2018-2019 is when they officially turned the corner and decided to focus only on ad revenue. But the SEO abuse dove it into the ground by 2014ish. They were making money enough to expand by orders of magnitude into other areas, so they simply didn’t want to tweak their search or strategy and kill their golden goose that funded things like Good Drive and their shit social network and loon, etc.

Let’s say you use a VPN, and all your internet traffic comes from an IP in London. 178.238.10.1.

It doesn’t matter if you have a VPN, if you log in to anything with any account tied to your real name ([email protected]), your email and anything done on that London IP are all linked. Google builds a profile on you based on the activity on that IP. AND your browser profile. Private/incognito window or not, if there’s a Google tracker on the site, they connect it all. Google doesn’t care about private windows. If you go to reddit in a private window on the same IP as your gmail, Google sees that and tracks every page you look at.

So let’s say that you log into your email from work. Google now has a treasure trove of new info about you and people you know. Same for FB, who uses the fact that you and someone else were logged on from the same IP range to suggest new friends.

Let’s pretend that you live in China and still have access to a VPN and want to learn about the Tienanmen Square Massacre. But the government can ask Google about you. What do you need?

• an IP never ever used with an account associated with an account with your real name.
• a no-log VPN that won’t tattle on you if asked what sites did you access on a specific date.
• a browser fingerprint never ever associated with an account tied to your real name.

Since January Google has been using browser fingerprinting and IP triangulation to track across incognito windows.

Meta wants in the game as well. Nothing done on a phone with Meta apps is done in isolation.

Edit: seems like only vanilla mobile browsers affected. Brave was not vulnerable, DDG minimally so, and I expect Iron/Waterfox with uBlock would also not have allowed tracking.

https://securityonline.info/androids-secret-tracking-meta-yandex-abused-localhost-for-user-data/

No, you use one as the backup. That’s why I said use JShelter, but if a site breaks beyond use, switch IPs and then reload with NoScript instead to be more selective of what is blocked and what’s not. That way I can still block Cloudflare and Google and Apple and still let the actual site load. And JScreep seems (for me, YMMV) to treat each as distinct fingerprints.

IMO if you know you can have multiple fingerprint profiles anyway based on which combo of extensions you use that do roughly the same job, that’s a net benefit.

The why is browser fingerprinting. Which Google started using as of January to track everyone.

https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

So if you go to ANY page with Google trackers, even in private mode, Google knows.

For vanilla FF I use multi - account containers, uBlock, and privacy badger.

For other FF forks like Librewolf, I get more blocky, like JShelter, a random agent switcher, and if that breaks a site beyond use I try Chameleon and NoScirpt.

It is, but it’s a use case that has a shitload of money behind it.

Do you know why we have had reliable e-commerce since 1999? Porn websites. That was the use case that pushed credit card acceptance online.

The demand is so huge that firms would rather stumble a bit at first to save huge amounts for a bad but barely sub-par UX.

Holy shit. Yes, it does. Thanks! Hadn’t heard of it until today

Because it’s an option already. “Transliterate to Latin letters.”

Edit: I should add that you should look at how many keyboard layouts there are. It’s kind of silly that for me to use an OSM based map and go to any county east of Slovenia I need to both have the keyboard AND know the transliteration of the alphabet.

Have you seen the Armenian or Georgian alphabets? What makes the K sound?

Did you know every dialect of a Slavic language using Cyrillic has it’s own distinct keyboard varied by mostly the letter for the nya sound and J?

Greek?

All while transliteration works fine in Google.

Destination search in all the OSM based maps is a challenge. The Latin letter transliteration only applies to large features. So if I want to find an address in a country try that doesn’t use Latin script, I literally need a keyboard in that language or do a lot of cut and paste from Google Translate. My address never, ever works on OSM. Gets the wrong street, can’t even handle house/building numbers. Works fine on Google.

Depends on the person. My spouse and I, along with 5 or 6 friends, use a variety of key words from a couple shared languages to talk about things when we don’t want other to understand. Mostly haggling or talking about sales stuff to discuss if we like something or think it’s too expensive when a human is hovering right there. So I can give body language of disappointment while saying “this is great.”

That sounds boring AF.

This 100%.

Wealthy people essentially pay staff to do make things happen for them, and those staff don’t sign up for IG or FB stressing abou making sure to use their ONE email like [email protected] for everything.

PA staff are both IT staff and human password managers, creating and curating massive sets of logins that are functionally disposable. With enough clout and money, if you DO have a problem with a social media platform, or your phone number, a PA calls an Executive CSR and sorts out the problem.

So it’s that their “privacy” is masked by the haphazard way they interact with things that track them. For them, tracking them is security to ensure you know who they are so that have a frictionless experience. If they want a dummy account to creep on people or be a perv, they get that easily, too.

I don’t hate Arch. Or Vegan diets. Or Crossfit. Or colleges outside of Boston, either.

But the people…well…

Brace yourselves for being told on MSN and Yahoo about the hottest new toy this Xmas! If you don’t buy it, you might be arrested for child abuse!

Anyone know what Linux distro? I assume Ubuntu…

Yes, from a general misunderstanding of how microwave ovens work, and what “radiation” was during the 1960s and 70s.

https://kitchenpearls.com/why-do-we-say-nuke-for-microwave/

The problem with the money problem is the money part. As much as I actually do want to donate to ALL the open source platforms I use, I don’t have enough to do that equitably between platforms and even cover processing costs of the payment. 25 services split $100? Why bother?

A foundation with an endowment is actually the solution. The Open Source Foundation (or someone like them) needs to become a neutral arbiter and incubator.

But also - I would, and can, provide labor. I would love to give anything FOSS 20-30 hours a week of my time. But doing what? Should I get a part time job to support 25 FOSS services? Take Fivr gigs and donate it all? Or can I just directly hustle a part time work week somehow?

Rural poor checking in.

I’ve lived in a camper, and then in the back of a convenience store my patents ran. Eventually upgraded to a doublewide. But I went to a rural school with like 40 kids that were all also poor. One kid and his family were miners living in a series of vans upon blocks by the mine. My best friend and his family lived in a half used rundown motel, the other half too broken down to bother living in. The richest kid was a rancher’s family that lived in a barndominium.

So every family on TV was rich to me, but it was TV, so I figured it was all fantasy land anyway. Star Trek wasnt real, either. I had seen a “normal” school before 3rd grade, but by high school and college, people that thought Nickelodeon (which I didn’t see until college anyway) shows were relatable at all just seemed like space aliens to me. I was likely more the space alien to them.

“Brad, I saw you cheating on Stacy at the club last night” [your pgp key here]