As much as I agree the 30% cut can be a bit steep, I do appreciate that part of it is going into ongoing R&D like Steam Deck and Proton benefiting the whole gaming industry. I'd like to think of it like Valve are investing into PC innovation similarly to the way Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo do for their new consoles.

The problem isn't so much blocking the ads on a page, that's a solved problem, it's doing so without incurring side effects. The main problem usually comes in two ways.

1. Ads are now being pre-baked into the content delivery itself in which there is no easy way to rip it out without destroying the content in some way. Twitch is notorious for this on streams where the ad portion completely replaces the video feed before your browser ever sees what was originally there. You may never recover what was there, but if you try to block the ad playing you trigger problem 2.

2. There are departments dedicated to developing ever changing anti-adblock scripts and detectors that enforce ad placements and detect tampering. In some cases this results in punishing the user by refusing to deliver content until the ads load, blocking or kicking the user off the page, throttling connections or access, or in Twitch's egregious case, more invasive ad interruptions. This has become a never ending arms race with ad blockers to keep up with minefield of invasive scrips monitoring what you do with their website.

TLDR: Ad blockers like UBlock Origin are already filtering how you're asking for bur advertisers are attacking the plugins themselves and have their own arms race of scripts to punish those who interfere.

This plus constantly running out of ammo because apparently the inside of every enemy skull is just hammerspace for more ammunition than the US military budget could ever afford. God forbid a stray shot hits your porcelain character, Thanos snapping you to dust at so much as a stubbed toe.

a nation so hardworking...

Or hardly working given how backwards and out of date the work culture is, but sure let's make this out to be the fault of employees who are likely overworking due to low pay. An extra day off isn't going to fix the systemic cultural issues, class discrimination, xenophobia... the list could go on and on.

Calling this innovative when Japan has yet to modernize its business practices, or admitting it's an issue, is disingenuous at best.

Sums up every Node project I've had the displeasure of looking at. The lock file being the only thing holding the twisted web of versions keeping that franken-app running between a minefield of incompatibilities and buggy hacks.

Ah yes, just Australian wildlife things. We don't have currawongs up here in QLD but we still have butcher birds earning their namesake.

Same with Express/Nord VPN sponsorships. Many people debunked the adverising BS they were spinning about blocking tracking when really it only masked a tiny subset.

As someone who studied infosec, those ads were infuriating. Now I just sponsor block it all because I'm beyond tired of it.

God help us all if we have to break out the Emus

Is it just me or are these stories getting a little bit 'competitive' on the worst possible accusations with lessening citations. All I could find on this are 15+yr old articles and Instagram/Tiktok influencers.

We have truly distilled humanity's confident stupidity into its most efficient form.

Hahaha, I wish.

You would be amazed at how ancient and poorly maintained many web servers are on the modern internet. SQL injection still consistently make the top 3 web app vulnerabilities as of 2021. If that isn't being sanitized properly I don't expect emojis would be handled much better.

Through a low tech social engineering attack referred to as SIM Jacking, an attacker can have your number moved to their SIM card, redirecting all SMS 2FA codes effectively making the whole thing useless as a security measure. Despite this, companies still implement it out of both laziness and to collect phone numbers (which is often why SMS MFA is forced)