Mastodawn

tomcat

3h ago

k3ym𖺀 Mar 2

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

tomcat

22h ago

Athena Mar 12

Sam Altman: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

Meaning: We stole all your knowledge , writing, and art, and now we’re gonna put a meter on it and sell it back to you. You’re welcome.”

tomcat

2d ago

move Skyrim mod install from Steam .exe to GOG
after installing correct skse version and address library, updating a handful of mods, things just work
notice performance pretty quickly gets worse, laggy, stutters, and eventually CTD
narrow it down to a memory leak in the GOG .exe
there's a mod to fix it

Thanks modding community

#Skyrim #modding #GOG #Steam #MO2 #ModItTillItBreaksThenModItSomeMore

tomcat

2d ago

Torsten Grote 3d ago

Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:

* enable developer options
* confirm that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day
* confirm with biometrics that you know what you are doing
* decide if you only want unrestricted installs for 1 week or forever
* confirm that you accept the risks
* enjoy the few apps that still have developers motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this

https://goo.gle/advance-flow

tomcat

3d ago

Looking for a .ics calendar to add to Proton that includes commonly recognized holidays in addition to Federal holidays. Options I've found either include numerous and duplicative dates for obscure state-specific holidays and birthdates, or exclude holidays like Easter and Halloween.

Any good options for something in-between?

tomcat

5d ago

Hacker News 100 5d ago

US commercial insurers pay 254% of Medicare for the same hospital procedures
https://github.com/rexrodeo/american-healthcare-conundrum

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401809

GitHub - rexrodeo/american-healthcare-conundrum: Investigative data journalism: quantifying fixable waste in US healthcare, one issue at a time. Open-source analysis of CMS, OECD, and federal datasets. $98.6B in savings identified so far.

Investigative data journalism: quantifying fixable waste in US healthcare, one issue at a time. Open-source analysis of CMS, OECD, and federal datasets. $98.6B in savings identified so far. - rexro...

GitHub

tomcat

6d ago