Advertising predates tracking by millennia. We can have online advertising without tracking, and certainly without this orgy of sharing data between 4353 partners. But market alone won’t get us there, because whoever offers advertising without tracking and selling data will be at a huge disadvantage compared to the crooks who sell. Only regulatory action can help. So this small step should be celebrated.

Then what are you talking about? I didn’t downvote your post, but probably like people who did, I have trouble understanding your point. Everyone online - privileged and underprivileged alike - is under omnipresent surveillance of countless actors. Until very recently this was completely unregulated. Information about our behavior, interests, opinions, relations, health, anxieties and dumb shit we post in moments of confusion, is gathered, sold, recombined and resold. The rich and powerful are doing it in hope of gaining ability to predict and change our behavior - i.e. gain more power over us. So just because you are more privileged then some, you should not care? Or not appreciate that something good, even if small and insufficient, happened about this awful situation?

It’s not about advertising. It’s about spying on our online lives. Not the same thing.

Sure. It’s in our nature to surround ourselves with like-minded people. Back in the old days, people would subscribe to a newspaper, watch TV and listen to radio stations, or go to pubs with folks they felt comfortable with, and that would often lead to gruopthink. There is only so much we can do about it with different platforms. The rest is up to us, individually and collectively. Being polite, open minded, thoughtful and critical takes effort. But it’s also in our nature.

What you wrote is probably true, but it’s not the end of the story. Ownership model of corporate social media creates incentives to polarize and divide people. It drives engagement and creates moats. Also, billionaire owners of those media have their own political goals, and are happy to use the platforms they own to advance them.

Fuck incels! Not literally, of course.

Why not? It would cure them 😉

Technically? Not very much, but I’m handy with NixOS. The hardest part was the configuration of a mail server. I should probably blog about the setup process. But of course the real work is attracting people and keeping them engaged.

Recently I’ve created a private forum and so far I’m very happy with it. It’s nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.

https://tad-lispy.com/club/

To be clear, I’m advertising the idea, not membership.

Is this coming from Wired magazine, aka the press organ of silicon valley? Big wows.

If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.

deleted by creator

Good idea. I’ll grep it and see.

Good point, but no. I avoid this crap like a dirty nappy.

Thanks for your help @[email protected] ! I got in touch with admins at chaos.social and it turns out my IP is getting blocked because something on my network is making requests with user agent set to Googlebot 😬

It’s definitely not something I run intentionally. I suspect some malware. Will post about it in a separate thread I think.

I’m on NixOS. The use of sudo doesn’t really bother me. I just wish to understand what’s going on. It’s still like this today.

While waiting for the results I’m educating myself on traceroute. It was super slow, but here’s the result. How do I interpret it?

$ sudo traceroute chaos.social
traceroute to chaos.social (5.9.119.202), 64 hops max
  1   192.168.1.1  0.777ms  0.714ms  0.621ms
  2   5.132.112.1  4.105ms  4.055ms  3.946ms
  3   10.10.10.174  7.384ms  7.338ms  7.204ms
  4   10.226.4.3  7.275ms  7.230ms  7.053ms
  5   *  *  *
  6   80.249.209.55  9.276ms  7.288ms  7.112ms
  7   *  *  *
  8   213.239.252.45  18.652ms  12.801ms  12.992ms
  9   213.239.224.69  17.158ms  17.165ms  17.119ms
 10   213.239.254.190  17.323ms  17.269ms  17.427ms
 11   5.9.119.208  17.327ms  17.332ms  17.211ms
 12   *  *  *
 13   *  *  *
 14   *  *  *
 ... asterisks all the way down
 63   *  *  *

~ took 15m23s
$ echo $?
1

It seems to stop at 5.9.119.208, which seems close to the destination 5.9.119.202.

Note to self: traceroute has to be run with sudo, otherwise only gives asterisks.

Edit: I’m getting almost exactly the same result when connecting via mobile network, when the connection to the site works. Am I doing it right?

Thank you so much for all the great work you’ve done so far. Take care!

In the USA there are almost 650 thousands patent applications being filled (of which almost 400 thousands are getting grants) each year. So while technically what you wrote is correct, in practical terms finding an interesting patent is certainly not a trivial task for a journalist.

That’s a serious accusation. Got anything to back it up?

Yes please! Do it Mellon!