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EFF "cover your tracks" browser privacy test
  • I get 17.45 on an iPad Pro. This is with all extensions disabled and my adblocker off. They say I am unique in the past 45 days. Looking through the info I don’t see how this works. Could it be that no one else has tested with an iPad Pro? It’s not like the hardware in this model is different from a similar one. You really just cannot meddle with it. It’s a fairly locked down ecosystem.

    If I took an iPad, reset it and ran the test. Then reset it and ran the test again, would both be unique?

  • How did he know?
  • TIL about another way of voting—does it have an official name. My gut reaction is that while multiple votes would usually result in the same thing as rank choice votes, there is less preference information in your method. I suspect that it might end up electing less politically extreme candidates than ranked choice voting, but I feel like I could be wrong about that.

    I do like the simplicity of your multiple votes method. I think it is easy to explain to people who maybe are off-put by ranked voting or other slightly more complex ways.

    I think I would prefer ranked, but I would take pretty much anything to improve our system.

  • Number of email accounts for financials
  • If you have an easy way to make emails on the fly like Apple’s hide my email feature then it really isn’t an issue to setup accounts with unique email addresses. Some sites don’t allow throw away emails from some providers, but I’ve never had that issue with Apples version since a ban on icloud.com emails would eliminate too many customers.

  • How do passkeys work across devices?
  • Depending on the site, you can use one device to login to another without installing additional software. For instance, if you have an iPhone with a passkey for microsoft.com stored on it, you can login to Microsoft.com using the iPhone.

    Here is a webpage that has some screenshots to show you what I mean. You can probably google some other examples.

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/05/02/microsoft-finally-lets-users-sign-into-accounts-with-passkeys

    It is possible to sync passkeys across devices but at this point is mainly within a single ecosystem.

  • Decided to test some browser fingerprinting this morning via the Cover Your Tracks tool by @eff. @brave, , and (no surprise) @torproject all performed (or appeard to perform) better than
  • How does this work exactly. I get it can see a fair amount of stuff on my browser, but if I close the page and then reopen the visit doesn’t go to 2 and I don’t see the signature I added. Does this mean it cannot fingerprint my setup?

    Edit: I also tried this on my fairly vanilla firefox installation with ublock origin and I see that the visit count will go up as I return to the page—so I suppose the fingerprinting is working on that setup. On my iPad with adguard each visit appears to be unique.

  • She will be here long after we're gone
  • Birds are basically today’s lizards and like most lizards can live a very long time and grow throughout their lives. When you think about how big alligators can get in a similar amount of time, it isn’t surprising that chickens can also.

  • Microsoft is silently installing Copilot onto Windows Server 2022
  • I have Server 2022 with a GUI installed on my laptop because it lets me use all the server features, play Windows games that use DRM and not spend time messing around with getting linux to run on a laptop. I have Linux on the laptop, but running inside VMs.

    I still don’t want copilot installed. I can confirm it is installed on my Windows Server 2022 laptop. I don’t see any entry points on the desktop or start menu. I haven’t checked Edge yet.

    I wonder if copilot is released to all update channels or if it is only on a subset?

  • Microsoft is silently installing Copilot onto Windows Server 2022
  • I don’t even see a link. Though I guess I should look inside Microsoft Edge.

    Edit: I cannot find anyway to get to it in either the desktop or Edge. I do not have a signed in Microsoft account on this machine, so that may be why I don’t see it. I’m not willing to sign in to see.

  • But how would they be able to live on that?
  • I have a house. I say have because while I have the title to the house, the bank has a lien that basically means they own it. Like a stock, my house increases in value. The government in my state then taxes me on the value of the house. Taxing me on unrealized gains in the house (I have not sold it) is like taxing a rich person on the unrealized gains of stock (that they have not sold).

    It is possible to come up with ways to tax stock. It will be imperfect like all tax systems are. It will be better than what we have now.

  • Here's why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned by capitalism
  • I wasn’t disputing your point—just throwing in a little extra info since I literally had that table open in a different tab (it’s April in America). I honestly doubt changing those rates would impact things much though. I think we need an asset tax (like the one that exists in most states for houses and that we call property tax) that impacts stocks. Probably a massive change in estate taxes too.

  • Here's why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned by capitalism
  • Federal Tax Rates 2024 Tax Rate | For Single Filers

    10%      $0 to $11,600        
    12%      $11,600 to $47,150
    22%      $47,150 to $100,525
    24%      $100,525 to $191,950 
    32%      $191,950 to $243,725
    35%      $243,725 to $609,350
    37%      $609,350 or more
    

    Plus state/local taxes on top of that.

  • Academics reckon Apple's default apps have privacy pitfalls
  • Surprisingly, I thought the article was a reasonable summary of the actual paper. I think some people might think this was a poke at privacy on Apple, but it really focused on how hard it is to create accessible settings despite the enormous number of options.

    I have found that navigating the menus in Apple iOS is quite a bit easier than on my Android devices. Mac seems more difficult as the settings tend to be inside the individual apps and don’t surface as well through the search.

    The paper hammered home the point that Siri configurations were particularly hard, but they also mention that Siri data is end-to-end encrypted. I thought all those points were fair.

    I do believe settings need to be improved, but I have little faith they will ever be useful for 99% of users who will simply never change anything from the default. At this point I believe any meaningful improvements for the majority of users will come from useful defaults that include E2E encryption on basically all user data. I feel Apple is coming close with iCloud Advanced Data Protection that was introduced last year, but that needs to become a default. Maybe it cannot though—too many users will lose all their data and then the trade off of security to convenience will not be worthwhile.

  • 5G slices are a net neutrality loophole, critics argue
  • I don’t think a big business should have an advantage over a small business that cannot afford that technology while using public airwaves. A better solution imo would be to prioritize all very low-bandwidth traffic.

  • The World’s E-Waste Has Reached a Crisis Point
  • 109 devices per capita? I just walked through the house looking at what my partner and I have that plugs in. We don’t have 109 together. And it isn’t like I we don’t have stuff. Mesh wifi routers, camping gear. Heck we even have a refrigerator. What do people collect?

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    panicnow @lemmy.world
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