Thats a good question that I would like to understand better. On first glimpse, FF provides protection “against fingerprinting by blocking third-party requests to companies that are known to participate in fingerprinting”.

Maybe that targeted approach is as good or better than heuristics but will take a closer look later.

Very interesting ... sort of surprised to see digitalocean leading on an onion service:

DigitalOcean provides Onion Routed Cloud as an application in its marketplace. All you need to do is click ‘Deploy’ and the script will automatically configure ORC on a Ubuntu 18.04 server.

It is such a simple, quiet extension it was not clear to me if it did anything. Was surprised to see how much design went into it.

Pretty good list.

In terms recommending Privacy Badger, I was recently reading privacy possum’s analysis of it (he says he worked on PB at eff for 6 months) and how it drops the ball somewhat on fingerprinting

Here is a link: https://github.com/cowlicks/privacypossum

and a main point is this:

Privacy Badger's fingerprinting blocking has a large deficiency, when fingerprinting is detected, the origin is marked as tracking (not the URL). So everything from that origin is blocked in a 3rd party context. This is a problem because it can lead you to block everything from a cdn. To get around this, Privacy Badger adds CDN's to the "cookieblock list". This prevents cookies from being sent to origin's on the list. However, it then prevents fingerprinting scripts from being blocked, thus allowing fingerprinting.

I’d be curious to hear about other addons like decentraleyes, etc.

While it would be enjoyable to see someone take down this idea that egregious wealth consolidation at the top is OK so long as the rest of the world is equally serfish, I agree with this:

Unfortunately, much gloomier forecasts seem more plausible. The trade and technology war between China and the United States, while perhaps understandable from a narrow U.S. strategic point of view, is fundamentally pernicious from the global point of view. It will prevent the spread of technology and hamper improvements in living standards across large swaths of the world.

And then sites that will not serve users who are not using technocracy approved browsers like this new Chrome with built-in forbid lists, tracking, and compulsory advertising.

It is a little sad/ironic that decentralised spaces rely on centralised services to reach audiences, a bit like bitcoin largely depending on fiat. One of my problems with something like peertube or ipfs is not being able to find much content — which is traditionally solved by centralised indexing.

Perhaps this is an opportunity to improve discoverability issues.

“fediverse” apps (groups of interconnected servers used for web publishing) from the Play Store

Not sure about always. Wouldn’t an attention seeking troll posting something controversial enjoy tons of comments instead of downvotes? I guess a protocol is to upvote your favourite dissent instead of commenting?

Without a downvote button on an open, largely user moderated forum, you may very well start seeing more users appeal to mods. For example: “mods, can you remove/ban any Delete Facebook comments? OP is clearly asking how best to use it privately, not delete it”

What’s next? Facebook starts crying foul when ios 14 shows apps secretly accessing the microphone?

there were some 700,000 young mink on fur farms in the Netherlands, national statistics agency CBS said last week.

ug

Great point. Flashing back to hours spent scouring hkey local_machine..._run, services.msci, add/remove What a nightmare windows is.

Fair enough ... in some places the habitat "comes alive" around March 21 and seems like a start of something new as opposed to everything frozen solid in Jan, but advocating for marking the rebirth of the sun has been working great for millennia.

Especially if this is true:

Facebook’s stock jumped more than 5% on the news. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter said the market sees Apple’s new rule as likely to shift demand toward Facebook’s own targeting system.

http://www.dailyjournal.net/2020/08/26/us-facebook-apple-revenue/

I noticed you left Facebook out of that forbid list. It would be funny if they took React proprietary.

Zuck and Cook should settle this the old fashioned way

“Ink-a-dink, a bottle of ink," I recited as I pointed back and forth between the two boys, "the cork fell out, and you stink."

I would go so far as to say that earth based calendars might benefit from starting at an equinox instead of the height of (winter or summer), months should start at new moon, and days should start around sunrise instead of the middle of night. Space travellers will need a more universal calender.

Permanent, year-round standard time is the best choice to most closely match our circadian sleep-wake cycle

That note about plaintext email trended on another site and I thought it smelled like turd. This fact about it originating from a MS employee puts it in a proper light.

The author of the criticism, and sr.ht site operator, has some interesting commentary. His comments after mozilla layoffs were pretty blunt.

IMO, MS has embraced not just github and npm but node js itself and seems a threat to embrace extend extinguish javascript engines and committee standards.

Today, I discovered this article, “Relying on plain-text email is a ‘barrier to entry’ for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member”, a title which conveniently chooses to refer to Sarah Novotny by her role as a Linux Foundation board member, rather than by her full title, “Sarah Novotny, Microsoft employee, transitive owner of GitHub, and patroness saint of conflicts of interests.”

In version 3, users are no longer clicking on school buses and crosswalks but rather the google script silently observes our regular page interactions in the background, making a determination of the user (or bot) based on behaviour fed into algorithms derived from machine learning. That is a scary aspect of it, we don’t know when we are being observed.

I know many people love HBO, but it would be nice to see some other alternative arise to this entity owned by the AT&T beast.

On October 22, 2016, AT&T announced an offer to acquire Time Warner for $108.7 billion (including assumed Time Warner debt). The proposed merger was confirmed on June 12, 2018,after AT&T won an antitrust lawsuit that the U.S. Justice Department filed in 2017 to attempt to block the acquisition.[9] The merger closed two days later, with the company becoming a subsidiary of AT&T. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarnerMedia)

Example EFF suit against ATT: https://www.eff.org/document/scott-v-att-geolocation-complaint

EFF is now suing AT&T for selling this data without users’ consent and for misleading the public about its privacy practices

I spent about 5 minutes looking for a good link and could not find one on a privacy respecting site -- was the best I could find as cnbc bounced me for adblocking.

I do not know much about android development and its development norms and practices, but I do wish customer service would refrain from bringing geopolitics into their support cases.

What appears to be their github seems pretty stale: https://github.com/onyx-intl

hard to find a link that isn’t full of trackers and adblock blockers

Facebook on Wednesday acknowledged that Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 could lead to a more than 50% drop in its Audience Network advertising business.

Facebook had previously warned that iOS 14 could impact its advertising business, but the company’s blog post Wednesday outlined just how specific that impact could be. The Facebook Audience Network allows mobile software developers to provide in-app advertisements targeted to users based on Facebook’s data.

...

Facebook’s stock jumped more than 5% on the news. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter said the market sees Apple’s new rule as likely to shift demand toward Facebook’s own targeting system.

http://www.dailyjournal.net/2020/08/26/us-facebook-apple-revenue/

Interesting about the cost of identification.

In terms of competition, I was seeking to distinguish between browser competition (eg chrome vs firefox, “edge”, safari, qt, falkon etc) and ad platform competition (doubleclick vs facebook, bing, amazon, apple, etc) but in some ways its all the same ha and your look at the trackers themselves makes a lot of sense

Because you would break the riddle of the sphinx:

The sphinx asked him this riddle: What creature goes on four feet in the morning, two at noonday, and three in the evening?

advertising competitors right? I saw another article with smaller adtech companies bemoaning FB and Google emerging walled gardens

And Grab is 23% owned by uber

Uber's right to redeem its 23% stake in Grab for cash was revealed in the U.S. ride-hailing giant's initial public offering prospectus released Thursday. This suggests a possible time frame for when Grab is planning to launch its own IPO.

as of Apr 19 per https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Startups/Grab-faces-2bn-payout-to-Uber-if-no-IPO-by-2023

so maybe it will be vastly improved ha

It seems that they are trying to get out ahead of regulations and help define how identity tracking tools emerge. Or maybe google really is our friend ha

Twitter came a long way out of the basement with its SMS messages into being key player in the surveillance capitalism, inside sales cabal. If it was the plan all along, well played Dorsey.

Here is a not-CNN summary if anyone else does not want: https://m.slashdot.org/story/374171

I sometimes catch myself thinking that a small team could maintain a modern browser. Then I come back to earth after reading something like “Security Vulnerabilities fixed in Firefox 80” : https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2020-36/

Interesting stuff and quite a rabbit hole. One article claiming early_data could survive browser restarts seemed to light a fire. I started building a tls 1.3 node server to see what type of values could be set, but will have to revisit when more time avails. This list of extensions is interesting: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8446#section-4.2

This is a little vague to me, but seems as though he feels others will carry on:

In either case, I consider myself extremely lucky to have people that can manage the project in future, and can only imagine what it would be like for someone without that luxury. I can't help shake the feeling that somewhere, the software I use is being developed solely by volunteers who would rather quit, but don't have the ability to say "no". This post has been delayed for that very reason, especially when so many people have given so much, and I feel they deserve a proper goodbye. At this point though, I can't find the strength to leave on better terms.

And in case instances.invidio.us shuts down at the same time, here is a current list of instances:

• invidio.us
• invidious.snopyta.org
• yewtu.be
• invidious.tube
• invidious.13ad.de
• invidious.xyz
• invidious.site
• vid.mint.lgbt
• invidiou.site
• invidious.fdn.fr
• invidious.toot.koeln
• invidious.ggc-project.de

I usually keep a copy of the fedora xfce spin handy in case I blow up a new install of some random distro and need to revert to something known.

yep, as long as a main target is an html display, it makes sense. in my case, I take notes in a way that restrains my syllable count to about 10-15 per line to encourage conciseness and my target is pdf—not a use case I expect markdown to accomodate, but it would be nice if I could tell pandoc to preserve new line but pandoc defers to md rules

Thanks for sharing that, I was looking at ssl handshakes as a possible supercookie for advertisers, but this is next level stuff. Will dig in.

thanks, true. my peeve is with disregarding normal newlines. from a utilitarian point of view it probably makes sense, just a personal pet peeve.

glaring issues with markdown like double spaces for newlines and so on that are just bad design.

this one drives me nuts. I read an issue on this and the markdown people were insistent on letting text flow through newlines

Your use directly jeopardizes Google's ability to make cultural works available to the world. As such, we would appreciate your voluntarily removing this content.

sad state of affairs

The tildes model (though invite only) seems appealing ... here is a breakdown of their costs and donations:

https://tildes.net/financials

and on tildes potential lack of funding

What if you don't get enough donations to run the site full-time?

One of the best parts about avoiding venture capital and other forms of investment is that there's no pressure. Tildes doesn't have to reach certain thresholds of traffic or revenue to prevent shutting down. The worst case is just that I end up running Tildes as a side project, and hope that it eventually grows to a point where it's sustainable to work on full-time.

granted, one main goal for lemmy is federation so approaches may vary, but in any event an influencers sheeple eyeballs revenue VC model is not the only one

what kind of funding do you mean? I hope this remains true for the life of lemmy:

Lemmy is free, open-source software, with no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever.

also, do we really want influencers and sheep?