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Very OT but relates to us all= privacy and advertising

9100

Diamond
Joined
Nov 1, 2004
Location
Webster Groves, MO
A friend said he needed a new battery for his car while in a room with an Alexa unit. Within a minute, his cell phone emitted a beep and when he opened it, there was an ad for a battery sale.

In screen printing the frames are often mounted on hinged clamps. What was formerly silk screen printing is nearly all a synthetic but the clamps are still referred to a "silk screen clamps" or "silk clamps". Someone mentioned them in a cell phone call and was inundated with ads for silk garments, obviously by a computer looking for key words.

Last week I had to replace a Square D manual motor started. The unit was so old that the part number no longer registered but by internet search I found the modern replacement. I did the search on my computer because the customer's is enough different to be annoying. MSN's home page has a slide show of various events, The Donald's latest insult and the current Kardashian scandal. Every five or six cards it has an out and out ad. This morning when checking the news, the slide show had an ad for a Square D manual motor starter.

Besides surveillance cameras, computers are listening to our posts, cell phone conversations, and even Alexa.

I think it is time to be working on limiting legislation with real teeth, like mandatory jail time.

Bill

The equals sign in the title was supposed to be a single dash ant the system won't let me change it.
 
A friend said he needed a new battery for his car while in a room with an Alexa unit. Within a minute, his cell phone emitted a beep and when he opened it, there was an ad for a battery sale.

In screen printing the frames are often mounted on hinged clamps. What was formerly silk screen printing is nearly all a synthetic but the clamps are still referred to a "silk screen clamps" or "silk clamps". Someone mentioned them in a cell phone call and was inundated with ads for silk garments, obviously by a computer looking for key words.

Last week I had to replace a Square D manual motor started. The unit was so old that the part number no longer registered but by internet search I found the modern replacement. I did the search on my computer because the customer's is enough different to be annoying. MSN's home page has a slide show of various events, The Donald's latest insult and the current Kardashian scandal. Every five or six cards it has an out and out ad. This morning when checking the news, the slide show had an ad for a Square D manual motor starter.

Besides surveillance cameras, computers are listening to our posts, cell phone conversations, and even Alexa.

I think it is time to be working on limiting legislation with real teeth, like mandatory jail time.

Bill

Dogs ... who pay attention ... often anticipate their owner's needs, too. And we generally think well of dogs for it.

The problem with con-puters.. is that one has to install a bit of code to make them divert to licking their own anatomy. Dogs, OTOH, happily volunteer.

The worry is that con-puters - who already seem to consider humans mere rawhide chew-toys - may take up eating meat.... and we are it.
 
I think it's crossing the line also. There's been times I've thought something out loud and the next thing I know I'm seeing ads for it! It doesn't bode well for privacy. It's probably just A.I. based advertising computers but where does it stop. Say a few "buzz" words and the government is at your door! Freedom of speech... just watch what you say.
 
I get almost no targeted advertising. Because I turned all that crap off. No Alexa, no Siri, no google search bar, no cookies. Ad and popup blockers all over. You'd be surprised how much crap you can cut out with a little effort.
 
I get almost no targeted advertising. Because I turned all that crap off. No Alexa, no Siri, no google search bar, no cookies. Ad and popup blockers all over. You'd be surprised how much crap you can cut out with a little effort.


Did it get cut out? Or is the feed back to you getting blocked? I've always wondered, as I use Linux and ad blockers myself.

Head in the sand vs the NSA...

The small stuff doesn't bother me, but we all leave a trail.....

The one that gets me, is that every time I use one of the MS Windoze machines that is internet connected, within an hour, I get a call or an email telling me I MUST do something to protect my system from being hacked. Oh well....
 
Did it get cut out? Or is the feed back to you getting blocked? I've always wondered, as I use Linux and ad blockers myself.

You serious? The parasites don't feed their adverts & malice through the site you are visiting.

YOUR browser is handed URI's that expect it to set-up a new link, via fewer "hops". No effect on the b/w, for example PM pays for. Your uplink bandwidth is belaboured via some OTHER route that goes live.

Unless, of course, your system never makes that initial contact to begin with.

When a local DNS maps the lot of them to 127.0.0.1? No traffic at all [1] traverses your bandwidth. Nothng to track, Nothing for No Such Agency to capture, either. It nevah' hoppin'.

With 80% to 90% of the traffic never undertaken, one not only avoids the parasitic annoyances.. everything else you INTENDED to do runs faster, and over less-costly bandwidth.

NB:

Highly effective:

- local "blackhole" DNS + privoxy implementing algorithms so the traffic never reaches off-box is the way to win.

Much less effective:

- Adblockers that work with a browser. Those are "too little, too late" - already eating memory, burning CPU cycles, and clogging paid-for b/w to anal-ize .. then not display (and hopefully not continue).

Waaay less efficient, not nearly as effective as "just don't even START" can be.

Bill

[1] helps to insure your resolver looks FIRST at /etc/hosts, AND NOT at off-box DNS.
 
What did you just say? Speak in sentences that make sense.

Localhost is a loopback address - it only goes to your own computer. So if you assign all these crappy ad sites to 127.0.0.1 (that's localhost) then instead of going outside and asking for data, the browser gets a "no such site" notice from your own local dns and quits trying to collect that data.

That's the simplest method of denying access to all these ad sites. But the drawback is your hosts file gets to be enormous.

The next easiest is ipfilter, which is sort of a bitch to set up but works in a similar manner.

If you run a Mackletosh, Little Snitch does this but has a pretty clean interface. Very much worth the $30. I am kinda sooprised there is nothing like that for Windows.

Yes I know, ipfilter. But that really is difficult for the average person to set up. And maintain, because these places change a lot.

Anyway, the idea is, if you don't let your browser connect to all this crap, then you save your own bandwidth and a lot of hair-pulling AND the creeps never get access to your browser so they can't send their annoying shit.
 
What did you just say? Speak in sentences that make sense.

*yawn* "make sense?" To whom?

Y'all might get "free medicare for all". Eventually. Free common sense is harder.

Google should find you examples you can grok. Their service comes with adverts, of course.

Until you DO grok it and block the worst-offenders among those, too:

loki2$ grep -c "google" /etc/hosts
48

/etc/hosts, BTW.. is an ignorant text file.

<127.0.0.1> <tab> <URI you want blocked>

..with no caret-characters.

As-in:

127.0.0.1 <tab> googleleadservice.com
127.0.0.1 <tab> fonts.googleapis.com

.....and.. one can "seed" that file with a free download of multiple thousands of known-bad-actors, even so.

A filtering proxy that dynamically adapts to NEW threats as well as old is easy, too. Here's one with sane defaults that don't REQUIRE any tweaking at all. Those can come later if/as/when the need arises, and are still not hard. Simple text, mostly.

Privoxy - Home Page

Not much work to any of that.

It JFW.

:)
 
Besides surveillance cameras, computers are listening to our posts, cell phone conversations, and even Alexa.

Better get used to it. Tape over your camera lens and microphone.

To throw off AI search for: home made chicken soup, C3 & C4, how to meditate, killing knives, sewing machines, hit-man handbooks, scented bath soap, vacation spots in Somalia.
 
As much as I enjoy Bill's verbage, it is hard to understand by the common man. The takeaway is that it is impossible to eliminate your digital signature. Everything you do results in a computer record somewhere. This phenomena is not new. The NSA has been doing this forever. Long before the advent of the Internet. Today however everybody plays and the Internet is the weapon of choice. Never forget that data is a weapon. Your task is to manage your signature. You do that by appearing to these search arguments as "Joe Average". It is important to note that you cannot stop your data being collected. It is unavoidable, but you can manage your exposure by using common sense. Do not become an exception. Exceptions are what these data searches look for.
 
I got an ad based on a text I sent someone, using Verizon's website. It was the only time I ever mentioned that I should have rented a wheelchair on a Disney World vacation as I severely aggravated a recent knee injury. I started getting ads on MSN for wheelchair rentals. I know it is illegal to record phone calls without someone's knowledge wonder if that law applies to texts? I have read the reason why the do not call list is useless is the fact the junk phone calling business is so profitable the perpetrators just see possible fines as the cost of doing business.
 
" Just throw a bunch of shit out there to hide your trail..."

ISP chaff/flares. Effective? Who knows.

Oddly I never get any ads on my computer or cell phone.
 
Perhaps I will feel differently when a battering ram comes through my front door at 3 AM, but it bothers me more that corporations are listening than the government. After all, it is a part of the government's job to keep track of what people are doing, especially those who are not citizens. It can be beneficial as well as threatening. Brentwood, MO had a fire chief whom everyone loved. At his retirement ceremony a neighbor told about the time they had a small house fire. This was an odd couple, a blind man and a midget wife. She heard him say on his radio, we have the man and woman, now I need two dogs and a cat. He knew it was a special risk household and made it his business to keep track of the occupants.

Hanoi Jane Fonda naturally had an extensive FBI file, which she was able to obtain with the freedom of information act. She said it was handy for things like looking up dates for events because they were all in there.

My Bulgarian pal, who came here with a green card, studied for the citizenship test, went through the ceremony, and is now a proper US citizen, once remarked that as an alien, it was entirely reasonable for the government to know where she was and what she was doing.

Things like Google trying to control the elections disturbs me much more, although that is nothing new. At one time the newspapers wielded tremendous influence. It may just be another facet of the famous telegram William Randolph Hearst sent to a reporter whom he had dispatched to Cuba to report on the Spanish American war. The reporter sent him a telegraph saying there was no war. Hearst replied "Send pictures. Will provide war." but they are getting a lot better at it. Much more disturbing is someone listening to my private conversations and tailoring responses to control my views.

Bill
 
The net, cell phones and instant connectivity brought us many things.
Privacy went out the window when we decided to use these things.
Even if all thermite says makes sense to you it's almost impossible to stay "private" if you use any on these devices.

Since these things are global by nature I'm not sure "legislation with teeth" in any country can control it.
Advertising in your newspaper is gone with all this targeted stuff now.
I did not mind lots of ads in newspaper or magazines, don't mind them on web pages.
With all the traffic out there it's sort of amazing how fast people can push ads. Imagine just how much data is being sorted and mined.

No one forces you to have these devices or use these services.
Perhaps all should come with a big warning tag:"Danger, the whole world can see you once you turn this on".
You hit the power on button and decided not to be private.
People sign up for facebook or gmail and complain about privacy. Really....you want to be connected to the world for free but you don't want to be seen or know?

I find the capability and speed of these services rather admirable in scope and speed just from the number of ones and zeros processed.
If your refrigerator hears that you are going to buy dog food ads may appear on your other devices.
How did my refrigerator give out my cell phone number? It did not, you did.

People come to me with there mind blown over how this can happen and should not be allowed. Some extremely upset.
Of note most of these people are older in years.
Bob
 
I got this scam e-mail sent to my business account saying they had hijacked my web cam and have pictures of me looking at nude teenage girls. They also claimed to have gotten in my e-mail and were going to send everyone in my address book the pictures unless I paid them $2,000 USD. I don't have a web cam and don't find women 1/3 of my age attractive. I don't know how anyone would fall for a scam like that. Also why they would ask for that much loot is beyond me. I would think that would get a lot of people that were even gullible enough to believe them not to pay.
 
I got this scam e-mail sent to my business account saying they had hijacked my web cam and have pictures of me looking at nude teenage girls. They also claimed to have gotten in my e-mail and were going to send everyone in my address book the pictures unless I paid them $2,000 USD.

I got a better deal than you. The moron was just asking for a little under $1000. "Don't get mad at me, I'm just a business man".
 








 
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