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

Hello Starter Kits ✨

https://loops.video/starter-kits/eAaAZQwIAC/popular-creators

Now available on https://joinloops.org ⚡️

#StarterKits #Loops

RE: https://chaos.social/@grote/116257002625921666

At this point I'm convinced that there's something deeply wrong with how our society treats technology.

Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution. It's unsustainable in the long run. Also, the last thing this world needs right now is even more centralization of power. Especially around yet another US company. (1/2)

3 ways to keep your files secure (without losing control)🛡Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter update

https://peertube.nextcloud.com/w/w8jy8HFoVAH1djsJb94BZJ

#AndroidAppRain at https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/?radd=1&doFilter=1 today brings you 16 updated and 1 added apps:

* DueNot: offline-first credit card bill management and reminder 🛡️

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repository  

Further, 4 #Magisk modules have been updated at https://apt.izzysoft.de/magisk

Here’s a little something I put together this week: Pinhead Map Icons. I was tired of digging through a bunch of different sources to find good cartographic icons, so I compiled all the public domain sources I could find into one unified set. You’ll see familiar faces from the likes of iD, OSM Carto, and National Park Service maps, plus some newcomers. Let me know what you think!

https://pinhead.ink/

#Samsung devices from today can no longer install custom ROMs.

Odin is gone and the Download Mode is also gone, which makes life hard also for repair services that want to restore a device.

This is your daily reminder that #Android is a liability, and major hardware manufacturers who ship Google’s version of Android are a liability too.

We need to get Linux phones to work, and we need manufacturers who are aligned with our principles.

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-disables-odin-removes-download-mode-3648469/