It's safer to assume that Amazon is always acting in bad faith and search to purchase your DRM free e-books from other vendors. There's plenty of other options out there besides Amazon
Pretty sure all of Baen's books are DRM free, and they offer virtually every ebook format around. They even used to include CDs with their hardbacks that would would include a huge subset of their collection. But they aren't a retailer, they're a publisher, so you're only getting the titles they publish.
Earlier this year I downloaded TikTok once, I needed to access some very niche videos and couldn't watch them without getting an account. I never added anybody, and I never associated with any other socials, but somehow I started getting emails from TikTok that one of my NEIGHBORS were viewing my profile! Even used their full name. I deleted the account and uninstalled the app.
I had a creepy one like this happen to me with Linkedin. I sold my uncle's guitar on craigslist using a throwaway gmail address to a guy with a very unique, rhyming name that I would never forget (ie - Gerald Herald). Immediately after he left with the guitar linkedin suggests I add him to my professional network. I never logged in to linkedin from that gmail, never looked this guy up, don't have linkedin app installed on my phone, literally met him for 60 seconds to get cash and hand over a guitar. It still weirds me out.
This is because when you click a shared TikTok link, your account and the sharer's accounts are associated in a social graph. The sharer will see your account as a suggested friend and vice versa.
No sharing link needed. Before I deleted my Facebook account more than a decade ago, it was already suggesting random people I met once IRL and are at least two hops away in terms of existing FB relationships. I had very few friends (~20 IIRC).
Id suggest FB & co also uses location tracking & proximity to expand their social graph continuosly?
Most people just dont care about these privacy settings, and if you have a vast number of users, it doesnt matter if ther are 10% "techsavy people" because the mass is just big enough to create profiles on which you then easily can compute/guess other connections & joints in the social graph.
Yes, that’s my assumption, although IIRC I never gave FB location permissions, so it might be temporarily sharing an IP address by being on the same WiFi or something. Come to think of it they had access to WiFi SSIDs as well in the early days even when location permissions were off.
Even without location they can get a pretty good idea of your location from your IP address or any other signals. Their neighbor also might have allowed access to their phonebook or something like that to make the connection obvious.
Cell tower data is readily available for a modest price. It's not hard to triangulate someone with "good enough" accuracy for marketing purposes.
Also, the world is filled with millions of Bluetooth-logging devices. They're everywhere from department stores (to monitor foot traffic) to the side of the road (to monitor traffic speed).
Reading cell towers also is supposed to be behind the location tracking flag. Including bluetooth by the way, which is why so many apps need this permission these days to even link a BLE device.
And tracking bluetooth emissions shouldn't matter as they are randomised while not in an active connection.
I uninstalled it after about half an hour of use when it became clear the app kept pushing me to watch videos with Andrew Tate (with him on the top half of the screen and random racing games on the bottom half). It’s dystopian.
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
The funny thing about removing "we don't sell your data" is that Mozilla before that was giving your data away for free. Now they just could be compensated.
I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ.
Besides, it doesn't seem like I'm able to install sponsorblock, ublockock origin etc on iOS firefox. I love using sponsorblock and several other add-ons from both Mazzella in chrome in Orion on my phone.
> I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ.
"Firefox" != "Firefox Focus"
Please do not conflate the two.
> it doesn't seem like I'm able to install sponsorblock, ublockock origin etc on iOS firefox
There are other options though. For example a DoH DNS profile pointing at DNS servers that do that for you (for example Mullvad's `adblock.dns.mullvad.net` DNS servers).
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since like 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
It's absolutely Firefox that I'm trying to avoid completely at this point.
> There are other options though. For example a DoH DNS profile pointing at DNS servers that do that for you (for example Mullvad's `adblock.dns.mullvad.net` DNS servers
DNS adblock doesn't automatically skip sponsored segments of videos like sponsorblock does.
What I like most about ironclad is that it is fully posix-compliant, meaning that you can run a lot of UNIX programs on it already, like what "Gloire" does: https://github.com/Ironclad-Project/Gloire
I stopped using duckduckgo and switched to kagi shortly after the tankman fiasco[1]. Never been happier- if you want to support the continued existence of search, then pay for it.
We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324
Kagi uses Russian search engine Yandex (EDIT: among several other sources) to produce search results, which means they pay them, which means indirectly sponsoring Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
There are more or less valid arguments for not excluding Yandex[1], but as a European, I want to avoid any of my money going to Russia if possible. And there is no setting to exclude Yandex from your Kagi search results.
If you stopped using duckduckgo because of the tankman fiasco, maybe you should reconsider if Kagi is right for you.
I'm honestly surprised they're legally allowed to do that. Isn't Yandex under sanctions and wouldn't paying them money as a US company fall under funding a sanctioned company?
By definition it also means your search queries are sent to Yandex, which may be a problem if you are pasting sensitive data there and belong to a risk group
Not by definition; from the Vlad response linked above: "we do not call all sources for all queries, as we balance cost efficiency with result quality - a delicate optimization". But I could understand how one may want to eliminate any possibility!
Second this. I finally gave up and subscribed to Kagi half a year ago, and man, I should have done it much sooner. The search results are just genuinely good.
This is not like trying to use Bing, and then half the time you have to do the same search on Google because of how poor Bing's results are. It feels like Google felt fifteen years ago: useful results without all the "sponsored links" garbage around it.
I'm not a farmer, but I have relied on the farmers almanac before when planning vacations months in advance. It's been surprisingly accurate at determining whether a given week would have rain, snow, or sun. I have no idea how they did it but I would love to see their weather prediction system open sourced if they're going to be shutting down.
They do detailed scoring of their predictions and it's based on rigorous physical modeling (navier stokes) so they know that it's better than chance. FA hasn't held up well to such scrutiny.
Sadly it would never work for the British Isles, that much I can guarantee you. Our weather resists all forms of prediction found to be reliable elsewhere, and I doubt AI enhancements over the next few years will make much of a dent in the problem.
I’ve tried all manner of weather services and none of them really do a really good job of any level of forecasting. They do however excel at supplying me with information I can get just by looking out the window.
"Fish and beans, for instance, can cause body odour because they're filled with trimethylamine, a very strong-smelling compound. There's even a health condition, called trimethylaminuria – also known as "fish odour syndrome" – which arises when the body can't turn trimethylamine into a non-smelly compound, says Beeson. "This can lead to a strong body odour," she says"
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