Well... Good point, but it seems I'm the lucky 10K today :) I wasn't around WWII to see the military equipment ads in the newspapers. And even though I've read a lot of newspapers in Poland (basically since the 90s) I don't recall seeing an explicit military equipment advertisement in popular daily and weekly newspapers, except for one case when Poland was debating the purchase of multi-purpose fighter jets, and there were I think F-16 ads – but these were printed inside the in-flight magazines of LOT Polish Airlines, so not really accessible to the wider public. On a side note, air travel advertisement seems to be a MIC's favourite choice, as I vividly remember huge Raytheon billboards at the Warsaw airport baggage claim during the NATO summit ;)
Google Fit is being replaced by Goolge Fitbit, but as usual with Google what is really happening is Google is one by one replacing the sections of the original Fitbit app with the Google Fit interface. The first thing that got replaced is the Fitbit Sleep tracking, and believe me when I say what Google did is an abomination in terms of UI/UX design. The previous Fitbit sleep tracking screen was near perfection of readability and clarity. The new one is Google's usual form-over-function design language where the most important metric (weekly-view sleep score) is hidden and requires many taps to access.
Turns out it's Apple itself that "sells" my data. Most likely because of I have Siri enabled with location access to "frequent places" or "important locations"... I'm quite disappointed. I thought this data wasn't shared with third parties, but as usual I didn't read the TOS/Privacy word by word...
I thought about it, but how would this work exactly? I passed the airport on a highway, so I didn't connect to any wifi. Maybe my phone probed some access point, but still this would require the said point to send my phones identity to FR24 servers. Or maybe it was my cell provider? I pinged a cell base station nearby the airport, and this fact was registered and sent to a 3rd party, and FR24 has a subscription with that 3rd party monitoring users? But that'd be surveillance on another level. Thus my first guess is something happened on my phone, FR24 somehow came up with a solution to go around various privacy restrictions of iOS.
The author highlights tracking, profiling & targeting. Just yesterday, I Asked HN but none responded: can't we just flood the trackers with random data instead of fight so hard to block them? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946
1. It would be hard to build a system that couldn’t be filtered out. Something is liked and unliked? Just don’t include it. Mouse isn’t moving randomly on the page? captcha time. Not to mention that they could randomize the element class names and ids or at least change them regularly so it would be a constant arms race to keep up.
2. You don’t want to be randomly liking crazy stuff on Facebook or randomly retweeting. There are real world consequences for doing the wrong thing there.
I agree that these are technical challenges, but they're not insurmountable. Any extension could itself track normal user behavior (e.g. mouse movement speed, scrolling), and "learn" to mimic that. And as long as the "likes" are themselves quite randomized per extension, it's unlikely that the random likes will have much of an impact. It also seems not hard to filter out porn, politics and religion from the subjects being liked.
I think the bigger risk is one or credibility - once the ad-revenue disruptor thing is in place, the creators might be tempted to sell their user data for a profit.
Like a chrome extension that sends trackers lots of randomized user actions and garbled data instead of just blocking them? We'd make the data unreliable and render it useless! What an incredibly sly counter-attack.
I think it could take a fair amount of work to be effective (i.e. reverse engineering APIs, formatting payloads, etc) but I'm sure a community of engineers would support those efforts if it were in wide enough use. The problem here is that those engineers may be deterred by the possibility of getting sucked into legal battles. Maybe if it were backed by an organization that could allay that fear like the EFF, Mozilla or the FSF then I could see this actually having a shot of being genuinely effective.
It's an interesting approach, but I'd assume only a small group of tech savvy users would do it. It's also a dystopian future that feels worse than the adblock arms race.
I'm still hopeful that we'll figure out micropayments in a way that let's web content survive without needing the ad tech garbage.
Until then I block and navigate away from sites that do ad-block-blocking.
Can't believe nobody here mentioned that his translation is a funny blunder. When you type "валентина сынах" into Google Translate you in fact get "Valentine Sons" but it's a mistake. There's actually a helpful tip showing the correct translation from Ukrainian of the person's name "Valentina Synakh" (Synah, to be accurate). Making a Russian connection out of this is a bit far fetched... But I guess that was the point.
