It’s sad enough to resort to consumption for happiness, but to play shopping simulators because you can’t afford to, is outright depressing. And spreading awareness is fine, but it feels somewhat condescending, when (over)consumption is the coping mechanism here. These people are likely struggling to find long-term happiness, and can only afford short-term dopamine hits instead.

Humanizing and accustomizing

Right on, same here. :)

The study found 58.3 percent of buyers say they couldn’t live without Bluetooth connectivity

Strange, when smartphones no longer come with 3.5 mm sockets… The consumer never asked for the majority of these “features”: they already had access to most of them (through their smartphone or other standalone device), or was easily and cost-effectively installed as an aftermarket gadget. All of these “safety” features, that coincidentally also happen to constitute a (future) privacy-nightmare, were pushed for by: legislators, insurance companies, and the automotive industry itself. Consumers effectively got conned into buying a duplicate of products they already owned, but which are instead subject to terms and conditions dictated by aforementioned stakeholders.

Imagine going after those seeking to protect their works from being stolen by AI, instead of the AI scrapers that caused this entire shit show to begin with. Put the blame where it makes sense, and don’t try to guilt trip those that are victim of intellectual property theft, into believing they are the ones responsible for the web becoming an accessibility-nightmare; not for just the disabled, but everyone (locking content behind: a login, PoW challenges, and CAPTCHAs). Awful defeatist take.

Practically all modern vehicles are privacy nightmares on wheels. They have identifying sensors all over the vehicle, on both the exterior and interior. And all ECUs (monitoring and controlling sensors and actuators from a vehicle’s particular subsystems) are (indirectly) connected to a cellular modem, which is likely to support ‘vehicle to everything (V2X)’ communications: where the vehicle exchanges sensory data with external networks (primarily the manufacturer’s), road infrastructure and other road users nearby.

Your most effective remedy is to hamper the functioning of the modem, that is if the manufacturer doesn’t throw an error code as a result of it. If that isn’t an option, check if it allows you to physically disable sensors (taping off, or limiting the FOV of cameras, or unplugging microphones). And lastly, if even that isn’t an option, disable as many “features” as you can; even though some may require you to manually re-disable them, every time you restart your vehicle…

Keep in mind that in doing so, you might also disable actual features (ones you might find genuinely useful). Mozilla’s somewhat outdated reports of manufacturer’s privacy statements might give you some idea, of which brands could be considered the lesser of evil. But these are subject to constant change, as are the over-the-air updates of vehicles in their fleet, and their dynamic user manuals…

All the time. There’s occasionally even websites that outright block me without challenge, run many iterations on my machine, or present a tiresome amount of CAPTCHAs (Waymo machine vision must be trained pretty well, from me labeling goddamn traffic lights, motorcycles and stairs throughout the day). Especially CAPTCHAs that load new pictures with an infuriatingly slow fade animation drive me up the wall; one of which possibly not even sufficient.

But I take it as a compliment, as it might mean my browser profile is minimal enough to trip these systems into thinking it’s a headless browser (typically used for bot traffic).

Authentication of users seems to be outsourced to ‘identity providers (IdPs)’ (primarily: Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.: “login with…”); that manage access to a service’s resources, which are increasingly distributed throughout various cloud-based services. A service’s chat application might be hosted at provider X, whereas its website at provider Y; so managing access to these resources from a centralized identity pool is convenient. Well, unless you value you privacy, but that’s the end-user’s problem…

At least that is the impression I’ve gotten from my limited research on Amazon Cognito: required for contacting my doctor’s office through their forced chat application (automatic account creation, no longer a phone line for uses outside of emergencies). And yes, to anyone wondering: I am going to look for alternatives, because this should not be acceptable, at least for a doctor’s office of all places.

Audio fingerprinting works because small differences in browser versions, operating systems, audio libraries, and hardware can produce slightly different results from the same generated signal. It is not necessarily enough to uniquely identify a device by itself, but it becomes much more useful when combined with canvas, WebGL, hardware, timing, and interaction data.

The gaining happens after retrieval of the results it seems: so it’s just silent for the end user. And perhaps they do both fingerprinting, and ensure audio devices remain awake.

Yeah, I understand (as an ex-GOS and current pmOS user). It just feels hypocritical to crutch on monopolies for “child protection”, while in the same breath criticizing monopolistic practices… The EU should pick their poison

How about requiring Apple to provide an option for the device “owner” to disable Apple’s “protections”? If I want to choose freedom over “security”, I should have the option to do so. But the EU seems more interested in app signatures and app distribution through centralized channels controlled by the very same monopolists (as a similar approach can be observed on Android). But everything to protect the children, right?

Every social media platform, having a business model where the customer is the product, will put measures into place to avoid liability on the basis of hypocritical, age-dependent requirements (additional protections for children in case of the GDPR or DSA for example). So although ordering the platforms to “age”-gate might be unconstitutional, forcing them to choose between abandoning their business-model or age-gating their platform, likely results in the latter while bypassing said constitutional protections. But on a national level this should be considered a (temporary) win.

Interesting that Chart 1 a only shows data up to 2023, while data up to 2026 shows an even closer resemblance to the dot-com bubble and 2008 financial crisis; in terms of steepness of the growth. So the more linear growth seen since the 2008 financial crisis, really should be attributed to other (more legitimate) forces in the market; while this article should’ve really focused on the growth since 2022 (which it just barely does).

So after butchering the like/dislike ratio, the view-count will also become utterly useless… What’s next, automatically subscribing users to inflate subscriber-count too? All these universally liked videos (no dislikes), views/exposure (zero engagement), advertiser-friendly content (threatened (shadow)banning or demonetization)! Now the only red flag to any malinformed advertiser might be a low subscriber-count; so just do it already. Well, alongside the lackluster performance of the ads themselves of course (which can only be measured after the transaction: poorly at that). And the best part: non of the ad-revenue will be shared with the propped up channels: as the recently heightened threshold, requires additional engaged viewers; as opposed to the TikTok-level, worthless kind.

“Consent” from just the wearer, that is likely to have their iPhone’s photos/videos synched to their iCloud account: which by default don’t appear to be end-to-end encrypted (and is therefore accessible by Apple). So although the user is technically expected to read Apple’s entire privacy policy to everyone they interact with, and they technically can enable E2EE on iCloud for this category of data, they know full and well the ordinary iSheep isn’t going to.

Given Apple’s obsession with brand-perception, risking being associated with perverts (like rightfully happened with Meta’s “pervert glasses”), I think it’s completely inexcusable to release a product of the same category; at least for the time being. But perhaps Apple’s marketed propaganda has really given the ignorant populace a false sense of privacy, in which they blindly trust a Trillion dollar corporation with their most privacy-sensitive information.

An application that would make donating to FOSS projects, especially GPL-licensed works (or at least: those not trying to cater to corporations) in desperate need of support, effortless. In that: a periodic budget can be determined, time spent actively using applications is tracked, an application’s userbase is taken into consideration (as their cumulative income may eat too much into budgets: possibly better spent supporting smaller projects), and personal preference can be given (including an option to filter license types); as to rank the applications based on perceived value, and fraction the budget accordingly.

I would be happy to support projects that I actively, or to a lesser degree, rely on. But the process of taking all steps required to support a project is simply too manual, and outright unmanageable, when trying to take into account all system components. I really want the incentives to shift from MIT to GPL, so that maintainers don’t effectively end up being controlled by corporate paychecks; and are rather supported by individual end users. This should in theory make FOSS more resilient to any future restrictions to source access, which could hamper the long-term parity of forks, seeking to strip anti-features.

Here’s the link you may have forgotten to add: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept-c2b968fb

And then music that gets ripped off by AI, gets the original creator flagged as AI, that in turn has to prove to an AI, that they are in fact not AI…

Law enforcement shouldn’t become too convenient (“The company built a staff of hundreds of compliance officers, many of them veterans of U.S. and European law enforcement agencies. The police could often get information about accounts far faster from Binance than they could from banks.”), but equally not be excessively hindered by procedures or cronyist governments (“[…] unable to obtain account records from some Binance users based in the United Arab Emirates. […] certain information requests flow through the Emirati government […] conflict of interest, because the investment firm MGX is funded by Abu Dhabi royals.”); so I’m quite mixed on the change of direction.

It might be positive for legitimate users of the platform (which are less likely to be investigated, let alone receive specialty-treatment), but simultaneously protect Trump’s crypto-scamming inner circle, alongside other high-value targets.

Having no issues with the Bypass Paywalls Clean addon. It’s so good, it got removed from: the Mozilla add-on store, GitLab, and Github (which is why it’s now hosted on the Russian GitFlic).