sigh

. . . I’ll allow it.

Oh it took me a solid month of trial and error, scrolling through xda and other forums reading every how-to and watching plenty of vids and I finally got it to work. But it was not even fun. Yes starting with a Pixel is better, but f* teh googlez.

Are we doing this again?

No. No, we are not.

Good point - but it didn’t work in my mastodon app (it linked to the tweet but as I say I have that blocked). I did read up on the Kamala tag though, so thanks for the pointer!

Oh. Right.

Not just that, but I was watching some video about i dunno, some kinda hardware, or something - nothing even particularly recent or popular - and the comments underneath it were so obviously and horribly bots. They all used the exact same words, they all used the exact same phrasing, and they all had different user names. Just one after the other, probably 100 of them

So I think YouTube has abandoned attempts to make it good - or even usable - probably for profit reasons. Enter russia4trump

OK so I don’t have Twitter and I have social media blocked basically so I wanted to see the ad, right? I went to YouTube to pull it up.

It was really bizarre - if you search for “Harris ad trump sleeping” you get about 100 - OK 20 of the exact same clip from any number of local TV stations (most of the Fox) where Trump claims Harris is sleeping. And one - exactly one - MSNBC clip, which runs for 12 minutes talking about “exhausted” trump, and doesn’t even show the Harris ad. The Harris ad did not appear in the search at all.

Now I’m not “signed in“ there, I don’t have cookies or anything so I’m just some random browser showing up asking to see the Harris ad and seeing 90% Trump ads.

I don’t know what else going on at YouTube, other than it’s awful and worse than ever, and appears to be subsumed with Trump crap.

RepubliQan owners

Trump wants his money, sure but the attention he takes away from trump will be his undoing. Pence and Rude were toadies, but Ketamine Elmo isn’t gonna play that.

Aw man, no Patagonian Toothfish crackers. Again!

The hits just keep on a-comin’

BOGU!

It’s a good start tho

This sort of surveillance is only possible because of the mobile advertising ecosystem. Location data is sometimes used to build profiles on device users and better target advertisements to them. Much of that advertising relies on a MAID, the unique advertising ID, on a phone. The MAID acts as the digital glue between a device and its associated data.

But that same underlying system, of Google and Apple linking a unique identifier on the phone to a user’s activity, allows Babel Street and others to build their mass monitoring products. In many cases, a device’s MAID is also displayed inside Babel Street.

So periodically refresh / replace your ad id as well.

Having just done that for the first time I feel confident in saying anyone who’s still using facebook or Xitter or tiktok or whatever - is not going to do that. I wish they would but that’s an order of magnitude more technical than where they are.

If they get a warrant, sure. Sell it I dunno. There’s more legal cases about cell tower data simply because it’s some form of technology courts have at least made an effort to understand at some point.

This is the famous cat dance “Suntangle Surrender” first made famous by Misty of Northampton Beach in 1919. Beautiful execution, so thoughtful and subtle.

? kid?

That would be a better approach, of course.

Unless you become a phone company or use a StingRay

You are right. And you’re fighting against the credit reporting agencies and google, facebook, apple, and all car manufacturers for privacy rights.

This is the result of jurists and legislators who don’t understand a single goddamned thing about computers in 2024. For fuck’s sake it’s been thirty goddamned years since this was obviously going to happen. Take a class, you bastards! Those of you who aren’t Heritage Foundation fascists.