The Crown Theatre, Eccles : 1899 – 2019

Once, The Crown was called one of the "prettiest in the north."

In the early years the stage hosted Shakespearean dramas and revues. In the 1930s, it was converted into a cinema. By the 1960s it found a new life as a bingo hall.

Closing in the 1980s, it fell into ruins.

Eventually, in 2019, a large fire destroyed it leaving only the facade standing.

#Eccles #Manchester #History #Photography #Abandoned #Ruins

You're paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.

I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.

Claude:

• Six parallel telemetry pipelines.
• A tracking GIF with 40 browser fingerprint data points baked into the URL, routed through a CDN proxy alias specifically to make it harder to block.
• Intercom running a persistent WebSocket whether you use it or not.
• Honeycomb distributed tracing on a chat UI because apparently your conversation needs the same observability stack as a payments microservice.

ChatGPT:

• proxies telemetry through their own backend to hide the Datadog destination URL from blockers.
• uBlock had to deploy scriptlet injection — actual JS injected into the page to intercept fetch() at the API level — because a network rule wasn't enough.
• Also ships your usage data to Google Analytics. OpenAI. To Google. You cannot make this up.
• Also runs a proof-of-work challenge before you're allowed to type anything.

Gemini:

• play.google.com/log getting hammered with your full session behavior, authenticated with three SAPISIDHASH token variants, piped directly into the Google identity supergraph that correlates everything you've ever done across every Google product since 2004.
• Also creates a Web App Activity record in your Google account timeline. Also has "ads" in one of the telemetry endpoint subdomains.

When uBlock blocks Gemini's requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.

KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.

Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.

All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.

Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin

#infosec #privacy #selfhosted #foss #surveillance

❓Have you noticed that digital products and services are getting worse? So have we!

➡️We have published a report about enshittification, on how and why digital products and services keep getting worse - and how we can turn the trend (hint: open tech, enforcement, public policy++)

Obviously @pluralistic is a big inspiration and help in this work.

More than 80 groups in Europe and the US has joined in a call to action.

More here: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree

Enjoy this short film!

A once-grand Portuguese mansion, at the heart of a large wine-making estate. Now it stands in ruins, as it is being reclaimed by nature year-after-year.

#Portugal #Photography #Abandoned #UrbanExploration #LostPlaces #Wine #WineMaking