381–390 of 836 posts
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> The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results Why exactly does Chrome even allow this in the first place!? This is the most surprising takeaway for me here, given browser vendors' focus on hardening against fingerprinting.
Firefox FTW. I was relieved to find this was a Chrome-only problem.
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Google cares deeply about privacy. Google defines privacy as them not giving your private data that they have collected to anyone who hasn't paid them for it or can compel them to give it up.
Why would the police go to all that hassle of compelling google to give it up when it can simply buy it on the open market.
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Are you defending LinkedIn’s behavior right now or are you just happy to be more technically correct (the best kind of correct!) than those around you? Trying to understand the angle
Something may be bad, but accurately describing why it is bad significantly elevates the discourse. Eg, someone could use the phrase "Won't someone think of the children?" to describe a legitimately bad thing like bank fraud, but the solutions that flow from the problem that "children are in danger" are significantly different from the solutions that flow from "phishing attacks are rampant". The two issues in this ca…
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Don't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed ont…
I don’t think it would necessarily have to be six bucks a month. Something Awful is a one time fee of ten bucks (a few bucks more to get rid of ads). I wouldn’t really mind a one-time fee for a lot of sites if it meant that they didn’t have to do a bunch of advertising bullshit,
I ask because it seems like every job I apply to asks for a linkedin profile, and I've heard floating around that if it's not filled in enough most employers assume you're a bot. Heck, one of the forms from the "who's hiring" thread yesterday straight up said if you have < 100 connections they'd throw out your application. So, in order to get my foot in the door, I need to hand over vast and intricate data about my personal life to a third party?
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It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield. I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month. Why does YouTube pr…
But there's no method or structure in place to pay a website a fraction of a cent. Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention. I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.
Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively prevented any alternative from emerging. Now that we've seen how advertising scales, and how it's ruined our mediascape, we're finally looking at alternatives. Not dissimilar to how we reacted to pollution, once we saw it at scale.
The headline seems pretty misleading. Here’s what seems to actually be going on: > Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers. This does seem invasive. It also seems like what I’d expect…
It is likely in response to scraping. Linked in is heavily scraped by scammers who do the BEC scams. So linked in is trying to find ways to link together banned accounts, to handle their ban evasion. I run a site which attracts a lot of unsavoury people who need to be banned from our services, and tracking them to reban them when they come back is a big part of what makes our product better than others in the industr…
It's also heavily scraped by businesses for lead generation for sales and recruiting. Either before their API became available or to not pay them or to get around the restrictions of their API.
The headline seems pretty misleading. Here’s what seems to actually be going on: > Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers. This does seem invasive. It also seems like what I’d expect…
> this is why I run ad blockers. It's pretty wild that we live in a world where the actual FBI has recommended we use ad blockers to protect ourselves, and if everyone actually listened, much of the Internet (and economy) as we know it would disappear. The FBI is like "you should protect yourself from the way that the third largest company in the world does business", and the average person's response is "nah, that w…
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> How is probing your browser for installed extensions not "scanning your computer"? I think most people would interpret “scanning your computer” as breaking out of the confines the browser and gathering information from the computer itself. If this was happening, the magnitude of the scandal would be hard to overstate. But this is not happening. What actually is happening is still a problem. But the hyperbole underm…
> What the article describes sounds like what many devs would land on given the browser APIs available. > To reiterate, at no point am I saying this is good or acceptable. I think there’s a massive privacy problem in the tech industry that needs to be addressed. These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. What t…
I think using LinkedIn is pretty much agreeing to participate in “fingerprinting” (essentially identifying yourself) to that system. There might be a blurry line somewhere around “I was just visiting a page hosted on LinkedIn.com and was not myself browsing anyone else’s personal information”, but otherwise LinkedIn exists as a social network/credit bureau-type system. I’m not sure how we navigate this need to have our privacy while simultaneously needing to establish our priors to others, which requires sharing information about ourselves. The ethics here is not black and white.
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This is incredibly normal language and quite close to how I would write this quote, so what makes you think this is LLM text?
It’s the fake drama. Punchy sentences. Contrast . And then? A banal payoff.
I am exhausted by so many people calling writing out as AI without sufficient proof other than writing style. Some things are more obvious, sure... maybe I'm just too stupid to see a lot of the rest of it? But so much of what gets called out seems incredibly familiar to me compared with traditional print media I've been reading my entire life.
I'm starting to wonder if a lot of people just have poor literacy skills and are knee-jerk labeling anything that looks well written as AI.