twhb

Apply the same logical test to freedom of speech, and you’ll get the same result.

You’re not missing anything about what’s likely to happen to you personally. What you’re missing is the manner in which rights shape your life and your society even when you don’t exercise them, and sometimes even when nobody is currently exercising them, and that significant harm can be built out of a vast number of smaller harms that aren’t individually that bad.

This article is misinformed if not intentionally misleading about Apple Pay’s privacy status. It is technically true that Apple does not share your credit card number, but it does share its own unique, persistent identifier.

This is an iOS 26 regression. There are a bunch of soft hyphens in there, which is why it works on other browsers and in previous versions of iOS.

This tool is deeply flawed. Fingerprinting protection is sometimes done by binning, which this tool rewards, and is sometimes done by randomizing, which this tool harshly punishes. The net result is it generally guides you away from the strongest protection.

The flip side of this, having the complementary flaw of testing only persistence, not uniqueness, is (warning, real tracking link) fingerprinting.com/demo. You can try resetting your ID and seeing if it changes here. Since tracking requires (a degree of) uniqueness AND (a degree of) persistence, the danger signal is only failing both the EFF test and this test.

Failing both is a requirement to derive meaning, not being lax: measuring only uniqueness would fail a random number generator, and measuring only persistence would fail the number 4.

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Hacker News actually still uses these for comment indentation, check this page’s source code.

This page seems designed to direct attention anywhere but the meat of the issue: are the moon details in Samsung photos derived from sensor data alone, or also external photos? To me, the answer is clear: Samsung can’t produce this result unless they also ingest external, high res moon photos. Yet Samsung frames it as “enhancing details”, not “adding details”, clearly implying the details in question were already there in some form.

Right, disappearing messages aren’t a safeguard against a malicious recipient, they’re a blast radius limiter on future device compromise on either end.

The abandoned plan was perceptual hashing, which should return the same hash for very similar photos, while the new one is a checksum, which should return the same hash only for identical photos. I don’t think that invalidates the point, but it does seem relevant. It certainly makes it much less useful for CSAM scanning or enforcing local dictator whims, since it’s now trivial to defeat if you actually try to.

I felt this way for a while, but I’d like to offer another angle: maybe it’s like saying “Every company eventually hires tall people. Some have no tall people, but it’s just a matter of time. Tall people are really an unstoppable force.” The missing piece is also observing short people (ad-free offerings), which you’d notice are not being eliminated, are also prevalent, and also “infect” everything. I think the unstoppable force being felt here is just statistics: ads are often an option, companies make a lot of decisions, it’s statistically inevitable that some of those will be ads, unless the company has some strong aversion to ads, which most don’t.

The never-ending chain has bothered me too. I realized that if there is a theory of everything, it needs to prove itself. As far as I know, that’s a logical contradiction. Maybe resolving that contradiction is the door to moving forward. Is the concept of a “theory of everything” invalid? Is modern logic insufficient to find it?

Don’t mistake this for victory. Google’s standard playbook when forcing things people don’t like is to spread the action out over a longer timeframe, exhausting the media and keeping the final blow mostly out of the news, and exhausting our individual outrage and will to keep fighting. It works every time, and it’ll work again if we become complacent again. Until and unless Google meaningfully commits to never neuter ad blockers, it’s still critical and urgent that we switch to Firefox.