A billionaire enters a gas station. Seeing the "Leave a penny, take a penny" dish on the counter, he scoops up all of the coins and pockets them.

"I'm a genius," he says to the protesting clerk. "I earned this money. Anybody could have taken it, but only I had the vision to see what was possible."

A lot of my timeline here is (rightly) angry about war and racism and oligarchy and facism and climate crises and “AI” and enshittification and closed-source software.

I’m angry, too, but I don’t feel informed enough to contribute to “the discourse” in a helpful way. (Not that being uninformed stops me from having opinions!)

Also my nervous system is shot — from 24/7 parenting, from lots of loss and grief, too many life transitions the past few years.

Anyway, at the risk of seeming to ignore all the (huge, critical) issues in the world, I’m going to try posting more intentionally here: photography, beauty, gratitude.

It may come across as insincere, but it’s really not. It’s what I need to get through things right now.

And all the other big scary awful stuff will keep happening, without me amplifying it.

But so will all the beauty and magic. Both exist, both are true, both are important.

Let’s see how this goes.

I saw southern auroras last night!!!! Rakiura! Holy cow that was AMAZING

(View from a bit south of Arthur's Pass, New Zealand)

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