Using an ad-blocking DNS server solves most of those problems. Mullvad offers a public DNS server with no account required, but there are plenty of options out there.

You should still use a browser extension on top of that for pattern-based URL blocking, but a DNS-based blocker should be your first line of defense.

A good ad-blocker goes a long way. You can block all Google domains with minimal impact to non-Google services.

30 years ago, maybe. Post-Napster, not relevant. Most online piracy is non-commercial now, and it’s still illegal across most of the world.

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn’t help. Everything about environment management is insane.

This doesn’t seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.

In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.

Honestly, I don’t find this very creepy. This is information you are already putting out there for everyone to see. If I post a video of myself speaking, I am not concerned about people seeing how my skin vibrates in that video.

As video generation tools become more advanced, we will need better algorithms to validate videos. The bar for “fooling the vast majority of humans” is much, much lower than the bar for “being literally indistinguishable from a real video”. The main problem I see is that it’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game, and I don’t think any method you publish will remain valid for very long in practice. The same method will be used to improve the next version of video generators.

Also, lots of real videos use post-processing that might wash out some of the details they are looking for. Video producers might re-record lines so they don’t perfectly match the video to begin with. It’s been a long time since I used a Samsung phone, but on my old S6, I remember that it always had a beauty filter applied to the selfie camera that made me me look like a creepy porcelain doll. I could probably make a deepfake of myself that looks more “real” than those real videos and photos.