irotsoma

  • 2 Posts
  • 462 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • No. At least not in the way most people expect.

    It does block some tracking and ads that Chrome alone allows or explicitly adds. But it simply shifts that tracking to Brave. The idea was that you’d still get the benefits of that tracking by giving all of your data to Brave instead. I honestly never was convinced by this considering your data is still being sold, just by a different company so it doesn’t sound much better to me. Supposedly, according to them, Brave is more trustworthy and gives you more control over what they track and sell, but I don’t trust that business model. There’s no real incentive for them to do what they said they would.


  • Right, but not all have fixed that. I still see lots of cases where I have to turn off several options individually. Though these could be sites outside of the EU jurisdiction, so they just don’t care, or sites that make enough money off of the tracking data, that the fines would be insignificant even if the EU were to get around to fining them.

    And again the comment stands that it’s not the law, but the implementations that are bad. The law requires it to be simple, but that’s not what was implemented.


  • Problem is not the law, but that the companies implemented it in as annoying of a way as possible to get people pissed off about the law and force it to be dropped, or for what actually happened which is that it’s too much work to not opt-in to the cookies which essentially makes it opt-out not in.

    And the idea to remove the requirements for “simple statistics” or whatever terminology they use will just get abused by using other illicit tracking tech to link the cookies to uniquely identify a person anyway. So it will effectively make the popups unnecessary in any circumstances and still allow tracking for marketing and surveillance.



  • It’s become a pretty standard practice on Apple, Samsung, and Google devices as well as many other Android manufacturers to enable data sharing by default in the US. Especially the last few administrations want as much data as possible about the people, and in the US pretty much all of the companies share this kind of data pretty freely without requiring any judicial oversight since the supreme court has been corrupted. And the current administration HSS basically cut all investigation into any corporations that are friendly to them, so there’s no essentially no risk in collecting, leaking, or selling this data, so why bother making it opt-in. And recently, it’s explicitly risky to not collect and share as much data as possible with the government.


  • This is what I use. I mostly just have the DNS filter turned on to allow for blocking similar to what my pihole does at home, bit allows me to have it when I’m outside of the house, too. But it has lots of other capabilities like a firewall, proxying through Wiegaurd or Tor, anti-censorship features, etc. It does use your device’s VPN connection but it creates a local VPN just to force routing all apps through it and then if you want an additional external VPN you use the proxying, but that’s optional.

    But the DNS-only option doesn’t drain the battery like a full filter/firewall may, so that’s one reason I only use it for that. And I use GrapheneOS, so apps are easier to control at the OS level than standard Android, do it’s not as necessary for me anyway.




  • Nah they’ll be able to get out, likely for free if they don’t mind a bit of detainment first. What they should be doing is finding a new place to work or seeing if their current employers will move them to an office in another country. And big companies should be expanding their offices in other countries to make up for the loss of workers, or moving their offices back to places where American tech workers are willing to live rather than moving to conservative states and then pretending there aren’t educated workers for them to hire in the US.




  • I’m just talking pure cost to manufacture for each. The cost of the hardware is higher: faster CPU, faster GPU, additional RAM, additional storage, higher end cameras, etc. That is where the cost of the phone comes from, so you can’t compare cost of a Fair Phone to this one any more than you can compare the cost of a Pixel 9 to the Pixel 9a. Both have basically the same software, warranty, parts availability, etc., but the 9a was about half the price of the 9 because the “a” series is a lower-end phone overall.



  • The system that scours search results doesn’t store the images, but they are stored. Maybe or maybe not by Google, but someone is collecting them and keeping them in order to feed whatever “AI” or hashing algorithm comes next.

    And it’s actually not the “whole point” in a technical sense. It’s mentioned because they want to make it sound less harmful. You’d never compare actual images directly. That would take a ton of storage space and time to compare a large set of files byte for byte. You always use hashes. If it was easier or cheaper to use the images directly, they would, just like the “AI” agents that do this in other systems need the actual images not hashes.


  • Problem is that this means the images have to be kept around in order to compare them. So, often these caches of child porn and other non-consensual images which often are poorly secured are targets of hacking and thus end up allowing the images to spread more rather than less. And the people sharing these things don’t usually use the services that do this kind of scanning. So in general, it has more negative than positive effect. Instead, education to prevent abuse and support for the abused would be a better use of the money spent ln these things. But more difficult to profit from that and it doesn’t support a surveillance state.