Google became a monopoly in search, advertising and various other things. It uses all of those to extract money from everyone, especially the advertisers with absolutely no accountability. All the large and small businesses have to jack up prices to make up for the money that Google extracts from them through those monopolies, and then reflect that expense on the consumer. Just go to reddits like r/ppc or r/googleads. Google became a company that single handedly amplifies inflation during its endless extraction of profit.
I think your phrase choice is also quite funny. Obviously a fact isn't physically stolen, it has been surveilled and sold to the highest bidder. Every fair chance a competitor had to offer you something better was taken from you, it just wasn't done in front of your face. And that data is becoming more and more valuable as we speak as all this AI data race heats up.
Google Adwords is quite literally using the data they have harvested from you and selling ad placements based on it to the highest bidder in its ad auction system. There was zero hyperbole in that statement.
Can you please be specific what I changed? I meant every single word exactly in the first post as in the second. Both are completely accurate. What exactly did I change with any substance?
You said the fact was sold to the highest bidder, which implies that they sell your data. Which is something that most people believe because people use language like you have. But it isn’t true.
The second time you were much more accurate. You wouldn’t have even had to restate it differently if the first time had been accurate.
"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"
It's basically a language quibble, that copying data is never "stealing", also in the copyright-violation context. I suppose they'd be happy with a rewording.
The PATH is great as Toronto has pretty variable weather and on a snowy or rainy day it sure beats being outside. One thing this article doesn't note is that post-pandemic half of it is empty. So many empty retail storefronts. There's still the assortment of Shoppers and various food courts and a handful of actual store under TD Place. But compared to a decade ago, it's so empty.
Stanford is skimming the absolute top students from around the world into its programs. There's more than enough capacity in US schools for the top 10% of US grad students and then the US gets the benefit of also getting the top 10% of other countries' grad students.
The explanation I've seen before is that it doesn't really matter for websites that don't _want_ anything from you. No credentials, no login forms, no text entry fields.
> The explanation I've seen before is that it doesn't really matter for websites that don't _want_ anything from you. No credentials, no login forms, no text entry fields.
Still worth creating a bit of a shield between you and the site to make it just hat much harder for anybody in the middle to inject anything / change anything.
Back before Lets Encrypt made it inexcusable to not have https, it was a common-ish prank to MITM all the HTTP traffic you could see and do something harmless like rotate images 180 degrees.
If the argument is that Lets Encrypt make its "inexcusable" to not have HTTPS, then Lets Encrypt effectively controls most of the domains on the internet
I am not sure what leads you to answer this way, but I assure you that HTTP, like any other unencrypted network traffic, does inherently allow undetected tampering by any middleman.
While it's highly unlikely that threat actors would be lurking in trusted networks and devices on such a network path, they definitely don't need to use shared WiFi or ARP spoofing if they have control of a core router or transmission line. That's the very essence of MITM attacks.
What leads people such as yourself to start a response this way? "I'll respond to you but first I'm going to feign ignorance of how you could even say that in a way that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion." I perceive this as exceptionally rude. Am I alone in that?
> does inherently allow undetected tampering by any middleman.
Yes. And did I describe methods by which you can hijack connections to /become/ the middleman? Perhaps you missed the subtle detail.
> That's the very essence of MITM attacks.
The popularized attacks you're describing became popular because they were done with the techniques I described in places like Starbucks and other businesses with open Wifi networks. Here it is, literally:
Well, I interpreted your reply as implying that the only vectors possible were shared WiFi or ARP spoofing. If you merely intended to offer two examples, then it makes more sense. But I am still not sure why your answers are so irrelevant!
So, I am still unsure that you are clued in here, because the article you have linked to has nothing at all to do with tampering in-flight TCP streams, only sniffing them. Perhaps you do not understand how these principles differ. This shared WiFi scenario certainly permits eavesdropping on unencrypted channels, and that’s a danger that’s distinct from actual MITM.
You claim we’re describing the same thing but we are not.
> did I describe methods
No, actually you didn’t — you named one vector and one mostly unrelated LAN attack. ARP spoofing may be a stepping stone, but not really central.
The attack you describe happens at the application layer, in fact. It doesn’t even need to use TCP. You’re simply stealing someone’s credentials and reusing them in a new browser session. There’s really no way to legitimately describe this as “MITM” — or “tampering” at all. [Your Wikipedia article does not use these terms.]
And in a typical Starbucks installation, nobody would realistically attempt to tamper with in-flight TCP streams. Because that attack would involve some elaborate setup, presenting a higher challenge than the Firesheep attack. I am sure you could explain and describe the former, if you understand the underlying principles.
No, the classic MITM attacks on http do involve neither WiFi nor ARP, but simply interposing malicious code somewhere else on-path. [Actually it is not necessarily malicious, because NAT gateways work by modifying TCP streams too!] That’s why a newer name is called “on-path attack”. And you seem to have omitted that scenario from your comments.
Yeah, I don't think it was people snooping on Facebook posts that caused the adoption of TLS at a widespread level. It was the fact that companies realized the NSA & their competitors would use it to attack them at every level.
You don't need ARP spoofing or anything like that to intercept a plaintext communication when you control the ISP
Yes, the IETF and Mozilla really put NSA in their place with SSL, but the publicized, primary reason for adoption was eCommerce.
As the NSF handed control of the backbone to Sprint and commerce was finally permitted, the vendors campaigned to secure http lest the consumer’s personal data and credit card details were snooped and scooped while in-flight.
The Internet was incubated in a high-trust environment and every collegiate sysadmin was secretly employed by the NSA (except for Chris Siebenmann who is a North Korean sleeper agent). Once they were able to receive paychecks from Jeff Bezos instead, they began installing malware on routers to replace porn with videos of dancing babies and kittens being totes adorbs.
SSL kept our credit cards safe from the NSA and our porn is no longer sponsored by the ASPCA. Whew.
Without TLS, sometimes still referred to as SSL, a webite's content can be modified by anyone controlling the network path. This includes ISPs and WiFi operators.
Sure, your website may have unimportant stuff on it that nobody relies on, but do you want visitors to see ads in your content that you didn't put there?
> Maybe there are edge cases associated with this?
Plenty. There are a lot of information-only websites where you might want to keep your visit to yourself.
To give an obvious example: some parts of the United States are trying very hard to make abortion impossible. The state government could mandate that ISPs MitM your traffic, and alert the police when you visit a website giving you information about the legal abortion clinics in a neighboring state. Guess you'll be getting a home visit...
The same is going to apply with looking up info on LGBT subjects, civil rights, Tiananmen Square, a religion not explicitly allowed by the state, whether Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania, and so on. Heck, even a seemingly innocent website visit could theoretically come back to haunt you years later. Just some bored scrolling on Wikipedia? Nope, you were planning a crime - why else were you reading pages about chemical warfare during WW I? That neighbor who died due to mixing bleach and ammonia was obviously murdered by you.
If it's unencrypted, you should assume it's being logged by someone nefarious. Are you still okay with it?
To be fair, TLS doesn't stop the authorities from performing dragnet searches. Just supeona Google for search keywords, mobile service providers for geofence data, DNS logs, IP logs from ISPs, etc. If that gives them enough for a warrant, they can get emails, SMS, browser history, account data, and detailed location logs. Not to mention license plate readers, surveillance cam footage and financial transactions.
It's honestly surprising that anyone gets away with any significant crimes, given just how much potential evidence is recorded.
Without TLS, people (service providers and intermediaries) can tell what pages I'm reading on your site. They can make the kind of inferences from these that get people convicted at trial.
TLS is more important on sites that are just serving information. It's easy to reconstruct your train of thought as you click around.
Librarians have fought (and lost) to defend our privacy to read.
In addition to what everyone else has said, having everything be encrypted means encryption isn't "special", there's no metadata that indicates that the communication contains secret data due to encryption. If people don't encrypt non-sensitive traffic, then sensitive traffic stands out. So there's a sort of civic duty element to enabling TLS (or using encrypted messaging, etc.).
The website might not be designed to have credentials or login forms, but now you have allowed attackers to place fake login forms on your website. And given the prevalence of password reuse for the general population, attackers can easily harvest real passwords this way.
Not to mention injected ads which used to be very common in the late 2000s.
I used to think that, but at this point the Internet is sufficiently hostile that it's everyone's responsibility to encrypt everything all the time to reduce the utility to bad actors to zero.
It's a little bit like using Tor for some of your ordinary browsing (which I do) so that spy agencies can't infer everyone using Tor is doing something wrong.
The one near Sunnyvale Community Center is an apricot grove and you can buy their apricots in the early summer.
There's an orange grove here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Tkycx4qdL8Wrq5zY6 near Intel HQ and the new set of SCUSD schools. The only thing from stopping you from picking an orange is a sign asking you not to.
edit: ha, the book is mentioned halfway through the essay. I should finish reading before commenting.
I agree with the book's thesis - there's an impulse to associate colour with "the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological" in contemporary western society. We've somehow managed to other color itself.
"The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.
Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analysing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at colour as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville’s ‘great white whale’, Huxley’s reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier’s ‘Journey to the East’, Batchelor also discusses the use of colour in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art."
Why? My understanding of the argument against seed oils is that they have a high omega 6 to omega 3 ratio, which does not align with historical intake and leads to inflammation. While I'm not a nutritionist, this seems like a perfectly reasonable argument
Americans eat 12.51 million metric tons of it a year, so it is clearly not exactly poisonous. And "inflammation" is very vague... most people would be better off just increasing their dietary fiber intake and not worry about swapping one fat for another. It doesn't require thousands of people with no education in the area creating social media content about it.
This is the first time I've heard anyone argue that a food product must be good for you because Americans are consuming a large amount of it. How on earth could you come to that conclusion given how unhealthy our population is?
Americans are not the healthiest population on average so if anything, it proves the reverse point that you are trying to make...
Also, fiber advice is complete nonsense. There are now plenty of studies showing that fiber causes more problems, especially for people who get easily constipated.
The fiber bullshit comes precisely from bad science, that is directed by wants and political opinions, especially those of women in that case.
Fiber advice has come around because for some reason, it was thought that defecating more often is better and women like to "work" on their transit because of them wanting to look as fin as possible at all times.
So, they make you eat very low energy (and nutriments) food to make you shit more often, just because.
What the fuck is inflammation? That wasn’t part of my 9th grade health class, outside of getting a sprained ankle. How is it suddenly a well known health crisis?
Inflammation is a bodily response to stimuli. Foods that are said to increase inflammation (like GP said, including seed oil) i avoid when some specific pollens are out. People under chemo or any kind of long term medical treatment should avoid it too, but honestly nobody should get out of their way to avoid oil because of their omega6 to omega3 ratio. Idem for polyinsaturated vs saturated (avoid saturated, but do not go out of your way to do it).
Burning point of oil/fat however is a data which is extremely important when you cook, and you should avoid frying food with oil at a low burning point. If you want to use a specific oil for the taste, use first an oil without taste and a high burning point, then after the vegetables are cooked, add your unrefined sesame oil and sear for like 10 second maximum while mixing everything.
We're deeply wired to avoid and attach to things based on extremely simple heuristics. Avoid the strange man with the pointy stick, attach to the tree that makes tasty fruit, avoid the crocodile pond, attach to the thing that makes women flock to you.
Marketing departments and politicians are very good at using this to their advantage.
The John Birch society was into weird ideas about health since the 1960s, I had a friend in the 1980s whose parents were Amway distributors and selling supplements who were introducing my family to anti-abortion and school voucher activists.
In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing.
Alternative ideas about the healthiness of fats have circulated a long time
is the first one I saw against ‘seed oils’, certainly alternative ideas about the healthiness of cholesterol and saturated fats have been circulating a long time. What is different is the polarization of the post-COVID environment but the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID.
Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is an absolutely brilliant read on why you see this kind of consonance between the fringe left & right (although fringe may not be the right word anymore):
One of the things that cuts the Democrats off at the knees is that the far left is even hungrier for “change” and “shaking things up” than Trump supporters are and doesn’t get any emotional satisfaction out of supporting the party of “status quo at any cost” other than the behavioral sink of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
European politics is itself in a death spiral of the center left and center right forming an emotionally false coalition whereas the AfD looks emotionally truer by the day.
A hundred percent, yes. The GOP learned they needed to activate their base during the Obama years - that led to the Trump takeover and a lot of the issues we're seeing right now, but the MAGA movement's fundamental allure is they're actually talking about problems in the country that are pretty apparent to people outside the professional class (there's an interesting civil war happening inside the GOP right now between the MAGA true believers and the people who thought they were riding the tiger, instead of just holding its tail).
The Democrats still haven't had that "come to Jesus" moment, as evidence by both the treatment of Bernie in 2016 and Kamala's total unwillingness to talk about any of the populist parts of Biden's economic policy (antitrust, pro-labor, stronger regulation, etc), and it's what's cost them the 2016 and 2024 elections - neoliberalism has failed, and the longer the Democrats pretend that's not the case, the longer they're going to be out in the electoral cold.
Like vitamin C to fix everything that goes wrong on long sea voyages, or removing lead and mercury from diets, avoiding alcohol and thalidomide during pregnancy, abstaining from cigarettes, removing cocaine from Coca Cola, or any number of other additives that are perhaps less clear cut: https://time.com/7210717/food-additives-us-fda-banned-europe...
Avoiding poison is a "quick, easy fix" to the consequences of that poison (or the opposite in the case of vitamin deficiency). Whether there's any reason to believe seed oils are harmful, I have no clue, but the idea that we could be en-masse consuming something harmful has dozens of precedents.
> The theme of the misinformation is that seed oils are the root cause of most diseases of affluence, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and liver spots.
> the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID.
What does the phrase "post-covid" even mean in a population with actively circulating covid? I don't think such a concept is even possible at this point.
Accurately, post a set of cultural changes. Some variant of that virus will be going around until, maybe, there is a severe lockdown because of another virus but that won’t happen for another half-generation at least even if the new virus is The Andromeda Strain.
There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity such as one of those Ithaca hypochondriacs that doesn’t get invited to parties because the only thing she’s wanted to talk about since 2021 is face masks.
> There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity
I imagine if you have a reason to be that scared of covid (e.g. immunocompromised or -adjacent) to propose that someone exclude a threat to their physical health from their identity seems like an impossible ask. The risk isn't imaginary, and it's notably higher than the pre-covid world. There is no going back.
Not sure why it's so hard to grasp that COVID allowed certain demographics to see how little society actually has regard for them.
I have a lot of discussions of my wife where I take position closer to your side and she takes the other side.
My son lost two years of in-personal schooling which contributed to some serious problems he's had getting launched into adult life. The models that the education-industrial complex users, which I don't believe [1] tend to take the position that you can't get back what you lose when you lose something. My son is getting a lot of help from myself and others and I think he's going to do OK but you can't make the case that lockdowns were free or that people who had mental health vulnerabilities didn't take their own lives because of the effects of the lockdowns.
You'd better believe that many people think that people like yourself have very little regard for them. It's pretty easy to grasp if you understand just how poisonous political polarization is.
[1] ... or don't believe in letting apply to myself and my family
> In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing.
I had the same group of people living and doing yoga in a castle near my mother's home, that i would have described as left-wing hypocondriacs, extremely skeptics of modern medecine. A majority voted "right-wing" at the last european elections.
So using left-wing or right-wing is not a good way to describe this kind of group. They clearly have a minority habitus that could push them to vote "left-wing" (as long a they are not in power), but also share an anti-science sentiment that can push tehm easily towards a populist right (populist != bad in my eyes, i do think populism in politics is necessary.
Yes I know the type.
First and foremost, they are contrarian and "alternative". They always try to oppose whatever the majority is doing, even when it clearly is the correct thing (they are often anti-vax as well).
They usually are left-wing because they are often parasites who always take more than they give. They like being in a group or community but it rarely lasts and work over time because of how exploitative and dishonest they usually are.
I know some very interesting specimens and my mother is one of them; not entirely because she made a decent amount of money in a public career, but now that she is retired it has become a lot more apparent.
Those people are not left because of values/principle, they just go with whatever is the most extreme version of something that looks like it will benefit them. Which is why they will gladly vote far-right, if they can see the benefits. The rise of far-right populists that try to sell a version of collectivism not far removed from the far left-version is why it is happening.
But since I stopped eating seed oils I haven't been mauled by a lion. Also, I ate seed oils in middle age and gained a bunch of weight, then I got healthy started exercising, spent money on a trainer and a diet, and stopped eating seed oils in fast food and lost weight!
Pick something almost everyone does and then claim that it is the source of the current great social ill... social media... profit! For bonus points use the phrases "cleanse", "detox", "inflammation", "processed", "all-natural" bereft of meaning.
I mean, it's not like the health effects of an oil would depend on what seed, or what quantity, or how you cook, or what other activities you do, is it?
p.s. all the silicon in your computer was inorganically grown!
A lot of the culture war topics seem deeply weird. mRNA vaccines that absolutely do work and are safe somehow get all kinds of things ascribed to them.
Prayer in schools, which has passed out of the Gartner Culture War hype cycle, seems like another one of those head scratchers.
Agreed. People just can't read. I think this is one of many upstream causes of the current political landscape. When faced with reading a corporate financial statement, any laws, scientific papers, municipal budgets, or even an article in WSJ or The Atlantic, people are unable to proceed. So a defense mechanism comes up: "it's all just lies, anyway." Then they go and find a tweet or watch TV.
I'mma go out on a bit of a limb here, and say that even the people who can read often 'can't read'. Many people who 'can read' only read things in one of two particular bubbles, colored either blue or red.
This has resulted in a population which is terrifyingly disconnected from reality, and yet utterly certain of their own beliefs; beliefs which have been worked into the core of their self-identity by the magic of political kayfabe. "The GOP believes Corona is from a lab, so it must be wrong" ... "Trump will genocide Gaza worse, so voting for someone arming an internationally condemned genocide is good and practical actually", etc.
Out of the small subset of people who really can read, and think for themselves, there is only a small number of them who can communicate their ideas effectively (and only to people who can at least sorta read at a 6th grade level). And the number of those people who have any power to amplify their voice is too depressing to think about for long.
... And yes, the Age of Resistance ties into this in many ways. The Skeksis are seen as strong, maybe even benevolent leaders by most, who are very far from any levers of power and aren't getting very well informed. Meanwhile, quietly (at first), the life of the small people is being drained...
This is why I said "one of many". There are many motivations and factors at play, but being overwhelmed when reading complex documents is a real great motivator to dismiss them out of hand.
This may also help to explain why politicians who express themselves with a limited vocabulary can be surprisingly successful. And the implication is that other politicians should probably do so as well.
"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."
I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
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