directed to CAPTCHAs and other exclusive bullshit in the course of trying to troubleshoot a problem?

Also, the community we’re in here is “nostupidquestions”.

There’s also an onion one but I lost track of it.

I figured you were trolling but gave you the benefit of the doubt right up until you mentioned “all credit reporting agencies”, in Belgium. There are no credit bureaus in Belgium, only a central bank which (unlike US credit bureaus) is public sector and not interested in grabbing data for profit, or in obtaining any data it’s not legally required to obtain.

Nice try though.

But FYI, your assumption would be wrong even in the US as well. Request your credit report from whichever credit bureau you believe is buying location data from your mobile phone provider. Notice the realtime location data is not on that report. Then go to your local small claims court and spend ~$100 to open a lawsuit against them for $1k (+~100 in court costs). Bring to court proof that they acquired your realtime CDMA/GSM location data, a copy of your credit report showing it’s not there, and a copy of the federal law requiring that consumer credit reports are complete when sent to the subject of the report (yourself). It might be the easiest $1k you’ve earned. You don’t have to prove actual damages either because the statute specifies $1k per violation. If you can catch all three credit bureaus doing what you claim, that’s an easy $3k. You can even hit all 3 in one case. Good luck!

BTW, I don’t put much stock into what you’re saying at this point but I am curious about the claim that phone providers are sharing sensitive personal info with Visa and Mastercard. Cardholders are just a number to visa & mc. Visa & MC do not even typically know the names of card holders. Exceptionally, if you buy airfare using a credit card, then the airline reveals the name of the passenger to the credit card company. Though to store that name as the account holder is ad hoc because they would have to make the assumption that the passenger and the buyer are the same person.

Dutch ATMs give a balance.