491–500 of 517 posts
The tech is very cool, the initial pitch was to fine tune wifi performance to get the best bandwidth\coverage ratio for a particular customer. But indeed, during testing we quickly discovered that we can map apartments and houses to some extent. You knew when someone was on the toilet for example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we had no idiotic EU cookie laws The obnoxious cookie banners are not required by "idiotic EU cookie laws". > a technical solution would be easy: default segmentation of cookies by what site you are actually visiting, plus all non-first-party ones silently expired after 60 minutes or whatever. 1. This was already implemented 2. Tracking isn't limited to cookies only > except for the fact that the number one ad n…
> The obnoxious cookie banners are not required by "idiotic EU cookie laws". Of course, the alternative is to not use cookies, to not use any web analytics products, or to resolve to argue the semantics of what is necessary before a judge when sued by one of the many lawyers who now advertise (ironically) all over social media with come-ons like "Did you browse FUZZYSWEATERS .COM? Your data may have been improperly u…
Honestly, I could not parse this rant that is a chain of non-sequiturs
> Please let me know what browser does what I describe.
Segmenting cookies has been a thing in all browsers for half a decade at least. Everyone but Chrome block third-party cookies. Safari clears out a bunch of cookies periodically (and PWA developers hate it for that)
> But I went on to detail the much "easier" solution where the EU aims its big swinging...list of mandates... at the 2-3 browser vendors
Ah yes, because tracking is only limited to cookies and to browsers.
> Sure, but also I question to what extent anyone is being harmed by "tracking" in the most broad sense of that word. As far as I can tell, the public believes "tracking is a problem" primarily because they resent retargeting ads. That's all.
Well, people from countries with quite recent cases of pervasive and invasive surveillance have other problems with invasive and pervasive tracking.
> The more reasonable concern is more around data brokers and the data about a person being sold and aggregated, which mostly gets concerning when it could be used for stalking, targeting political dissidents, etc. The fact that I spent 34 seconds on A product page, then 32 seconds on B, then added B to my cart and then bounced, that is the nature of all of the data being tracked on 90% of websites, they don't traffic in my location data or even want to collect sensitive information.
You have to chose one stance, not multiple at the same time:
- is this not a problem because who cares about a single ID?
- is this a problem because data broker amass and trade vast amounts of sensitive personal data?
> But every website is affected by the GDPR's vague definitions of "tracking."
Ah yes. It's GDPR that causes these poor innocent web sites to use data brokers that keep my precise location data for 12 years: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
And GDPR isn't required at all, because all we need to do is make the 2-3 major browser to just not set cookies, because that's all we're concerned about. There are no other ways of tracking people, and that tracking data isn't used by anyone anywhere.
Except, you know, "data brokers and the data about a person being sold and aggregated", but who cares about that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no incentive to represent the civically disengaged You're repeatedly misrepresenting or misunderstanding the issue. The tl'dr is that Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement, more than a million of me even. This is one easy way to take the casual and overly general "you're civically disengaged" victim blaming off the table. Your elected representatives already know your interests, they…
> Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement Again, I worked on these issues. Bezos and friends never showed up. Nobody showed up. This wasn’t a battle between David and Goliath, it was an empty field to which some generals showed up, looked around and then left. > money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take To a limit. The last few years have been a barn full of monied candidat…
Working on something means you put in effort, not that it's focused properly or that you even understand the real issues. At best you'll solve your problems without caring or understanding if it solves anyone else's.
> Bezos and friends never showed up.
Case in point. Bezos and friends don't need to "show up" anywhere you'd know. Their interests are implicitly considered and they're transmitted on channels you and I don't have access to. I'm talking about the general issue of asymmetric representation. This is where money matters.
> The last few years have been a barn full of monied candidates being trounced by insurgents.
You are conflating winning a popular election with leading for the people. Such statements in 2025 US are ridiculously disconnected. Almost without exception in recent history the wealthy always increased their wealth faster than the poor, and at their expense. Just over a decade ago the poorest 50% had 0.4% of the US wealth. No wealth means no power, not even personal agency, let alone in national policy. Are you telling me that finally the "insurgents" are fixing this and with their help the bottom half will start gaining the wealth and power from the super rich? Because if you aren't saying this, you aren't saying anything. The powerful will keep pushing and getting what they need, and you'll keep blaming "the lazy" that things don't change.
> Most people who would call in on digital privacy don’t bother because they’re lazy or think it’s useless.
Most people are assaulted with many, many more attacks on their rights and wellbeing. Those are more immediate concerns. Over 50% of US population just barely eeks out more that $10k in wealth. When they're drowning in debt, living from (social security) paycheck to paycheck, worried what else they'll lose next, showing up to fight for digital privacy, or almost anything that's not life and death, is the least of their concerns.
You decided to label them "lazy". Ever wondered if your work "on these issues" is tainted by this opinion, and that's why ultimately all you can achieve is only for the people who can afford it? Because you can afford it, and the lazy don't deserve it. The correlation is there.
Okay I'm as concerned about privasy as everybody else is here but i also gotta admire that its pretty neat they can actually do that. Are they measuring the signal echo like what radar does? If they controlled both the receiver and transmitter i wouldn't be as surprised to find out they can tell when something crosses between them and form a 2-dimensional mesh (like that episode of Star Trek TNG where geordie detects…
It's far from great for imaging, but it can be done. https://www.zmescience.com/research/inventions/wifi-technolo...
I don't think it justifies the impending orwellian hellscape this technology will eventually unleash, but one positive thing about this that has me a bit excited is that this could easily clear up many ambiguities in criminal cases. for example, fairly often a death will get ruled as a suicide but victim's relatives and friends will insist that it must have been a murder; imagine being able to use this technology to definitively prove whether or not there was another party present when the victim died.
Or in rape cases where the defendant is protesting their innocence, knowing the body language of the victim and the defendant could be a vital clue because you might be able to observe the victim fighting back.
Again, I don't think the positives outweigh the negatives to the point that it could ever justify an invasion of privacy on this scale (you might as well just make everybody let the government set up a thermal camera in their house!) but it is interesting to think about the problems this could solve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal. If we rely on the technical path, Comcast can achieve the same by how many active IPv6 addresses are in use. Even if you aren't using your phone, the device is going to be constantly pinging services like email, and your ISP can use that to piece together how many people are at home. If we rely on legal protection, then not only Comcast, but all ISPs will…
> The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal. I disagree. Solutions should be technical whenever possible, because in practice, laws tend to be abused and/or not enforced. Laws also need resources and cooperation to be enforced, and some laws are hard to enforce without creating backdoors or compromising other rights. "ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers" doesn't mean ISPs won't s…
E.g. the you should be able to own your router and even if you choose to rent you should have full control over the software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes that's the point. You don't need those things. The idea that a news article or blog post or e-commerce page could "crash" is ridiculous, and the law shouldn't humor that excuse. There's been standard ways to declaratively define such pages since before scripting frameworks gained popularity. Use those standard ways. If you're really building an app and need to performance test, buy some hardware in your target ra…
You don’t need a shopping cart either. Just make the user write down the skus from your online catalog and send you a purchase order. Products exist on spectrum and the ones that win are typically easier and more convenient to use. If your business is developing the best product it can, it absolutely needs the ability to be convenient and useful. Adding a language select option on a multinational site seems pretty ta…
It does matter from the perspective of privacy, because in one case your vistors deal with one party (you) and in the other case another party (Sentry) is also involved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A language preference cookie is colloquially considered a preferences cookie, which is included in the except strictly necessary cookies.
I'm not sure what you mean but our ancestor comment describes this clearly. A language preference cookie is not tracking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44431268
The GDPR is different from the ePrivacy Directive. The EPD is responsible for cookie consent. And it has the language addressing preferences cookies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Language preferences are (in all of the deployments I've seen) legally categorized as functional cookies and not strictly necessary cookies. Same with e.g. dark mode/light mode or other preference toggles
functional cookies would be strictly necessary cookies, wouldn't they?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No I am referring to the EPD as I state in my comment, an acronym you should know since it’s defined in the explainer you link. As someone who has experience in this area, it’s not as simple as “just use the Accept-Language header it will be fine”. In any event, that’s besides then point. There are non-tracking cookies that get swept up in the EPD’s consent requirements. This causes way more popups than needed to add…
> There are non-tracking cookies that get swept up in the EPD’s consent requirements Still not sure where you and nightpool got this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44434685
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're correct that the GDPR specifically doesn't require this, but you're incorrect that "the law" doesn't—the 2004 EU ePrivacy Directive requires affirmative consent for all cookies, and it's being enforced much more strictly now in a post-GDPR world
I answered that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44434685