Don Marti

Because the core values of news professionals and Big Tech oligarchs are so different, you might expect news organizations to stand up against Big Tech when bills that would limit Big Tech harms are the subject of hearings at state legislatures.

You’d be wrong.

rjionline.org/news/big-tec...

So does that mean that a bot will take what I tweet here on Bluesky and post it back to the Fediverse? Or the other way around? (either way it sounds useful, I want to tweet to _all_ teh twitters but only have to type once)

For now you can still block the click-throughs organization-wide even if you don't want to deploy an element hiding ad blocker blog.zgp.org/search-malve...

Drones to Diplomas: How Russia’s Largest Private University is Linked to a $25M Essay Mill A sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious connections to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university build...

Need a good reason to block the click-throughs to the search ads? #adBlocking #security

krebsonsecurity.com/2025/12/dron...

Firefox hit me today with the fucking AI bot popups

discovered some of the browser .ml .* shit i'd disabled in about:config had *switched back on*

someone at @mozilla.org is playing fuck fuck games with users' preferences.

hey @mozilla.org who is responsible for this?

Agree that consent banners are an antipattern -- see the article. Both Flo and Meta made people go through a "consent" process but the jury found that by California standards no consent was actually given

Weak cases have been getting thrown out for lack of standing, and lawyers are learning to adapt. They're finding clients w. significant harm that can be traced back to data collection.

Knowing what we know about Meta scams it's reckless for any site to pass them data (by pixel/sdk/capi) on a user

Why Weakening CIPA Would Hand Big Tech A Free Pass On Data Abuse | AdExchanger With privacy under unprecedented attack by data brokers and social media, it's is the wrong time to weaken CIPA's private right of action protections.

“With privacy under unprecedented attack by data brokers and social media, it is the wrong time to weaken these protections."

Take a look at this article co-written by OP member @dmarti.bsky.social discussing the repercussions of SB 690 on the dismantling of CA's CIPA.

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Why Weakening CIPA Would Hand Big Tech A Free Pass On Data Abuse | AdExchanger With privacy under unprecedented attack by data brokers and social media, it's is the wrong time to weaken CIPA's private right of action protections.

One-third of all scams in the USA originate with Meta?

Not quite—the real source is the companies that pass personal info to Meta, knowing that Meta's ML will use it to inflict harm.

Fortunately, #California has a #privacy law that—when used properly—will help.

www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-...

So let's say, hypothetically, that some teenager in the USA is an AI skeptic or even "AI vegan" and working on a college short list. Any strategies to avoid getting stuck with slop for 4 years? (This research is hard enough without the whole AI fad thing)

And imagine that Walton had found not just a messy store, but an exec running a criminal scheme, Google or Meta style

blog.zgp.org/thought-expe...

And the people at the top either don't care, or find that "safety" works in the opposite direction to what they want.

If Sam Walton had walked into a dirty, disorganized Walmart, stuff would have been fixed fast, whatever the VPs said. Zuckerberg and Pichai are all "meh" about high-profile crimes.

Mix #scamCulture with the efficiency of #openSource, and you get #surveillanceCapitalism and an economy-wide collapse in trust.

While American business culture has always celebrated “fake it ’til you make it,” we have pivoted to “make it, then fake it even harder.”

rjionline.org/news/the-tra...

Screenshot of a reCAPTCHA prompt, stating "our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network"

Every time I try a Google Search for [sergey brin epstein files] Google gives me a CAPTCHA...is this happening for anyone else?

update: I think I fixed it, enterprise policies to the rescue -- a fairly simple #security / #privacy protection to block the risky search ad clicks without breaking the ads on legit sites

blog.zgp.org/search-malve...

Ideally you would be able to keep only legit ads by default—with user's GPC choice applied—but for now that's hard to set up, so IT depts. have to be able to educate users when it's a good idea to turn off uBO for a site and when it's not.

(feature request: check ads.txt, unblock if it's legit) 3/3

If you're going to run a school or public computer, you need to make sure the Google Search ads aren't showing up or at least are not clickable. Right now uBlock Origin will do that reliably but search ads are out of scope for Privacy Badger blog.zgp.org/winners-don-... 2/3

This is mostly good advice, but has one problem. The biggest ad-related threat to most random users now is fake SaaS and employee portal login pages on Google Search.

Users try to go to the site where they have an account, click on the Google ad, and get compromised. 1/3

Groklaw Domain Hijacked? Site Now Serving Crypto Content - FOSS Force Groklaw’s storied domain has fallen into unexpected hands. What’s behind the sudden flood of crypto content—and is the site lost for good?

Another web maintenance todo: if you still have #groklaw links on your blog or other site, time to make a local copy of the original pages from archive.org and fix the links

fossforce.com/2025/08/grok...

Drone strikes on refineries and tanker terminals (easier to put out of action with a smaller drone because they're already flammable) could even be revenue-positive for a terrorist group that can invest in the oil futures market #energySecurity

What can I say, the cover of the incoming Spanish translation of Blood in the Machine is absolutely incredible.

This is a very interesting paper (HT @older.bsky.social & @philippmarkolin.bsky.social). I need to sit on some of these thoughts a little longer, but here's a first approximation 🧵 of reactions — in no particular order and without much filtering.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” -- George Orwell

Q: how do you get the Board of Directors to give you a 29 billion dollar pay raise?

A:

Consider, your Honor, that my client was being extremely productive at the time of the crash.

As each Big Tech switches away from high-growth value-extractive mode to earning more like a normal legacy IT company, that means more growth opportunities for the firms that are now on the losing end of their anticompetitive tricks. Total impact on an index fund investor will be somewhat positive

Great article, but I don't believe that the fall of the "Magnificent 7" firms will crash the stock market.

Ever since Big Tech pivoted from "create more value than you capture" to the other way around, every $1 in Big Tech market cap means the destruction of > $1 in the legit economy

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a ...

Newsletter: This is the Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble: genAI is nothing like Uber or Amazon Web Services, there are no profitable genAI companies, agents do not and cannot exist, there is no AI SaaS story, and everything rides - and dies - on selling GPUs.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...