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This is a Chrome thing. It’s a safe bet that if you use Google products you don’t care about privacy anyway. “Google product collects info about you: news at 11.”

> This is a Chrome thing.

This is blatant misinformation. Firefox (and all of its derivatives) also does this.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1372288


This only works if the web page knows the random per-install id associated with an extension.

That can only happen if the extension itself leaks it to the web page and if that happens, scanning isn't necessary since it already leaked what it is to the webpage. It also doesn't tell you what extension it is, unless again, the extension leaks it to the webpage.

The attack on Chrome is far more useful for attackers as web pages can scan using the chrome store's extension ID instead.


And this bug was reported eight years ago, with no serious attempt to fix it since.

Google cares deeply about privacy. Google defines privacy as them not giving your private data that they have collected to anyone else unless you ask them to.

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.

There's a fourth amendment case on the Supreme Court docket (Chatrie v. U.S.) about Google searching a massive amount of user data to find people in a location at a specific time, at police request. The case is about whether the police's warrant warranted such a wide scope of search (if general warrants are allowed).

Point being: Google will 100% give your info to the police, regardless of whether the police have the legal right to it or not, and regardless of whether you actually committed a crime or not.

Bonus points: the federal court that ruled on the case said that it likely violated the fourth amendment, but they allowed the police to admit the evidence anyway because of the "good faith" clause, which is a new one for me. Time to add it to the list of horribly abusable exceptions (qualified immunity, civil asset forfeiture, and eminent domain coming to mind).


They knowingly participated in PRISM, too.

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.


So no compelling here. The police asked for it and google gave it, either for free or in exchange for money. They didn't say "no" to the police, they didn't wait for a court order.

The bad guy here is google. And the people that champion data collection by private companies because of free market == good.


In that case, the main bad guy was the police who didn't bother to do even the most basic investigating after "check Google's GPS records to see who was at the house" including "Check Google's GPS records to see how how long they were there" which would have shown them this was a drive by, but yeah Google is absolutely a villain

The breaking point with me that caused me to de-google myself was finding out that Google was buying Mastercard records in order to cross-reference them with Android phone data. That shit is not okay.

Ah yes, I should have said I was describing the official line, not the behaviour. In all fairness the “can compel them to give it up” doesn’t seem to be optional but otherwise, yeah. Agreed.

Weren’t Samsung phones doing something like this? If you tried to take a picture with the moon in it, it would just generate an image of the moon?

> ChromeOS

“Boy, I hate operating systems from evil gigantic corporations that constantly spy on us. I know the solution, let’s use a Google product!”


I'm not super into ChromeOS (only used it once or twice) but until they're 10% of market share I'll support them against Windows to keep the OS landscape diverse.


I have a TV though.

Time for them to pivot to their strength: ZZT

I haven't thought about ZZT for many many years, and didn't realize it was a Tim Sweeney joint. Thank you very much for the intense hit of nostalgia!

The writer chose to write for PC Gamer and sign their name publicly to an article on the site. You don’t get to just say “oh, wasn’t my decision, tee hee” when it’s your name on the article.

Yeah, let's try not to make a habit of punishing people making subsistence wages for the sins of the corporate elite.

If you're making half a mil designing spyware for Palantir, different story.


At this rate society is going to slowly politicize every profession to the point that the only approved positions will be under a respective party’s ministry.

This is such an extreme reach.

A search isn’t going to lead them to a “reputable source”, it’s going to lead them to ad filled SEO garbage, because it’s not 2004 anymore and thousands of Google employees have been working for two decades to ruin the Internet.

I’ll take LLMs any day over what search and the rest of the Internet has turned into.


Right, I think (hope) the OP meant not to emphasize the "search" in the sentence, but the "reputable source". Of course a Google search now is much worse than an AI search.

And it is the ultimately the reputable source that matters, and whether the person actually read it and checked that the details matched the summary (be it human abstract, LLM-generated, or otherwise).


It works in essentially every other profession. Programming isn’t that special.


In essentially every other profession the credential is gated behind years of work experience and often a degree or course.

We already have such a credential. It's called "lasting two years at a FAANG+ without getting fired". If you do that you can get interviews anywhere.


It appears that the coding job will be some variation will be some variation of vibecoding going forward, so a professional cert might be good enough.


My dad was at one of the others of the Big Eight at the time, and yeah I remember he was always slinging 1-2-3 spreadsheets.

He stuck with 1-2-3 for many years after Excel had taken the crown, but eventually gave in.


Re: 2001

> Clarke wrote the movie screenplay with Kubrick

I don’t think this is true? I thought the two of them sat together and worked out the plot, and then Kubrick went off and wrote the screenplay and Clarke went off and wrote the novel. So neither is really “based on” the other.

Anyway though, Rama is great, yes. I’m skeptical of the idea of a movie adaptation but Denis Villeneuve is probably the right one to try to pull it off.


Clarke’s book The Lost Worlds of 2001 goes into a lot of detail about the process (and is a great read in its own right). His take was that the book should say “a novel by Arthur C Clarke, based on the screenplay by Stanley Kubrick” and the movie should say “screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by Arthur C Clarke”.

I think Kubrick was very much the dominant force in the partnership, but they did work quite closely together.


IIRC they were working together at the same time. The "2001" book set action around Saturn's Iapetus moon and so the screen initially was meant to follow it. But since it was impossible to create convincing planetary rings at that time, action switches to Jupiter's Europa. And so all other Odyssey books were set there as well.


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