I have not read that book, but seeing as the right is on the rise also here in Europe, it might be worth checking it out.

It is soo easy to forget about just how much identifying metadata you leave on the internet just by reading stuff.

You know the cookie banners you see? Those that claim to let you opt out from being tracked by advertisers?

Yeah, those are just the overt tracking mechanism, tracking pixels are far far more insidious.

Lets backtrack a bit, back when Facebook started getting big, companies started embedded Like buttons on their webpages, cool right? You could just click the Like button and it would help you post a link to your Facebook feed to the page you were visiting.

Seems fine, right? What’s the issue?

It would be fine if the image of the Like button was stored on the local web server hosting the rest of the site.

But it isn’t.

It is stored on Facebook’s servers, it is stored in a way that every single Like button has their own ID, so every time you load up your favourite website about abandoned radiation experiment sites it makes your browser send a request to Facebook’s servers as well and depending on how the request is sent they can at minimum log that your IP address loaded the Like button with the ID number X, the ID number X is tied to the specific webpage you visited.

Then you go and do some research on impotense and how to cure it, the pages you read all have Like buttons as above, but with their own ID numbers, Facebook now knows at a minimum that you are a man who is interested in science, technology, society and modern history, you may also suffer from impotense.

Well, you keep browsing the web and read local news, well the Like button is also there, and with the ID number Facebook can add an area of interest to your profile.

It keeps going like this, but with one huge important change, people are starting getting warey of the Like buttons and Facebook in general, so they simply remove the button, while introducing the tracking pixel, a 1px*1px transparent picture, it works like how the Like button loads, and keeps generating data for Facebook.

Facebook is not alone in this, I just used them as an example.

You can read more here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_pixel

This is also not even getting into browser fingerprinting.

There will be a lot of strangers in the stairwell in my apartment building.

If the place was actually called “Temptation Mart”, I would be very suspicious, a Temptation usually means that if you fall for it, something bad will happen.

That is a new way of putting it that I have not heard before, I like it, it doesn’t answer my questions as much as defecting them. It forces me to realize thsybit doesn’t matter.

That’s fair.

I was about to add that option, but forgot about it.

I guess what makes me annoyed about it is that we know that the big bang happened, but we don’t know what triggered it or what was before.

The one thing that still remains unclear with regards to science and god is the big bang.

The way I have heard it explained is that before the big bang there was nothing.

Which to my mind becomes:

First there was nothing, which exploded

This does not make sense to me, how can nothing explode?

So there are three categories of answer to this question:

A. There was something before the big bang which exploded, though this offeres not explanation of how the thing that exploded came into existance, I have heard theories about how the universe is cyclical and how it will eventually collapse into a new big bang, but that doesn’t answer the queation about the first big bang.

B. God exists and triggered the big bang, that means that the god entity exists outside of our universe.

C. We are just a highly advanced simulator, the big bang was the the program starting our simulation.

As someone who is mostly agnostic, those who belive that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence belong in psychotherapy.

There is zero evidence either way, the best we can say is that we don’t know.

I an not even American and even I am pissed at that dumb ruling.

And what is even more annoying is that I read that what is considered an official act is not clear, so a court will need to decide if an act was official or not, and that court will be the SCOTUS.

So they could easily decide that acts Biden performed was not official, but the same acts performed by Trump was official, and invent some crap about context being different in som complex way, so with this ruling they have moved the power from the POTUS to the SCOTUS while POTUS stays the fall guy.

Yep, after 18 years on dA, I closed my account there yesterday.

I had about 2000 photos or so, but a year ago I got too pissed off at how slow and annoying it was to navigate, so I set up an index page on a webhost and use digiKam to create albums.

I update the index page in HTML/CSS and link to the albums.

The albums does have some javascript, that is to enable arrowkey navigation, else it is just pure HTML and CSS, and it is blazingly fast.

Correct, Putin is behaving like an abusive partner.

He never expected Ukraine and the west to do so well against him, and since we don’t have any police to call in this case the abuser won’t be taken to jail and keeps fighting.

Oh I agree with you, I just don’t think that a world war is what Putin wants.

Putin doesn’t want a world war, he is more interested in having the west just roll over and letting him retake the former countries of the Soviet Union

I see that this is the day, I wish you all the best and know that realizing the issue and doing something about it is a huge step on the way!

You are doing good!

Going for a walk.

Cleaning.

Minecraft, soo much minecraft…

Break down the issue into smaller tasks.

I was living with a family in a suburb to Bath in the UK, the son in the family and me was with his friends Bristol for a day, when they suddenly started talking about bombs, yep this was the London bombings in 2005…

At first I didn’t realize what happened, I am Swede and English is my second language, so I had a bit of trouble actually understanding it all.

When we got back home, I called my parents who were in Canada on vacation at the time, they were at a restaurant and had not heard the news yet, so they were very confused but happy that I was fine.

I can just imagine them at a restaurant, getting a call from their son calling to say that he is ok and not to worry with zero context and then hearing about the attacks that way, that must have been quite surreal, but also ment that they was never worried.

Go for a drive, I have AC in my car…

Nope, not to my knowledge.

I have never heard about that being a problem or even a thing.

Untill someone makes a wood detector I don’t think they are worried about it.

The point is that a metal detector is specifically made to find stuff easier, and significantly cuts down on manpower needed to find stuff, increasing the risk of scavanging.

Using a metal detector here in Sweden requires a license from the government.

This is to prevent scavaging archeological artifacts.

That explains so much, I have been wondering why Ian suddenly started talking about more modern and common guns, but never saw the drama.

Thank you for filling in the gaps.