The article discusses the use of targeted advertising data by government agencies, particularly focusing on how a technology consultant demonstrated the security risks posed by Grindr's data to national security agencies. It highlights the widespread availability and potential surveillance applications of advertising data, as well as the government's interest in obtaining and utilizing such data for intelligence purposes.

Why is this worth the read? It goes into detail how these data exchanges work and the mechanisms of obtaining such data. We often hear about the result of these actions, but how these actions are performed are described within.

(clear your cookies to read the paywalled article)

Below is a disturbing amount of information data brokers have ammased from buying your data from trackers in ads and apps.

"a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States.

... can access this data to trace individuals' movements—including to sensitive locations like hospitals, temporary shelters, and places of worship, with a promised accuracy within "a few meters"—over a day, a week, a month, or a year. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged.

... target customers by categories that are "often based on specific sensitive and personal characteristics or attributes identified from its massive collection of data about individual consumers." These "audience segments" allegedly allow advertisers to conduct invasive targeting by grouping people not just by common data points like age or gender, but by "places they have visited," political associations, or even their current circumstances, like whether they're expectant parents. Or advertisers can allegedly combine data points to target highly specific audience segments like "all the pregnant Muslim women in Kochava’s database," the FTC alleged, or "parents with different ages of children."

For all you USA peeps:

A bipartisan team of U.S. lawmakers has introduced new legislation intended to curb the FBI's sweeping surveillance powers, saying the bill helps close the loopholes that allow officials to seize Americans' data without a warrant.

The bill follows more than a decade of debate over post-Sept. 11, 2001, surveillance powers that allow domestic law enforcement to warrantlessly scan the vast mountains of data gathered by America's foreign surveillance apparatus.

A bipartisan team of U.S. lawmakers has introduced new legislation intended to curb the FBI's sweeping surveillance powers, saying the bill helps close the loopholes that allow officials to seize Americans' data without a warrant.

The bill follows more than a decade of debate over post-Sept. 11, 2001, surveillance powers that allow domestic law enforcement to warrantlessly scan the vast mountains of data gathered by America's foreign surveillance apparatus.

The sudo-rs project improves on the security of the original sudo by:

• Using a memory safe language (Rust), as it's estimated that one out of three security bugs in the original sudo have been memory management issues

• Leaving out less commonly used features so as to reduce attack surface

• Developing an extensive test suite which even managed to find bugs in the original sudo

I have a device that reached end-of-life support and I'm burned out loading ROMs to extend it's support. Upon from my return from the trip I plan on purchasing a new device anyway, so buying one while traveling is also an option.

I'm traveling to a European Market that has stronger privacy rules GDPR and their devices must have lower SAR (regarding phone RF emissions).

Regarding RF and SAR

My carrier frequency bands in my home country are supported by European phones I'm looking at (Android and Apple). But do the phones dynamically manage the RF emission based on locale or are the limited at hardware or software?

Would purchasing the device abroad have an effect I think it does when I bring it home?

Regarding Privacy

This one is tricky, typically the account (gmail or Apple ID) is associated with the locale. If I were to create a new account and set up my device while abroad, will this have lasting effects? I have a friend who have immigrated and set their devices up abroad and their locale is still their OG country. One of them changed locales (for android) because spotify (app) wasnt available in their home country locale. So I speculate this is a solid approach if I were to do so.

I know I might have issues with availability of content (downloading from app stores). But as far as accounts go, my Spotify (and netflix if i stil had it) account is associated with my home country so I will still be able to watch shows in my locale. Being able to download the app is the limiting factor but there are ways to get around that with side loading.

So yeah, if anyone has experience with this and could call out some things I didn't consider or validate my expectations, would be appretiated.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains

Source of this is from Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare posted at 11:34 Jul 9,2023. It was posted to his twitter (@eastdakota). Not linking to twitter bc don't want a deadlink next time twitter makes API changes. And not to drive traffic to twitter :D

Edit: July 11th update, arstechnica published a detailed explanation

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-is-tanking-amid-threads-surging-popularity-analysts-say/

I am not one for policies restricting choice but I fear the situation where Meta sets up instances that become big, say like Lemmy.world. Then one day when their instance is popular, they decide to charge other instances to federate with Meta's instances.

Big corps like YouTube, twitter, Meta, etc are known to offer services at a loss to grow their service and then drop the hammer and demand payment to use what people already rely on.

I feel a policy that prevents federated corp instance from profiting early on from FOSS, self hosted, and volunteer federated servers is something to think about - though I do not know the best approach.

I like what Open Source software does with their licensing approach where you are free to view, use, and contribute but if you take you must distribute the source code to others. Some outright ban usage for profit without a license.

Obviously licensing applies well for software to prevent abuse, and I would like a discussion about what Terms of Use policies can prevent volunteer work from being abused - if any are desired.

see the following cross-post from: https://programming.dev/post/427323

Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?

I'm not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.

Here is a link if someone don't know what Meta's Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

With all the strengths and shortcomings of Chat-GPT, I wanted to share one consistent strength I found it has when working with regex.

• You can ask it to generate regex patterns for known and custom things.
  • If you are skeptical it is correct (like me), you can ask it to break down the pattern and inspect why the decisions were made. If I don't understand some fields, I type up a quick test and make sure it covers all edge cases.
• And my personal favorite, you can paste a regex and ask it to tell you what it matches to. No more writing regex and forgetting what they are for!

I don't always have the opportunity to use regex when I work and would shy away from it because it can become illegible, but now that it is so easy I find I am slapping it everywhere and I cutting down on logic when sanitizing inputs/data. The bonus is now that I'm using it more, I am becoming less reliant on having it be generated for me.

I want to discuss a topic, say a recent event like "Google Search will omit links to Canadian news sites in Canada". So I find communities where that topic might appear but I cannot search the contents of a community to see if that thread exists.

Has anyone figured out good approaches to searching in Lemmy? I mostly use mobile apps like Jeroba or Liftoff so my experience is limited to them.

I'm still getting the hang of Lemmy and federated services.

I'm browsing the programming.dev instandce in the Liftoff app and I can choose to view:

1. my subscribed communities on the server (currently none)
2. Local communities on the server
3. All (?)

I know All is not "all communities on Lemmy" but what perplexes me is I can see posts from another community that is hosted on a different server and it appears because it is "via programming.dev".

At first I thought it was because a user registered on " programming.dev " posted on another instance but I opened my eyes and saw the user's origin is no way related.

Any ideas?

EDIT:

After reading all the comments I’m pretty sure “via programming.dev” should read in the context of the post as !community@instance is known via programming.dev instance. I guess it makes it explicit which “all” I am browsing if I pick up browsing where I left off and forget I am not in the “all local”.

At this point I have only seen this on the Liftoff App for Lemmy but still trying other. Must be in the metadata and Liftoff decided to display it.