Notices by Don Marti (dmarti@federate.social)

not affiliated with this #job just sharing what looks like an awesome #privacy #sysadmin opportunity in #california

(implementation for the #DeleteAct so you get to go home every day knowing you helped make the surveillance industry big mad)

https://calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/Jobs/JobPosting.aspx?JobControlId=466076

@fabiocosta0305 @glynmoody @cstross The fair use issue in the USA still isn't decided. In the EU, though, AI can be trained on copyrighted works unless the copyright holder "expressly reserves" -- which all the mainstream publishing companies, and most independent authors, have been doing

https://cultureactioneurope.org/news/european-parliament-adopts-the-ai-act/

@tek @twifkak @jonathankoren and the NSA, and the CIA... https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-nsa-and-cia-use-ad-blockers-because-online-advertising-is-so-dangerous/

@twifkak @jonathankoren @tek (and yes, "experienced advertisers" in the USA are more likely to run an ad blocker than average https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and-adblockers )

@twifkak @jonathankoren @tek

Malwarebytes has more info on fake domains showing up in search ads -- in this case it's fake ads for ads.google.com but looks like the same principle (?)

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/01/the-great-google-ads-heist-criminals-ransack-advertiser-accounts-via-fake-google-ads

@lavaeolus @dsalo It looks like they're obfuscating their real problem, which is that most of the people who have released their works under CC licenses want an updated license that clearly disallows generative AI training, and Creative Commons management doesn't want to make one

https://www.ietf.org/slides/slides-aicontrolws-creative-commons-position-paper-on-preference-signals-00.pdf

I found one thing on the Internet you can click to buy better stuff and be happier—and five theories about how it works https://blog.zgp.org/click-this-to-buy-better-stuff-and-be-happier/

@evan @wjmaggos good point--imho a server would be a great extra for an annual event like a conference or trade show

1/2 very good point from @_elena here: "I will be thinking: what do the Big Tech billionaires and kleptocrats wish I would do? And then I will do the OPPOSITE."

https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-fediverse-has-empowered-me-to-take-back-control-from-big-tech-now-i-want-to-help-others-do-the-same/

The habits and settings that are revenue-positive for Big Tech are the ones that reflect more surveillance and addiction on the user's side (ever notice how Big Tech big shots tend to have strict screen time rules for their own families?)

Good story but the headline should really be "exploiting Meta's decision to understaff content moderation and ad review" not "weakness"

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-instagram-meta-deceptive-political-ads-election

@aral @SecurityWriter Good point. Some ad blockers are security tools, some (like ABP) offer a false sense of security with paid allow-listing, and some are adware, malware, or subscription scams.

The 2 tools I recommend are:

Privacy Badger is simpler but since it's purely focused on tracking it will let more annoyances through.

uBlock Origin does a lot more

I never recommend "an ad blocker" to users—the extensions that come up highest in Google are the ones that let the Google ads through

@tchambers @evan Personally I'm not opposed to web advertising if done right (Kurt Vonnegut was able to quit his day job as a car dealership manager because of sales to ad-supported magazines—constructive web ads could help writers) but the way that Mozilla is going about it is more like #adfraud in the browser than like the previous "ads in Firefox" projects

Making it easy for bad sites to "steal attribution" (claim credit for sales) creates surveillance risks to users

https://blog.zgp.org/why-turn-off-firefox-ad-tracking/

#readTheWholeThing "[W]e and our colleagues at other journalist-owned publications like Defector, Hell Gate, Racket, Remap, Aftermath, and others have shown that small businesses owned by the people doing the work can be successful not just editorially, but can also be financially sustainable."

https://www.404media.co/what-we-learned-in-our-first-year-of-404-media/

@thomasfuchs good point (also it looks like many people on here will interpret the use of these as an anti-artist statement... https://federate.social/@dmarti/112621235231128785 )

If surveillance/personalized advertising is such a good way to match buyers and sellers, then research should show that people who use #privacy tools and settings are buying worse stuff...right?

https://blog.zgp.org/easy-experiment-behavioral-advertising/

I'm going to paste "ISBN: 9781098169466" into the public library order suggestion form...then if future me gets email about a book showing up I hope that future me will take it as sign I'm supposed to learn this stuff https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/activitypub/9781098162733/

now that the original company isn't using it, is "twitter" going to be a generic word for a short text sharing service? so the fediverse site I have an account on is just one of the twitters (lowercase t)?

@mhoye if you think it's bad now, the next generation is ads built in to the browser, with an average latency of 1500ms per ad (!) https://www.adexchanger.com/the-sell-sider/privacy-sandboxs-latency-issues-will-cost-publishers/

it helps to understand the direction here if you consider Web Environment Integrity*, Manifest v3, "Privacy Sandbox" (in-browser ads), and "Performance Max" (hide placements from advertisers) as 1 project...goal is to get the most expensive ads possible into the cheapest possible context

(and yes, WEI will be back under a different name)

@kevinrns @xot also since proof-of-work cryptocurrency is fundamentally based on expensive use of a resource, the more expensive the electricity is, the more the cryptocurrency is worth. The higher the tax on energy used for mining, the more costly the "work" in PoW, so the more valuable the coins mined. Might be counterintuitive, but a tax on cryptocurrency mining would actually act like a subsidy

all right, let's get this daily standup for the ship project started. How is everyone doing on yearning for the vast and endless sea? Let's go around and check in