RSS Parrot

surveillance licensing in practice

https://blog.zgp.org/surveillance-licensing-in-practice/

Published: July 23, 2024 00:00

I wrote about how states should avoid free speech questions around Big Tech by establishing a licensing system for surveillance, and got some questions about how that would work. The problem to watch out for is that state privacy regulators tend to be…

Sunday Internet optimism

https://blog.zgp.org/internet-optimism/

Published: July 21, 2024 00:00

Over on the social media sites there have been a bunch of very serious posts from very serious people explaining how surveillance advertising is here to stay and the best we can do is put some privacy-enhancing technologies on it. This sounds dismal and…

turn off advertising measurement in Apple Safari

https://blog.zgp.org/turn-off-advertising-measurement-in-apple-safari/

Published: July 14, 2024 00:00

Apple Safari includes an advertising measurement feature, but fortunately you can turn it off. I don’t regularly use this browser but can get a hold of a copy to check it, so I’ll update this if the instructions change. On Apple iOS Open Settings, select…

PET projects or real privacy?

https://blog.zgp.org/pet-projects-or-privacy/

Published: July 13, 2024 00:00

Every advertising event is full of thought leader insights about privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) for ad personalization and reporting systems. Somehow Big Tech, adtech, and martech are all fired up about projects for reimplementing…

turn off advertising features in Firefox

https://blog.zgp.org/turn-off-advertising-features-in-firefox/

Published: July 11, 2024 00:00

It’s understandable that Mozilla wants to break their dependency on Google search ads, but right now they seem to be doing it by, yes, yet again putting advertising features in the browser. This time they’re doing it in a way that introduces new,…

Using GitHub Pages to host a locally built site

https://blog.zgp.org/github-pages-for-locally-made-site/

Published: July 10, 2024 00:00

Something I recently ran into: How do you build a site locally and host the resulting built version of the site on GitHub Pages? Here’s one way to do it. First, have a make all target that builds the public files from the source pages (for example, pass…

Big Tech platforms: mall, newspaper, or something else?

https://blog.zgp.org/big-tech-mall-or-newspaper/

Published: July 6, 2024 00:00

The Pruneyard is “an iconic destination and experience designed to make the everyday extraordinary.” It’s also, according to the US Supreme Court, a business establishment that is open to the public to come and go as they please. The views expressed by…

Return of the power user

https://blog.zgp.org/return-of-the-power-user/

Published: June 30, 2024 00:00

It’s all coming together. The PC power user is back. In the early days of small business microcomputers, the person with a subscription to Byte, and some knowledge of topics like batch files and how to get support for a printer driver, was able to bring up…

Money bots talk and bullshit bots walk?

https://blog.zgp.org/money-bots-talk/

Published: June 28, 2024 00:00

Now that AI can beat a Turing test by bullshitting, what’s the next test? In Prediction Market Trading as an LLM Benchmark, Jesse Richardson suggests that setting up an LLM to trade on a prediction market (e.g. Polymarket, which is the platform I’ll talk…

This site is opted out of AI. Perplexity.ai crawled it three times

https://blog.zgp.org/perplexed/

Published: June 24, 2024 00:00

Quick test of the perplexity.ai thing. From here it looks like they ignored this site’s 3 layers of AI protection: robots.txt X-Robots-Tag HTTP header noai meta tag and that they’re crawling from three different IP addresses with three different user…