Why Email Spam Looks Better Than Usual These Days

The problem with making coding easier for more people is that it makes spam more conventionally attractive. Which is bad.

Maciejewska, Joanna - Twitter (2024-03-29) | WIST Quotations

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

Creating C closures from Lua closures

The Weird Way The 404 Media Zine Was Built

Lessons on laying out the 404 Media zine using a relatively weird setup—on Linux, using Affinity, with the help of the Windows translation layer WINE.

Every Keystroke You Make: A Tech-Law Measurement and Analysis of Event Listeners for Wiretapping

The privacy community has a long track record of investigating emerging types of web tracking techniques. Recent work has focused on compliance of web trackers with new privacy laws such as Europe's GDPR and California's CCPA. Despite the growing body of research documenting widespread lack of compliance with new privacy laws, there is a lack of robust enforcement. Different from prior work, we conduct a tech-law analysis to map decades-old U.S. laws about interception of electronic communications--so-called wiretapping--to web tracking. Bridging the tech-law gap for older wiretapping laws is important and timely because, in cases where legal harm to privacy is proven, they can provide statutory private right of action, are at the forefront of recent privacy enforcement, and could ultimately lead to a meaningful change in the web tracking landscape. In this paper, we focus on a particularly invasive tracking technique: the use of JavaScript event listeners by third-party trackers for real-time keystroke interception on websites. We use an instrumented web browser to crawl a sample of the top-million websites to investigate the use of event listeners that aligns with the criteria for wiretapping, according to U.S. wiretapping law at the federal level and in California. We find evidence that 38.52% websites installed third-party event listeners to intercept keystrokes, and that at least 3.18% websites transmitted intercepted information to a third-party server, which aligns with the criteria for wiretapping. We further find evidence that the intercepted information such as email addresses typed into form fields are used for unsolicited email marketing. Beyond our work that maps the intersection between technical measurement and U.S. wiretapping law, additional future legal research is required to determine when the wiretapping observed in our paper passes the threshold for illegality.

Prime Grid

A prime number grid visualizer