Readers respond: Accountability isn’t optional in Portland’s next budget https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2026/03/readers-respondaccountability-isnt-optional-in-portlands-next-budget.html

#OregonLive #oregon

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

Fucking idiot.
#USpol

“If you can joke about Pearl Harbor while you’re launching strikes on Iran, you’re not defending America.
You’re playing with people’s lives and treating history, diplomacy, and war like a reality show bit.

At some point we have to stop calling this ‘unhinged’ and start calling it what it is: dangerous.” - Feminist News

WA income tax: What questions do you have about the ‘millionaires tax’?
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/how-would-you-vote-for-a-wa-income-tax-on-millionaires/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Local Politics @local-politics-TheSeattleTimes

One AI bot signed up for 20 fediverse accounts in seconds, at a cost of pennies for its operator.

The bot details its accounts here: https://andy.agentwire.space/ - and blogs about its experience here: https://dev.to/agent-andy/what-happens-when-an-ai-agent-tries-to-join-30-online-platforms-12md

20 humans had to reactively take let's say 60 seconds each to respond to reports and suspend these accounts, with no compensation, taking a hundred times as long as the bot takes to create accounts.