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I tried DuckDuckGo like two years ago and my opinion was “meh, I don’t like the results”.
Yesterday @Root made it clear that the sole amount of data collected changes the whole perspective of tracking.
I went to shower thinking about that and as I was standing there enjoying warm water...
It hit me.
I liked google results and disliked DDG not because DDG was worse.
I liked google results because they were CRAFTED for ME to LIKE them. They exploited my confirmation bias, the strongest of all biases.
I took my other phone which is android, has a different sim that isn’t tied to my identity (don’t ask, this is Russia), was never connected to my WiFi and of course has no google account tied to it.
I tried googling stuff.
The results was just like what DDG gets you, the only difference was google amp were on top.
The fuck. One of the wokest moments ever.106 -
I don't use Google/Facebook for privacy reasons (and their sub-services etc). Haven't used them for ages but noticed that google still loads a lot of domains like analytics etc. This goes for facebook as well.
I now blocked a lot of google/facebook domains through my hosts file.
It's funny to see the amount of DNS requests to those fb/google connected domains nearly go to zero and also the fact that I literally can't load google/facebook anymore!126 -
One of my fears is that the NSA will start tracking my every movement because I've search "explode" in Google one too many times... I always forget if the $delimiter comes first or the $string in PHP's function explode().7
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Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<
I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.
The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.
After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.
I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.
After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.
I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/
But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/
But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)
I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.
... six seconds pass ...
... another two seconds pass ...
... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.
asjdlkagjdsk.
> Pic related.
19 -
- Google: Can I track you? You'd get this and that and much more if you allow me to.
- Microsoft: I will track you. Disable half of my settings if you do not want to be tracked.
- FB: I do NOT track you
7 -
HUGE FUCKING DILEMMA FOR ME.
I will probably get the chance of choosing a company phone soon (as in, next few days).
Option 1: Android - not allowed to root or anything crazy so I'll have a partly open system but with google tracking fully enabled at all times (most probably).
Option 2: iOS - Also not allowed to jailbreak or anything 'weird' but it's entirely closed source. Although no Google tracking shit.
I honestly have no clue what to choose.
Halp.105 -
A big FUCK YOU to chrome, and a big FUCK YOU to google in generally. First the hell that is code.org, then the chrome. I genuinely want to open a dictionary in google to see if the word "privacy" is in there. Sure, first it was tracking users with by making them agree to a long ass TOS no one wants to read except lawyers, then barely even giving any info and asking for consent with YOUR data, but this is too far. For all you that dont know, LanSchool is an application that allows teachers to see students screens, internet history and more. Its the reason kids can't play games in English class. But most importantly, its a chrome extension. We have to do assignments from home right? So when we logon to the school account from home, LANSCHOOL GETS DOWNLOADED ANYRACKS EVERYTHING I DO. It pains me how teachers can view so much information unfairly because of some unknowing students, my friends privacy was unfairly in the hands of google and the school system. Right when I found out about tit (~2 mins after i first logged on) i made an Ubuntu VM just for goddamn google docs. Back to my friend, he went on some websites not to be considered appropriate, and got in huge trouble. He was completely unaware of the fact that they could see his screen, and I resent google for allowing a third party to manipulate my PERSONAL COMPUTER without my consent. Die google, you ruined android, which had so much potential, and now the web and virtual privacy. You should be <strike>ashamed</strike> dead, and I hope in the future you realize that one day people will have common sense.26
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DuckDuckGo may be great for not tracking you, however it sometimes lacks the "smarts" of Google....
5 -
"we use cookies to give you a better experience on our site"
A better experience? Really?
It looks like you're using more than 100 external parties for whatever fucking reason. It is nearly impossible to disallow these, except for some stuff like analytics, which I don't like since it includes mass surveillance parties like Google and Facebook, but I'd at least, to some extent, understand that better.
But, the amount of dark pattern here is staggering and this kind of 'consent' you're using wouldn't, in a million years, hold up under the GDPR.
You know what would be a better experience? No tracking and no ads.
Go fuck your better experience (would that be a better sex experience....?)4 -
When Google recruits, I guess they don't need to ask you anything, since they are already tracking your every move.13
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> Open private browsing on Firefox on my Debian laptop
> Find ML Google course and decided to start learning in advance (AI and ML are topics for next semester)
**Phone notifications: YouTube suggests Machine Learning recipes #1 from Google**
> Not even logged in on laptop
> Not even chrome
> Not even history enabled
> Not fucking even windows
😒😒😒
The lack of privacy is fucking infuriating!
....
> Added video to watched latter
I now hate myself for bitting
22 -
GDPR: great law, except for those who use technology (JS blockers, tracking protection, etc etc) to fight other technology (cookies, trackers, etc etc). Welcomed by the general public, but for content publishers it is a royal pain in the ass. Because did the EU provide non-legalese explanations as to how to become compliant? Of course they didn't. Why would they? But of course lawyers jumped on it like it's the best thing in the world. "GDPR-experts".
Now, article 11 and 13 again. Copyright law taken to ridiculous levels, impossible to implement, except for maybe Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Anyone else? Of course not. Again, a lot of money has to be involved with it. Does anyone want this thing? Of course not. And why the fuck is this still a thing even?! Did direct lobbying to the EU Parliament members a few months ago not teach them anything?! Senile pieces of shit. Should those old fucks really be able to decide about the future of the internet?4 -
Google cripples ad and tracking blockers: In January, Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 which removes an essential API in favour of an inferior one. As usually, Google is being deceitful and touts security concerns as pretext.
That hits all Chromium based browser, such as my beloved Vivaldi. The team argues with their own browser internal blocker, but that's far worse than uBlock Origin. One of Vivaldi's core promises was privacy, and that will go out of the window. The team simply doesn't react to people pointing that out. They're fucked, and they know it.
So what now? Well, going back to Firefox because that will include the crippled new API for extension compatibility, but also keep the powerful old one specifically so that ad and tracking blockers will keep working. Google has just handed Mozilla a major unique selling point, and miraculously, Mozilla didn't fuck it up.26 -
Son of a... insurance tracker
You hit delete and I’m stuck with this reply!?!
Stuff it, I’ll rant about it instead of commenting.
How’s an insurance e company any different to google tracking your every move, except now it’s for “insurance policy premiums” and setting pricing models on when, how, and potentially why you drive.
Granted no company should have enough gps data to be able to create a behaviour driven ai that can predict your where and when’s with great accuracy.
The fight to remove this kind of tech from our lives is long over, now we have to deal with the consequences of giving companies way to much information.
- good lord, I sound like a privacy activists here, I think I’ve been around @linuxxx to long.20 -
(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)
Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"
No.
It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.
It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.
Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.
Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.
The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.11 -
"How much info can we get from cookies? I want to get gender, approx. age and at least first name. That's possible, right?"
Me: "that's not how cookies work.. the info needs to be stored somewhere, where we can access it. It's not in guests cookies"
"How does Google do then? They're tracking everything we do.. *bla* *bla*"
- my business partner..........5 -
No offence to anyone but I'm wondering why so many people go for Google chrome while chromium browser provides about the exact same browsing experience and speed etc but without Google's proprietary tracking shit. I know not everyone cares about their privacy but still wondering.13
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Wtf bs is this? Can't governments just stop trying to control the internet?
It's literally the closest thing we have to a free and fair society on the planet and that's with all the tracking and abuse of information going on. I think we need to start applying our minds to creating a decentralised network with p2p discovery routed through our phones if we want to keep any semblance of freedom of speech or privacy around for our kids. Routing traffic wouldnt use more than 50-100mb of ram and would probably use a lot less battery than Google does listening to our conversations or transmiting our location data so we wouldn't even notice. If only we could find a cable free decentalized way to get data across the ocean no one would be able to control it again, I doubt we would be able to shut it down either.
9 -
I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.
My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.
Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.
So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.
I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.
Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.
AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.
There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.
But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.
This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.
But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.
I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.
I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.
But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.
I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.
On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.
Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.
Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.
So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.
One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.
I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.
There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.
commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).
it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.
it also seems kinda slow for responses,
it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.
4 -
I've fucking had it with youtube, fucking jizz slapping knob butlers. I'm going to setup a mirror on my server, the idea is:
- Setup a youtube-dl cron that fetches multiple times a day both audio and video versions of the music playlist I have, hopefully with some sort of progress tracking of each download and total, so I could check if it has run successfully and have a nice dashboard, might need to do that myself (except if compactd proves itself to manage that all)
- Need to figure out a way to download the "best" quality but not go beyond 1080p, since if some videos for some reason are uploaded @ 4k, that'll be a waste of space
- Have Compactd/Funkwhale/Koel as the music player frontend for the audio version of the files, preferably one of them should offer download of the files too, so I could have a similar setup to spotify, though I could probably also just have some filebrowser installed or have a password protected index.
- Not sure what to use for the video versions, since sometimes the video goes with the music; plex? emby? suggestions are welcome
- Saw somebody (ab)using google drive as their backup for all the music they download, so I want to setup something similar, rsyncing all videos and music to some account, so in case shit majorly hits the fan, I can just download everything back
15 -
Title: Google can track your porn history, even in incognito mode
Body(tl;dr version): Pornsites use Google Analytics
You little idiotic motherfucking tech savvy wannabe, most of the websites use some form of user tracking services.
Hell, even the blog/news website you work for probably does.22 -
I know Google isn't the worst company in the world. But some of their data tracking just seems a bit odd. Such as keeping audio logs each time you use Google on your phone. Or when it picks up random bits of conversation. Along with them keeping track of where your going, and where you have been. Even if Google maps isn't running.
And one of my all time favorites is when Google Allo was a thing, it used to have access to my camera randomly without actually opening the app. My phone will tell me different logs each time Allo opened the camera without my permission.
I know they need to collect data in order to advance some of their fields of tech. But it just seems a bit intrusive when companies like Google do this.11 -
Being Honest,
I never had any problem with Google tracking my activities. I love their services and I feel like they're using my data to really serve me better.
But I do have problems with Amazon and Facebook.
Amazon keeps disturbing me with their annoying ads recommending things I've already purchased.
Using Facebook on the other hand is like standing nude in public.18 -
me vs marketing guy, again
me: yeah, the database server is not responding, so you cannot log in to post your blog, wait for it to get online.
MG: But, the website is online.
me: web host and database server are two distinct things, they are not the same, *share a screenshot of the error*
MG: Oh okay.
Literally 3 hours later this fucking idiot sends an email and I quote.
"Hi Dev,
@CTO FYI, Someone has removed this code So there is some tracking issue on it.
Please add below google analytics code on the website.
Note: Copy and paste this code as the first item into the <HEAD> of every web page that you want to track. If you already have a Global Site Tag on your page, simply add the config line from the snippet below to your existing Global Site Tag.
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://googletagmanager.com/gtag/..."></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1');
</script>
"
The fucking issue was of him not being able to post his shitty blog, and he shares an email like this, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!2 -
I don't understand privacy advocators.
Am I the only one who wouldn't give up practicality in exchange for "potentially more secure"?
I don't understand so much what the deal is with people who avoid Facebook, or don't trust Google or Microsoft, just in the basis of "privacy" or "security".
Websites tracking you to serve ads? Well, it's pointless because I very rarely buy something from the internet or let myself be influenced, ads are waste of time, just use an adblocker.
I can pretty much upload my whole life or documents on Google drive, even if I made it public no one would really care or read it all. It's like that GitHub project you uploaded but never documented, so no one cares. I usually use alternative software not because of "privacy" but because it has features other software doesn't have.
In reality you realize people aren't that interested in your life more than their own life.24 -
My prederred method of communication is over email.
A guy I've built an ecommerce platform and affiliate tracking for was sending me a lot of IMs. So I disabled Google chat. Then he started sending me texts to let me know he sent WhatsApp messages.
Last week he sent me a text to let me know to check WhatsApp. The message there was extremely vague and a minute later an actual email came in explaining the actual issue.
He's fucking with me right?
Then yesterday he messaged me a random series of questions, some that could have easily been googled, that on a holiday while I'm out with my family, should have definitely been over email, because they weren't immediate issues. I actually pictured him drinking at a bbq when he was writing them.
I was about to quit this dude but I get some nice monthly bonuses. -
A client asked me to include a GA tracking code into her website,
I said yea I'll add it for you, just send me the code snippet please :)
she sent me the URL to google analytics login page....
I told her that I need the code snippet not the URL.
She replied: yah that's what I sent.
Me:...2 -
"Apple and Google will ban the use of location tracking in covid19 contact tracing apps on their stores to ensure user privacy and to prevent governments from using the syatem to compile data on citizens"
AHAHAHAHAHAHA7 -
Don't take your Android phone when you commit a crime. Otherwise you'll get a notification next day...
How would you like to rate this crime scene you visited yesterday... -
Boss: “Our ecommerce conversions in Google Analytics are less than the actual pace of orders.”
Me: “Nothing has changed in the tracking code or setup. It must be our goals setup which you have to have a Ph.D. to understand, plus whatever mood Google’s algorithms are in today.”
He’s not mad at me. We’re both just confused why Google AdWords, Analytics, and Tag Manager have to be so damn hard to get right. I’ve never been able to do it right. And most data is thrown out because people browse websites while logged into their Google Account, which makes their clickstream disappear and become unattributable because of understandable privacy policies. I don’t want my data tracked when I’m logged in either!
So now we have had to hire specialists at several thousand dollars per month to figure this out. -
Big tech hates Apple for introducing Anti-Tracking features into IOS14.5,
https://gizmodo.com/how-to-block-ap...
But...... this isn't what I expected to fall through after that happened.
Google is introducing a similar feature into Android 12 😱
https://gizmodo.com/google-will-let...2 -
Back in the days when I knew only Windows, I used to be a Microsoft fan. I wanted to use only Microsoft products. I had a Hotmail email account that Microsoft acquired. I used a version of Windows and Microsoft Office (even though I didn't know at the time that it was pirated). I wanted to be a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) and promote Microsoft everywhere.
Fast forward to now (or maybe to the time after I got introduced to GNU/Linux), I started hating Microsoft solely for the reason that they had a price-tag on everything. Later on, when I got to open-source software, I hated Microsoft for making all of their software closed-source. When I decided to move out of the Microsoft environment, my next favorite was of course, Big Brother (Google, if you haven't gotten it) - Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive. My personal information was the price to pay for the services even though I wasn't OK with that fact.
Then again, I realized that you could actually have your own stuff if you had the know-how. Compile / host your own software on your own systems. Oh, then I went on a compile spree. That's when I realized I didn't need any of these corporations to own my data. Today, I try my best to keep my data in my control and not some corporations who gives me free stuff for the price of my data and personal information, no thanks.3 -
Brave Browser.
There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.
Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:
Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”
If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.
But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:
“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”
Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.
In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.
Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.
I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.
There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.
In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.
Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.15 -
So I just got asked for a quote for developing an app for a client's friend. He wanted an app that requires me to build let's just say a combination of what you see on uber with the live tracking of your uber driver, seeing all cars around your location and determining the closest one (It wasn't necessarily cars) plus profiles and another app for another set of users (I can easily make this one and determine the logged in user and in turn tailor the features for that user but they wanted two). An admin portal also was included and I had to do various integrations with Google maps. In app purchases was also necessary. Logs as the app has to keep track of all activities basically. A wallet feature was also to be implemented, scheduling, rating and complains section was also something requested and finally a mini accounting system was also to be developed. I was going to do this singlehandly as a freelancer. Obviously this is a lot of work. I also gave them a timeline of about 3 months for development. Which meant I was going to be putting all my time into developing this. Front end and backend for the app and front-end and backend for the server and database architecture. I charged them $10,000 not only for the work but also because they were going to be making money off of the app. They go "wow and why does it cost so much"...Judging from their reactions I don't think they will move further with this with me because of costs...😂 I can't even begin to wonder why they think that isn't a fair price. I have learnt from previous work before that you always state a cost for which you are absolutely sure you would want to work for else you would start doing the work and once you see how little you are being paid for so much work you end up hating the work and completing it ends up being a difficult task.10
-
I wrote a tech book several years ago for O'Reilly, which itself was a dream come true. I'm still amazed I got that deal done, and the fact that my name was on a title with a unique animal on the cover is SUPER cool.
Back then, their publishing system was based on Git with their own markup language, and it was sort of a chore to use. Easy and straightforward, but laborious. I spent 3 entire days just (re)formatting my drafts to their code. They've upgraded it since, I see, based on the same fundamental versioning idea and still using Git. Neat!
I've also done tech writing for .NET Magazine, which used Word's change tracking, and penned articles for other publications using Google Docs, or even drafts in WordPress.
Have all of you run into interesting systems used by publishers to manage content?2 -
Google apparently announced, they would stop most types of tracking.
Whats up with that and why would they give up their almost monopoly on advertisement.
Am I missing something?14 -
Google tracks Android users even with location services turned off.
https://theguardian.com/technology/...
Fuck Google & Apple; Are there any decent mobile operating systems that actually respect your privacy?9 -
I know you pals know much more than me about privacy. I have these questions to you all:
- can google still know trends about me if I only use google docs and google drive to store files I share with other people and rarely update it? Let’s say I don’t use google search or any other google service ON REGULAR BASIS
- does chromium actually works as the measure to get rid of google tracking if I don’t want to use Firefox?
- how safe is apple (miss me with that Apple hate)? How bad is the fact that I let apple store my regularly updated health information and I use iPhone?
I’m not talking about triple letters here (FBI, CIA, etc), I’m only talking about collecting and selling data across companies12 -
My phone got stuck in funky restart boot loop yesterday. The first 2 restarts was odd but after 3 cycles, I started panicking. Went on my PC, googled for all kinds of button combinations of power button, volume button, back button, and home button to get into fastboot, recovery and safe mode to see if I can clear stuff or at least get backup of my stuff. I also tried taking the battery out. Nothing works, except when I factory reset.
Everything was new again and as it booted up, I have to remember to change my authentication keys in LastPass, my private ssh key in Krypt. But fortunately, Google remembered all my apps and suggested if I wanted to install them again since it recognized my phone was an old phone. Thanks for tracking me Google. And now since its a reset, everything is clean, no cache, cookie, and some of my music files are all gone. Well at least its fast like before.1 -
Google researchers have exposed details of multiple security flaws in Safari web browser that allowed user's browsing behavior to be tracked.
According to a report : The flaws which were found in an anti-tracking feature known as Intelligent Tracking Prevention, were first disclosed by Google to Apple in August last year. In a published paper, researchers in Google's cloud team have identified five different types of attacks that could have resulted from the vulnerabilities, allowing third parties to obtain "sensitive private information about the user's browsing habits."
Apple rolled out Intelligent Tracking Prevention in 2017, with the specific aim of protecting Safari browser users from being tracked around the web by advertisers and other third-party cookies.2 -
Finally go around to de-Googling my phone:
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...
Feels good reducing my tracking footprint4 -
Thanks google for creating the illusion of an option to change the shipping address for a repair order. You even mention the new address in your notification email, but when I click on UPS tracking, I can see that you sent the shipment to the old address, which is in a different city where I can't quickly go to pick up my repaired phone. After charging an extra 95,- Euros for additional damage supposedly not covered by my warranty. Lucky you that my old phone had connection problems with the shitty Vodafone station wi-fi router, which is one of the few reasons that I still even want to use a google hardware product. Thanks google for just being slightly less wretched and mediocre than your competitors, that might grant you some more years before you will be buried in history forever. Pixel phones are just like Macbooks: high quality product and good marketing, good enough to make your customer accept everything else being bullshit. Google search is even worse, but based on the same concept: just suck a little less than your competitors but don't waste any effort trying to actually be really good at anything.3
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Doing the Full Stack Nanodegree from Udacity
Using Google's oAuth Sign in in my Flask App, I realized that no matter what browser I use, I was unable to logout, Google always threw an error my way. I figured something must be wrong with my code..
Searched on Google, couldn't find anything relevant, gave up on first 4 results(not pages, yeah I'm that lazy!)
Spent 3 hours Debugging at different points, removing all the abstraction I've put in using various libraries (Bad move)
Finally it dawned on to me to check Udacity forum as well. It's a frickin cache/cookie thing. Tried the app in an incognito window, worked like a charm. Reverted code back with all the libraries, worked like a charm again!
FUCK YOU GOOGLE! In your attempts to track users, you're even making our work difficult!
(in hindsight, I should probably be better at asking/looking for help)1 -
LOL XCode....I think they meant "X"tra useless, resembling such as a bag of dicks without handles!!!!
Also, being fucking buried because there's aren't any devs anywhere to be found near me makes me extra cranky!
Ive been hammering away at this Flutter, Java, Swift, Python, and Google maps for just about 36 hours on 3.5 hrs sleep. I just can't stop, I fuckin love this shit!!!
Considering the fact that I'm self taught and just started writing code for real about 7 months ago, I'd say I'm handling this alright for now. Every bit of tech is getting shot out of a cannon at this one- maps, real time tracking, state level auth/Id verification, custom components like ID scans/native desktop applications on custom linux machines, body cams, SIP trunking... all in 3 apps which are 100% multi-platform and scaled up to high end enterprise levels and being groomed for national release. I'm writing the code and doing the tech for ALL of it- even down to custom painted barcode scanners, a wallet system built from scratch, GPS integration, location/geofence based document querying... holy fuck guys I'm gonna fuckin die haha!!!
I went from barely getting websites made in late summer to this very moment, where I am pumping shit out in Flutter, Dart, Python, CPP, Js, Swift, Java, Kotlin, Obj-C, SQL/noSQL, and who knows what else.
I don't even know what the hell I just said haha I hope everyone has a great day! -
I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.
I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)
I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:
1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company
2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)
3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth
4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.
5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.
6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.
7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .
8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.
My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?
we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.
So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?
then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?
if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.
For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.
same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS
for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .
an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".
edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"
but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product
The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad2 -
After reading through an article by EFF about Google's new FLoC technology, I finally woke up and realized that Google isn't any different from the other huge organizations, and that it isn't here to fight for greater user privacy and rights... As such, I made a switch, going from Google to DuckDuckGo.
Sure, I still use YT, but other than that, I don't have a gmail address that'd be of importance, don't use their search engine, and now...
Got any tips on how to minimize tracking potential of an android-based rooted smartphone? (Stock rom, Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro). I know using a custom rom is an option, however, Lineage isn't officially supported for this model of phone, and I still value functionality over anything else, so... Unofficial daily drive OS is sub-optimal.
Alternative hardware solutions like PinePhone, although nice in theory, are way too behind the commercial brands in terms of technology and features, so that's a no go.5 -
Okay soo I’m not a database guy.. I’m an embedded engineer but I’m helping one of my interns make a hardware tracking database... so we are tracking assembled products (dev samples).. but also tracking the pcbs within the product.. depending on the product it might have more than one pcb or contain other components to track.
The question is how would I set up the relationship in the tables, so depending on the say “type id” of the product it would link to a table full of feilds specfic to that “type”.. say the product is of type phone and has a pcb of this and a camera of that.. blah blah blah.... but say another product is of type “washing machine”.. which has no screen, it has a different pcb, but also has other things..
There would be a type table .. washing machine, phone, tv, camera, pcb, ecu.. etc.. but those type would need their own tables...
I guess the question is how to relate a field to different tables depending on the value of the field... is this portion all done thru query results and logic rather than pure data base schemas?
What would be the question in terms of database lingo to google search the answer lol2 -
Lol. Another day, another (or just the usual) big tech company just takes us from behind.
This time? Oh Google is just spamming me because they "found malware" on a tracking code. There's nothing. Except competition.
They had to email me about every "malware" in EVERY fucking workspace version. In random order, eventually effecting the live version. Thanks. I really needed those 30 emails to know. -
So there is this idea in my head for creating a anon, add free, chatservice available for tor and normal adresses. Where everything is e2ee and there are multiple channels to join. Can anyone tell me if it already exists?? I basicaly want to go away form google/fb tracking1
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