Apply the same logical test to freedom of speech, and you’ll get the same result.
You’re not missing anything about what’s likely to happen to you personally. What you’re missing is the manner in which rights shape your life and your society even when you don’t exercise them, and sometimes even when nobody is currently exercising them, and that significant harm can be built out of a vast number of smaller harms that aren’t individually that bad.
This article is misinformed if not intentionally misleading about Apple Pay’s privacy status. It is technically true that Apple does not share your credit card number, but it does share its own unique, persistent identifier.
I agree on randomization, but there are other places where it doesn’t stick out like that. I’ll look up specifics if I find the time, but I think reading canvas data without permission is one place it’s utilized, including by Tor.
This tool is deeply flawed. Fingerprinting protection is sometimes done by binning, which this tool rewards, and is sometimes done by randomizing, which this tool harshly punishes. The net result is it generally guides you away from the strongest protection.
The flip side of this, having the complementary flaw of testing only persistence, not uniqueness, is (warning, real tracking link) fingerprinting.com/demo. You can try resetting your ID and seeing if it changes here. Since tracking requires (a degree of) uniqueness AND (a degree of) persistence, the danger signal is only failing both the EFF test and this test.
Failing both is a requirement to derive meaning, not being lax: measuring only uniqueness would fail a random number generator, and measuring only persistence would fail the number 4.
Also check out oklch.com, I found it useful for building an intuition. Some stumbling blocks are that hues aren’t the same as HSL hues, and max chroma is different depending on hue and lightness. This isn’t a bug, but a reflection of human eyes and computer screens; the alternative, as in HSL, is a consistent max but inconsistent meaning.
Another very cool thing about CSS’s OKLCH is it’s a formula, so you can write things like oklch(from var(--accent) calc(l + .1) c h). Do note, though, that you’ll need either some color theory or fiddling to figure out your formulas, my programmer’s intuition told me lies like “a shadow is just a lightness change, not a hue change”.
Also, OKLCH gradients aren’t objectively best, they’re consistently colorful. When used with similar hues, not like the article’s example, they can look very nice, but it’s not realistic; if your goal is how light mixes, then you actually want XYZ. More: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value....
Also, fun fact: the “ok” is actually just the word “ok”. The implication being that LCH was not OK, it had some bugs.
restic’s rest-server append-only mode unfortunately doesn’t prevent data deletion under normal usage. More here: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html#secu.... Their workaround is pretty weak, in my opinion: a compromised client can still delete all your historic backups, and you’re on a tight timeline to notice and fix it before they can delete the rest of your backups, too.
This page seems designed to direct attention anywhere but the meat of the issue: are the moon details in Samsung photos derived from sensor data alone, or also external photos? To me, the answer is clear: Samsung can’t produce this result unless they also ingest external, high res moon photos. Yet Samsung frames it as “enhancing details”, not “adding details”, clearly implying the details in question were already there in some form.
Right, disappearing messages aren’t a safeguard against a malicious recipient, they’re a blast radius limiter on future device compromise on either end.
The abandoned plan was perceptual hashing, which should return the same hash for very similar photos, while the new one is a checksum, which should return the same hash only for identical photos. I don’t think that invalidates the point, but it does seem relevant. It certainly makes it much less useful for CSAM scanning or enforcing local dictator whims, since it’s now trivial to defeat if you actually try to.
I felt this way for a while, but I’d like to offer another angle: maybe it’s like saying “Every company eventually hires tall people. Some have no tall people, but it’s just a matter of time. Tall people are really an unstoppable force.” The missing piece is also observing short people (ad-free offerings), which you’d notice are not being eliminated, are also prevalent, and also “infect” everything. I think the unstoppable force being felt here is just statistics: ads are often an option, companies make a lot of decisions, it’s statistically inevitable that some of those will be ads, unless the company has some strong aversion to ads, which most don’t.
The never-ending chain has bothered me too. I realized that if there is a theory of everything, it needs to prove itself. As far as I know, that’s a logical contradiction. Maybe resolving that contradiction is the door to moving forward. Is the concept of a “theory of everything” invalid? Is modern logic insufficient to find it?
Don’t mistake this for victory. Google’s standard playbook when forcing things people don’t like is to spread the action out over a longer timeframe, exhausting the media and keeping the final blow mostly out of the news, and exhausting our individual outrage and will to keep fighting. It works every time, and it’ll work again if we become complacent again. Until and unless Google meaningfully commits to never neuter ad blockers, it’s still critical and urgent that we switch to Firefox.
I listened to a lot of mic testing a few months ago, frustrated by the AirPods Pro Gen 1 too. My conclusion was that all wireless earphone mics are pretty bad, and you’re not going to sound good unless you hold the phone up to your cheek or use a headset. But if you just want the best you can get in wireless earphones, I think the Jabra Elite 7 Pro and Sennhesier Momentum 3 are both a step up from the AirPods Pro Gen 1. They sound cheaper and let in more background noise, but they don’t have that underwater sound, parts of your voice disappearing, or sporadic background noise amplification, making them more intelligible and less stressful on a call.
HN is overly dismissive of tech in Android devices. People should look up testing of Samsung’s current gen 108 MP sensor. It’s true that it doesn’t look sharper when displaying the whole image on a smartphone’s 3.5 MP screen or a 4K (8.3 MP) monitor, and that it’s not really 9 times sharper than a quality 12 MP, but those points miss the meaningful one: it actually is way sharper than the current gen iPhone, and it is very visible as soon as you blow up the image, zoom in, or significantly crop it.
After thinking about this for a minute, I think the point wasn’t that people shouldn’t have fallen for this in particular, but to give everything a tint of uncertainty. It’s a pretty clear cut example of “no matter how believable it was, it can still be not even a little bit true”. In many contexts I’d call that a rather unproductive observation, but in the context of fake news, we have many people perceiving different realities built on a whole network of strong beliefs about what exists and what happened. Uncertainty about everything is probably actually exactly what’s needed to break free of a grip like that.
My problem with this is that it conflicts with identity ownership. If I give every company [email protected], I no longer have the ability to switch email providers, especially if I only decide to switch after losing my someservice.com account. If I give every company [email protected], then I’m still ID’d by mydomain.org. Maybe in a way that automatic linkers miss, for now, but maybe not: how hard is it, really, to automatically determine with decent confidence that mydomain.org is a personal domain, and strip the entire username and subdomain part in the existing normalization step?
It can be some secret mydomain.org, but that still links all my profiles together.
I could buy a different domain for every company, but that’s cost prohibitive, and also piercing WHOIS privacy is just another data sharing agreement away.
Posting this because I’m hoping somebody has a better answer.
I got a memorable phone number a while ago. Websites like numberbarn.com make it relatively easy. A key realization I had is that repeating numbers aren’t the thing to look for, because they’re what everybody is depleting and marking up, and actually aren’t a very good proxy for what you really care about, which is memorability and maybe aesthetics. For example, 34567 is better than 37771, and also more likely to be available and cheap. Repeating digits and their associated markup are also about typability, but that probably barely matters to you if people are almost always calling from their address book.
You’re not missing anything about what’s likely to happen to you personally. What you’re missing is the manner in which rights shape your life and your society even when you don’t exercise them, and sometimes even when nobody is currently exercising them, and that significant harm can be built out of a vast number of smaller harms that aren’t individually that bad.