Which would be almost, but not quite entirely useless, wouldn’t it.
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It strikes me that the Do Not Track option is nothing more than a request, and there are three possible responses:
- Yes, of course! We weren’t really tracking you anyway, but we respect you!
- No.
- Yes, of course! We would never use your request as a reason to add an extra flag to the data we are collecting on you whether you want us to or not. You can trust us as far as you know
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That’s assuming there was even any consistent standard behavior about it.
In theory, it was supposed to represent a user preference - that they had explicitly opted in or opted out, or null if they had not chosen.
But some browsers defaulted it to on, so some webservers were configured to ignore it. Meanwhile nobody was paying websites to go in and make changes to handle it, nor defining how they should.
So it ended up meaning nothing most of the time but sometimes meaning whatever someone thought it meant, which might not be the same as whatever anyone else thought.
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This is interesting. An undeniable improvement in construction design is kind of responsible for a lot of bad developments in our world.
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Via Cory Doctorow’s Mastodon feed…
In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma.
It’s so painful to try and communicate this with family and friends and business colleagues who are manifesting the damage but don’t know what to do, or can’t muster the very real determination and skill required to extract themselves, at least to some more tolerable degree.
Edit: That’s one hell of a piece; I certainly can’t dismiss it as mere polemic, I think Ed Zitron nails it.
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I agree with most of what he had to say, but winced at this:
The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around — and I’m not even getting into Tesla’s designs right now — we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has worked mostly the same way since I started flying, other than moving from physical tickets to digital ones.
No, no they have not. The same fight with tech that he’s describing with laptops and smartphones is happening to drivers while they commute or run errands - because it’s baked into the vehicle. Don’t get me started on how computer systems have affected safety on airplanes. 
Sure, people can opt out of in-flight infotainment systems and avoid specific types of planes when they travel. However, auto dealers / manufacturers routinely turn drivers into users of “unfriendly” car navigation, toll payment, emergency service, and maintenance/warranty systems.
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My 2012 Ford? Yeah, a bit, but not so much that it actually tries to drive for me. In-flight computing in that car is just a lonely, discontinued, mid-2000’s MP3 player.
Newer cars: I agree, it’s out of control. (Or, even worse, relinquishes control the moment it senses it’s about to die.)
Side bar: take ride in the back of a Telsa 3 some time (as I usually don’t, long story) and ask the driver to turn on the computer’s vision display, where it plots things that it sees. It’s alarming how much you’ll see out the window and it doesn’t. “Object persistence” doesn’t seem to be part of its brain either; watch as vehicles disappear and then take a moment to re-appear and be re-identified after being occluded. F**in’ scary, IMO.
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I think we need to think about cars, too.
To begin with, they offered some people new mobility options, but put other people in danger.
As they became more common, the number of cars slows down both care and bus travel, and threatens bike and foot travel.
As they became more common, buses and streetcars were shut down, so other mobility options are being destroyed.
To try to reduce collisions, civilians are expected to cross at intersections, where cars would have to stop, but now they don’t have to stop, so civilians have to watch for cars coming from every direction, while the drivers are too busy watching for cars to notice civilians.
To try to improve visibility for drivers, cars are equipped with headlights, so cars are equipped with tinted windows to protect against other headlights, so cars are equipped with more powerful headlights and daytime running lights, so cars are equipped with stronger tinted windows, so some safety planners are suggesting even more powerful headlights… meanwhile daytime running lights are often far beyond blinding.
To try to show where cars are stopped or turning, cars are equipped with hazardous bllinders and turn blinders, and school buses are equipped wit strobes, and so on…
Gorz’s essay is worth reading:
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Enshittification, polarization, and brain-rot all are apt words for 2024. And they are all depressing. Roméo Dallaire’s latest book The Peace gives examples of more uplifting words.
Ubumwe is one of the words in the national motto of Rwanda. Dallaire’s very readable book has a lot to say about his time in Rwanda. The Kinyarwanda-language word means unity.
The Zulu word Ubuntu grew from the phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Dallaire explains Ubuntu as meaning “A person is a person because of other people”.
Dallaire cited Metis professor Paul L.A.H. Chartrand, who explained that the Cree word Niw_hk_m_kanak means All My Relations and “encompasses all humans, including those who have passed on and those who are yet to be born, as well as all plants, animals and the earth itself.”
Here’s hoping to a new year with less brain-rot, less polarization, and less enshittification. May your 2025 have more Ubuntu, more Ubumwe and more thought to every being on this planet alive today and in future.
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Occasionally my Firefox browser gets real laggy, best way to fix it is to close it and reopen. So i go back to YT to watch a video and i am greeted with this:
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I saw a similar message for the first time today.
Google’s had quite the year on privacy!
Slow-walking then killing the commitment to deprecate third-party cookies
Google brings back digital fingerprinting to track users for advertising | Mashable
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I had to turn off my Ublock, but left my Privacy Badger on. I think that’s still working, we’ll see if i get any ads
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I have noticed I don’t get any ads or have any issues if I search for a Youtube video on DuckDuckGo and play it through the video tab
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If they want people to stop blocking ads, maybe they could offer other safety options.
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Summary: install Honey (which is owned by Paypal), and it actively steals all Affiliate Commissions.
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Also not “finding” the best discounts.
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Also: This is part one of three, and there’s worse to come.
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