Most of the input devices that Apple sells on their website don't have multitouch, including 0 keyboards and only one of the mice. Many of the photos on the site for each of their non-iMac desktops include full setups that don't have a magic mouse or separate touch pad. The Mac mini and Mac Studio don't come with any input devices, and don't say anywhere that multitouch is recommended (closest is some language clearly marketing it as an up-sell on the Studio, "Take your creativity to the next level [with extra purchase]").
I suspect the more likely scenario is they don't actually care how accurate these nominal categorizations are. The information they're ultimately trying to extract is, given your history, how likely you are to click through a particular ad and engage in the way the advertiser wants (typically buying a product), and I would be surprised if the way they calculate that was human interpretable. In the Facebook incident where they were called out for intentionally targeting ads at young girls who were emotionally vulnerable, Facebook clarified that they were merely pointing out to customers that this data was available to Facebook, and that advertisers couldn't intentionally use it.[0] Of course, the result is the same, the culpability is just laundered through software, and nobody can prove it's happening. The winks and nudges from Facebook to its clients are all just marketing copy, they don't know whether these features are invisibly determined any more than we do. Similarly, your Google labels may be, to our eyes, entirely inaccurate, but the underlying data that populates them is going to be effective all the same.
There's a sort of mirror world of academic research happening, where on one side of the mirror, you have people building the tools to censor the internet (typically but not always in Asian venues), and on the other, the tools to circumvent that censorship (typically but not always in Western venues). I know far more people on the latter half of the equation, but have enough exposure to the other side of the mirror to know that most of them earnestly believe they're doing something good. They see massive megacorportaions pushing American interests as an unfair lever in a fight for national sovereignty, and what they do as simply leveling the playing field, and combating misinformation. While I would wholeheartedly agree that they are mistaken in their analysis (reifying systems for people, "The institution I'm supporting may sometimes do bad things, but what I do is supporting the good parts!") and should immediately stop, I wouldn't want to dehumanize them any more than I would someone who works for Palantir, or even Google, Amazon, etc.
It may even make those working there feel like a success of a human. For example, I work at a non faang company doing unsexy work. Although I disagree with Plantir's objectives, I would probably take a role there specifically so I can try to feel like I've succeeded. At present, I feel like a complete and utter failure, and this feeling is renewed literally every day.
I think it was Call of Duty 2 (when the franchise was still WW2-based) when they would show, in my recollection, an anti-war message including this one every time your character died. I think this was absent from later incarnations of the franchise.
And the quotes showed up longer, like 5 seconds, so you could read them in full. Later games would display the quote for 1-2 seconds, which often wouldn’t be enough time to process the full text
Cod 4, World at War, and MW2(?) also did this to my memory. At least one of them did for sure. Not always necessarily anti-war, but historical quotes related to war.
People reproducibly build Signal all the time. There's a bug right now that makes the play store version differ from the one you get by downloading off their website/build from source, but you can examine the differences to see they're minor.
Pick a decently up-to-date fork of Signal on GitHub and look at its Actions. You can also just do it yourself if you'd like, the process is effectively just doing a build in a docker container and comparing the result.
There is a dedicated reproducible builds action that verifies that it does match (currently failing because of the aforementioned bug). I'm not sure why you're still litigating this when, again, you can not only just go look at it, you can very much do it yourself.
Tracking pixels aren't for fingerprinting, they're just regular tracking. You can block them fairly easily (just block the 3rd party request to the known tracker). Fingerprinting is a lot more difficult to detect and prevent. Companies claiming they reserve the right to do it is a good reason to take precautions, but without insight into what is actually being done, that's hard to effectively do (without resorting to blocking all possible vectors, like Tor Browser).
There was an incident a little while back where some Tor Project anti-censorship infrastructure was run on the same site as a blog post about zip bombs.[0] One of the zip files got crawled by Google, and added to their list of malicious domains, which broke some pretty important parts of Tor's Snowflake tool. Took a couple weeks to get it sorted out.[1]
Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, Thunderbird is developed by MZLA. They're both subsidiaries of the same non-profit, but they don't share funds or employees, so it's not clear to me how this could "sap resources".
reply