When companies tell you they respect your privacy and you should give them your data, you tell them it doesn’t matter. Because policies can change, and at the end of the day, your privacy isn’t always up to an single company.

Wait. This was last year, so not the capitol riot. What happened in January last year? I’m in a decent mood today. Just going to skip looking deeper into this one. I have Factorio to play!

Oh! I think I see what you mean now. I think I get it.

I hope so. It’s more likely something infected Firefox itself, and didn’t get into the OS. But when I checked the modem logs, it happened up to a couple of months after the fact. That’s worrying.

What’s even more worrying is that a couple of websites told me I had an IP address that didn’t match my home IP, but would provide the correct one if I refreshed the page a couple of times. So some kind of covert proxy or VPN type of thing was happening.

I ended up just wiping everything, to be safe. Still a bit paranoid though.

You’re not wrong. But also keep in mind that headlines prime readers to think in a certain way before they even get a chance to read the context. No one will admit it, because headlines make money, but all it takes is one carefully worded headline to change how people interpret, feel about, and react to a story. Even when you’re aware of this trick, it’s impossible to avoid all the time. That’s just how our brains work.

I know this story is more-so about a trojan in a trusted place, and not general security, but I have an anecdote to share.

So, time to fess up here. I previously complained about Google trapping me in captcha-hell for enabling Ublock Origin.

I was wrong.

Turns out that I had visited a movie streaming site a while before to watch a season of some show, I forget which. Without any downloads or noticeable input on my part. My Linux box apparently got hacked/malware. All I did was click the occasional “I am a human” box on the website, and sit back with popcorn.

I found out when my ISP starting blocking IP addresses some time later. I checked my modem’s logs, and they showed some unexplained traffic to impossible “unassigned” IP addresses afterward. I didn’t notice for a while.

I was stupid. Even worse, my phone also started behaving badly after that. I think I watched the last few episodes in bed, so must have infected that too.

Don’t assume any system is automatically safe.

Context. People seemed to be complaining about Mozilla’s CEO. That’s why I wanted to clarify for anyone reading the comments first.

People. This is talking about the CEO for Onerep, not the CEO for Mozilla.

The headline is ambiguous here. The CEO in question is from Onerep, not Mozilla.

Huh. I hadn’t thought about that. That’s not a bad point either.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks-grok-twitter-ai-is-actually-woke-hilarity-ensues/

“I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles”, they went on to say.

Easy. I specifically blocked all titles with the tags “EA” and “EA Play” on Steam. Never have to worry about it.

Why would Reddit ban it? It’s an easy way for them to collect users’ IP addresses for their corporate overlords.

Pretty simple, actually. Content farms push as much media out as possible to get as much attention and views as they can. This generates ad revenue. Advertisers pay Google for the ads, Google pays content creators.

😍

Well fuck.

Legitimately the only reason I still have a Windows 10 ISO and key sitting on my long term storage drive is because I fear that I may have to install it to use VR whenever I get a new kit.

Please Valve. Pretty please…

Actually, didn’t Facebook buy the lens company Valve was donating to and working with to develop their new VR lens tech? I forgot about that. Another reason to hate Facebook. (I refuse to call it the M word.)

God, I want a THC vape. Had one once when I lost my job, apartment, roommate, etc, all at the same time.

I couldn’t afford my overpriced-yet-shitty $2,000 apartment, plus utilities, by myself on any of the jobs I found. There was nothing to do but wait for a couple of weeks for family to come pick me up, so I said screw it and got a THC vape pen. It was the most relaxing two weeks I’ve ever had.

The pen had a nice big cartridge of Charlotte’s Web. I used it A LOT. Woke up in the middle of the night at one point, still buzzed, and decided I should take a break from THC. I needed to sober up to handle adult crap, so I threw the thing away.

Proud of myself for not letting myself become and addict, even though I was high at the time. But still miss it.

Automated content farms to sell ads. So basically, instead of teams of people in Russian content farms like 5 Minute Crafts siphoning money from Google, the AI does it instead.

Another reason why advertising-based economies are stupid. It’s a race to the bottom, and every single content creator has to make their content worse and worse, with more and more ads, just to break even. Fucking podcasts have automatically inserted crap now, just shoved in randomly, based on your IP when you download them.

Aldi’s sells little bottles of sparkling mineral water where I live. I always grab one when I go there.

People like metal cans, and they like bubbly drinks. I share in your confusion.

Problem is that one day, it will. I’m old enough to be able to see the difference in how much freedom has been lost online.

It’s not impossible. North Korea exists. There’s nothing stopping the rest of the world from adopting the same authoritarian regulations and technology bans.

That’s why people need to be involved in their governments; elections, local regulations, and what have you. It’s easy to complain that things aren’t perfect, or that you don’t like any of the options; but being part of the process, long term, is the only real way to fix that. The more people that give up and say they don’t care, the faster corruption infects everything and ruins what good is there. And trying to be clever and say that “one side is just as bad as the other” is not only a selfish lie people tell themselves to feel better about not doing anything, but it actively helps the authoritarians claim power.

The only thing that staves off corruption and authoritarianism is when the people being governed get involved and stay vigilant. Even small things like school board elections matter down the road.

You want to have a free internet? Then vote in school board elections. Seriously.