• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Do they “give high rankings” to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don’t go in and penalize them for… telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?

    Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page’s query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.

    The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.

    The “accusation” of “fingerprinting” was along the lines of “their site called a canvas function oh no”. It’s not “fingerprinting” every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.

    What exactly is “all data available in my session” when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it’s nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.

    This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn’t that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it’s that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds “anonymous” to me, even if it isn’t Tor-strength anonymity that’s resistant to wiretaps.

    There’s an important difference between “we’re trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don’t boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo”, as opposed to “we’re building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners”. And I feel like you shouldn’t take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.












  • People will sometimes introduce themselves with pronouns, or sometimes wear little badges with them.

    There are definitely people IRL who don’t use the pronouns one might guess by looking at them. I haven’t met many (any?) people who go by neopronouns, but they are around the Internet.

    You can often just guess pronouns for people, but if you can’t read the gender someone is presenting (is your new friend rocking a kilt, sports bra, and enormous beard?) it might be polite to ask, and/or to use “they” until you get the right one.

    You don’t have to want people to call you he/him just because you are a man. But he/him is overwhelmingly popular with men, so it’s a fine choice.

    If there is a field for pronouns, and you want people to know yours instead of them having to guess, you should put yours in there. The other reason to put pronouns in, even if people are likely to guess right, is to exercise the field for the people who often get guessed wrong.




  • I think it benefits the distro maintainers. They can vet and ship version 0.13.1 of some multi-player video game, and support that for two years without bothering to package multiple backward-incompatible releases from the game developers. People won’t come demanding that they break their distro’s stable version no major version upgrades rule because everyone actually playing the game can just use the snap/flatpak published by the developers.


  • Check to see if there is a power differential here.

    Are you an established adult with a Real Job and a nice apartment while she is struggling to figure out how to get out from under the thumb of her controlling family? Or is she happily making her own way in the world as a small farmer or boat salesperson or something while you have been futzing around painting skateboards and playing in a minor punk band?

    Older people dating younger people can be wrong because it is easy for the older person to have too much power in the relationship. If you have something she really wants or needs that you can provide or withdraw at will or as a condition of the relationship, you should not date.