As part of a new report on digital advertising as a security threat published today by @johnnyryan and me (https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidden-security-crisis.pdf), and previously unreported:

We reveal 'Patternz', a global mass surveillance system that harvests digital advertising data on behalf of 'national security agencies'.

Patternz is operated by a company based in Israel and/or Singapore. It claims to collect data about 5 billion users from 87 ad exchanges and SSPs via 6 data centers around the world.

Thread:

So, Mr Beast made a YouTube video where he dug 100 wells in impoverished areas of Kenya and other African countries. CNN did a story on how he was being criticized for his good deeds. They quoted Saran Kaba Jones, a Black woman who has been building wells in Africa for 15 years, and a single Twitter commenter.

But... The Black woman praised Mr. Beast? She only asked that we consider maintenance, because many of the wells she digs are because existing wells weren't maintained.

#BlackMastodon

One year ago, I decided to leave Twitter and start my own Mastodon instance for myself and a few friends.

I quickly started supporting the project on Patreon and joined the Discord, to see if I could help some people with scaling up their instances, as I was familiar with the stack and I know the drill.

A few weeks later, I was reworking the whole hosting for the project, then mastodon.online, and ultimately mastodon.social…