• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Do they “give high rankings” to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don’t go in and penalize them for… telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?

    Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page’s query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.

    The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.

    The “accusation” of “fingerprinting” was along the lines of “their site called a canvas function oh no”. It’s not “fingerprinting” every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.

    What exactly is “all data available in my session” when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it’s nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.

    This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn’t that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it’s that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds “anonymous” to me, even if it isn’t Tor-strength anonymity that’s resistant to wiretaps.

    There’s an important difference between “we’re trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don’t boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo”, as opposed to “we’re building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners”. And I feel like you shouldn’t take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.


  • It sounds like nobody actually understood what you want.

    You have a non-ZFS boot drive, and a big ZFS pool, and you want to save an image of the boot drive to the pool, as a backup for the boot drive.

    I guess you don’t want to image the drive while booted off it, because that could produce an image that isn’t fully self-consistent. So then the problem is getting at the pool from something other than the system you have.

    I think what you need to do is find something else you can boot that supports ZFS. I think the Ubuntu live images will do it. If not, you can try something like re-installing the setup you have, but onto a USB drive.

    Then you have to boot to that and zfs import your pool. ZFS is pretty smart so it should just auto-detect the pool structure and where it wants to be mounted, and you can mount it. Don’t do a ZFS feature upgrade on the pool though, or the other system might not understand it. It’s also possible your live kernel might not have a new enough ZFS to understand the features your pool uses, and you might need to find a newer one.

    Then once the pool is mounted you should be able to dd your boot drive block device to a file on the pool.

    If you can’t get this to work, you can try using a non-ZFS-speaking live Linux and dding your image to somewhere on the network big enough to hold it, which you may or may not have, and then booting the system and copying back from there to the pool.








  • Zuckerberg Did Nothing Wrong

    I’m concerned that the narrative that what Facebook was trying to achieve here was wrong or bad is itself user-hostile, and pushes in favor of the non-fiduciary model of software.

    Facebook paid people to let them have access to those people’s communications with Snap, Inc., via Snapchat’s app. This is so that Facebook could do their analytics magic and try and work out how often Snapchat users tend to do X, Y, or Z. Did they pay enough? Who knows. Would you take the deal? Maybe not. Was this a totally free choice without any influence from the creeping specter of capitalist immiseration? Of course not. But it’s not some unusually nefarious plot when a person decides to let a company watch them do stuff! Privacy isn’t about never being allowed to reveal what you are up to. Some people like to fill out those little surveys they get in the mail.

    Now, framing this as Facebook snooping on Snapchat’s data concedes that a person’s communications from their Snapchat app to Snapchat HQ are Snapchat’s data. Not that person’s data, to do with as they please. If the user interferes with the normal operation of one app at the suggestion of someone who runs a different app, this framing would see that as two apps having a fight, with user agency nowhere to be found. I think it is important to see this as a user making a choice about what their system is going to do. Snapchat on your phone is entirely your domain; none of it belongs to Snap, Inc. If you want to convince it to send all your Snapchat messages to the TV in Zuckerberg’s seventh bathroom in exchange for his toenail clippings, that’s your $DEITY-given right.

    User agency is under threat already, and we should not write it away just to try and make Facebook look bad.











  • I’m going to go with “be normal”.

    Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn’t. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.

    Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.

    But that’s kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it’s often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.