skells @skells@qoto.org
Joined Feb 2021
skells
boosted
@meshy @nik They're leaky as hell and getting worse, and there's no hardware on your machine that they won't gladly hand to whatever ad server asks for it. They operate on the premise that they're the only thing running on your machine, so they eat all of your memory, video memory, CPU, etc. Chrome downloads executable blobs and *is* spyware, Firefox is a crappier version of Chrome that gets its money from Google. (Linksys made all right gear until Cisco bought them to turn them into a mechanism for selling coupons for Cisco gear.)
Like, think about geolocation. It's not just based on your IP any more, not even GPS. Google's stupid map cars (not to be confused with https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/eintr/mapcar.html ) were dumping wifi traffic and they apologized and were super sorry they *promise*, but that was seed data for capturing WiFi MAC addresses, devices and WAPs. (The stink the EU kicked up over the contents of the packets was a distraction at best; Google wanted the metadata.¹) They were exposing this to the public until Samy Kamkar (really cool fuckin' guy) built a little web UI that let you type a MAC address and see where that router was on a map. If the signal level from a known WAP is $x and you see a new WAP and the signal is $y, you can tell how far you are from both. If you move, you've got another data point, and that's enough to triangulate the new WAP. What if you're near no known WAPs, though? GPS lock, triangulate the new WAP. And not just WAPs, MAC addresses of devices fly all over the network. An Android device *touches* your network, and Google knows who's there and where they are (and the manufacturer of the device, and since MACs are often serial, usually the *type* of device). And the WiFi antenna isn't the only antenna: all these Bluetooth devices, all over. Bluetooth interface on your stereo? If there's ever been an Android device on your network, Google knows where it is, so even without a GPS lock, it can geolocate any Android device that saw a packet from the stereo, or any device running ChromeOS, probably any device running Chrome. No hardware Bluetooth killswitch on your iOS phone? Google knows where it is. Grocery stories already use WiFi and Bluetooth triangulation to figure out where people are, how much time they spend in what place. (Even if there's no WiFi, your phone will periodically send a beacon to try to find known WAPs; same with the Bluetooth hardware looking for your headphones. It's technically illegal to listen in on the cell phone bands, so that's not commercialized yet, but maybe the 5G band is different and maybe that's why businesses love 5G.) Someone with an Android phone walks by your house, Google knows who lives there and where you shop. Ever had a one-night stand with someone that had an Android phone? Google knows if you stayed behind to cuddle. The only reason they haven't counted thrusts² yet is that nobody's thought to do it yet, but they've got the data if they want it.
So now the browser wants to fondle your Universal Serial Bus: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/USB . Why would they let shit like that in?
And of course, they can offload the heavy vector math (the bread and butter of machine learning) onto your system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU . Of course, Google will mark a site as malicious if there is a Monero miner (not very often when there's a malicious advertiser), and Firefox takes orders from Google on that (hop into about:config and have a look at the variables that start with browser.safebrowsing, urlclassifier, and geo.wifi), so being on their shit list is already 71% of the web.
When browsers started executing code, it was supposed to be in a sandbox.
That's just part of it. Browsers are terrible now. You know who runs the W3C? It's public: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List . Of course, it's alphabetized so "Whose checks have the most zeroes?" is not obvious, but scroll through the list. Adobe, AirBNB, Alibaba, Amazon, American Express, Apple, AT&T, Baidu, Brightcove (ads, if you don't know), Ericsson, Facebook, Google, HM Government ("HM" as in "her majesty's", i.e., the UK government), Huawei, IBM, Intel, the J. Paul Getty Trust (this is more sinister than it sounds if you're unfamiliar), Mastercard, Microsoft, Netflix, OpenX (ads), Quantcast (ads), Salesforce, Scribd, Siemens, Softbank, Stripe, Telstra, Tencent, NYT, Washington Post, Viacom, Disney, Xiaomi, Yahoo, Zoom. Plenty of others, ad companies, etc. CERN's still technically on it. So this is how you get the DNT header and then everyone ignores it and now there are cookie windows.
I don't have to worry about any of that if they don't have access to a real computer with real hardware, and I don't wanna worry about any of that.
¹ And I know this, because I've worked at the companies that do this shit and build this kind of thing and why they build it. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 . It looks like, for three years, Google ran a free 411 service. 800 numbers cost money: the service pays the phone company for each incoming call. Why would they do such a thing? I know, because AT&T built the same kind of thing to do the same kind of thing: big bucket of training data. We had people speaking location names in every accent in the country. (In this case, anyone could know it about GOOG-411, because it's also on the Wikipedia page.)
² Speaking of location data, that "Give permission for your location data?" prompt is complete horseshit if you've got an accelerometer. See attached: you can get location data with accelerometer and having map data. (Ask OSM if you want it for free.) Bonus attachment: the accelerometers can also be used to listen to audio. The companies doing browsers, phones, operating systems, etc., are all building backdoors and leaving them open when they walk through because we let them.
motion_sensor-based_privacy_attack_on_smartphones.pdf
inferring_user_routes_and_locations_using_zero-permission_mobile_sensors.pdf
Like, think about geolocation. It's not just based on your IP any more, not even GPS. Google's stupid map cars (not to be confused with https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/eintr/mapcar.html ) were dumping wifi traffic and they apologized and were super sorry they *promise*, but that was seed data for capturing WiFi MAC addresses, devices and WAPs. (The stink the EU kicked up over the contents of the packets was a distraction at best; Google wanted the metadata.¹) They were exposing this to the public until Samy Kamkar (really cool fuckin' guy) built a little web UI that let you type a MAC address and see where that router was on a map. If the signal level from a known WAP is $x and you see a new WAP and the signal is $y, you can tell how far you are from both. If you move, you've got another data point, and that's enough to triangulate the new WAP. What if you're near no known WAPs, though? GPS lock, triangulate the new WAP. And not just WAPs, MAC addresses of devices fly all over the network. An Android device *touches* your network, and Google knows who's there and where they are (and the manufacturer of the device, and since MACs are often serial, usually the *type* of device). And the WiFi antenna isn't the only antenna: all these Bluetooth devices, all over. Bluetooth interface on your stereo? If there's ever been an Android device on your network, Google knows where it is, so even without a GPS lock, it can geolocate any Android device that saw a packet from the stereo, or any device running ChromeOS, probably any device running Chrome. No hardware Bluetooth killswitch on your iOS phone? Google knows where it is. Grocery stories already use WiFi and Bluetooth triangulation to figure out where people are, how much time they spend in what place. (Even if there's no WiFi, your phone will periodically send a beacon to try to find known WAPs; same with the Bluetooth hardware looking for your headphones. It's technically illegal to listen in on the cell phone bands, so that's not commercialized yet, but maybe the 5G band is different and maybe that's why businesses love 5G.) Someone with an Android phone walks by your house, Google knows who lives there and where you shop. Ever had a one-night stand with someone that had an Android phone? Google knows if you stayed behind to cuddle. The only reason they haven't counted thrusts² yet is that nobody's thought to do it yet, but they've got the data if they want it.
So now the browser wants to fondle your Universal Serial Bus: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/USB . Why would they let shit like that in?
And of course, they can offload the heavy vector math (the bread and butter of machine learning) onto your system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU . Of course, Google will mark a site as malicious if there is a Monero miner (not very often when there's a malicious advertiser), and Firefox takes orders from Google on that (hop into about:config and have a look at the variables that start with browser.safebrowsing, urlclassifier, and geo.wifi), so being on their shit list is already 71% of the web.
When browsers started executing code, it was supposed to be in a sandbox.
That's just part of it. Browsers are terrible now. You know who runs the W3C? It's public: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List . Of course, it's alphabetized so "Whose checks have the most zeroes?" is not obvious, but scroll through the list. Adobe, AirBNB, Alibaba, Amazon, American Express, Apple, AT&T, Baidu, Brightcove (ads, if you don't know), Ericsson, Facebook, Google, HM Government ("HM" as in "her majesty's", i.e., the UK government), Huawei, IBM, Intel, the J. Paul Getty Trust (this is more sinister than it sounds if you're unfamiliar), Mastercard, Microsoft, Netflix, OpenX (ads), Quantcast (ads), Salesforce, Scribd, Siemens, Softbank, Stripe, Telstra, Tencent, NYT, Washington Post, Viacom, Disney, Xiaomi, Yahoo, Zoom. Plenty of others, ad companies, etc. CERN's still technically on it. So this is how you get the DNT header and then everyone ignores it and now there are cookie windows.
I don't have to worry about any of that if they don't have access to a real computer with real hardware, and I don't wanna worry about any of that.
¹ And I know this, because I've worked at the companies that do this shit and build this kind of thing and why they build it. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 . It looks like, for three years, Google ran a free 411 service. 800 numbers cost money: the service pays the phone company for each incoming call. Why would they do such a thing? I know, because AT&T built the same kind of thing to do the same kind of thing: big bucket of training data. We had people speaking location names in every accent in the country. (In this case, anyone could know it about GOOG-411, because it's also on the Wikipedia page.)
² Speaking of location data, that "Give permission for your location data?" prompt is complete horseshit if you've got an accelerometer. See attached: you can get location data with accelerometer and having map data. (Ask OSM if you want it for free.) Bonus attachment: the accelerometers can also be used to listen to audio. The companies doing browsers, phones, operating systems, etc., are all building backdoors and leaving them open when they walk through because we let them.
motion_sensor-based_privacy_attack_on_smartphones.pdf
inferring_user_routes_and_locations_using_zero-permission_mobile_sensors.pdf
skells
boosted
Success as an entrepreneur can be dangerous as you begin to believe your prior strategies will always be effective in novel situations.
---
RT @WhatisMoneyShow
WiM045 - The Vervaeke Series | Episode 2 | Wisdom and The 4 Levels of Knowing with @vervaeke_john
John and I discuss:
-The Functions of Distributed Cognition
-The 4 Levels of Memory
https://youtu.be/V6NiLOi3icc
#Bitcoin
https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShow/status/1436003144249462787
skells
boosted
RT @selfbankt
The vax wasn't made for COVID.
COVID was made for the vax.
The vax was made for Digital ID rollout.
DIDs were made for Central Bank Digital Currency rollout.
CBDCs were made for #TheGreatReset
TGR was made because the money's broken & they want to rug pull us.
skells
boosted
How's fighting for freedom became a selfish irresponsible behaviour?
skells
boosted
[Quote RT]
Meanwhile I have this wild idea for zero-carbon buildings in the local style and built using local sustainable non-toxic materials, that ISN'T experimental and already known and beloved by literally billions of people around the world. Who do I talk to? https://nitter.poast.org/createstreets/status/1436205023311052807
skells
boosted
"You can't have a garden without fences." Lyme Bay Marine Protection Area (England) biodiversity up 430% and fish numbers up 370% eleven years after banning bottom-towed fishing. Just ban it everywhere already. https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/news/marine-protected-area-status-can-boost-fish-populations-by-almost-400
fuck it I'll get a tray
skells
boosted
Heard that some doctors in Bangkok are now offering DIY vaccinations where they hand you the syringe to inject yourself.
50k THB (1500 dollars) for the DIY option though. Why would anyone want to inject themselves while the doctor nips out of the room for that price when you have have someone inject it into you for free?
*Innocent face*
skells
boosted
people have speculated that there is a much greater risk of myocarditis from the vaccine if you take any kind of steroids because steroids fuck your heart up in general and there have been a lot of stories of high level athletes having severe effects from it and some of them dying
skells
boosted
@valleyforge the UK developed independently in the "Tube Alloys" program until it merged with the Manhattan project on 1943.
The US then told us that we weren't allowed the secrets and so developed our own in 1952.
Before the French.
@Schizokitten@freespeechextremist.com @Schizokitten@blob.cat @ImpoliteFemale @PonyPanda @Prodigal @graf threw this chant down in Europe and no response, didn't know the ozzies dig it
skells
boosted
@Schizokitten
>I’ve been on Fedi for approx 2 years and have spoken to 1 other Australian
ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
You guys are everywhere...LOL
There are at least 5 on FSE...and they are super active...
@PonyPanda @ImpoliteFemale @Schizokitten @graf
not-a-rapper.gif
>I’ve been on Fedi for approx 2 years and have spoken to 1 other Australian
ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
You guys are everywhere...LOL
There are at least 5 on FSE...and they are super active...
@PonyPanda @ImpoliteFemale @Schizokitten @graf
not-a-rapper.gif
@dubh cute af
skells
boosted
Joined Feb 2021
