We will have the next SacLUG meeting on Wednesday at the Natomas Bel
Aire market
https://www.raleys.com/store/447
6-8pm
Diego Martinez will present Clojure, episode 2. More details will come
on the SacLUG website. I believe Diego will summarize his notes form the
previsous meeting as well. Stay tuned for updates.
https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/march-2025.html
Brian
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
Don't forget the next SacLUG meeting at the Bel Aire market on Arden!
https://www.saclug.org/articles/2024/february-2025.html
Diego will talk about Clojure! I am looking forward to it!
Meeting starts at 6pm.
Brian
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
I know that there are a lot of ways to have your online activity tracked. And, I thought I understood many or most of them.
But, I tried out Gemini with the request, "write a two page article on Stoicism." The results were interesting and pretty good and give me an idea of what Gemini can do.
A week, or less later, yesterday, I get an email from Facebook suggesting that I join the "Daily Stoicism" group.
WTF. I never use Facebook and basically ignore their reminders on how many notifications or messages I have.
AFAIK, there is no legal way Facebook should know what I am doing with Google, unless Google is providing them the information on a back channel.
Am I missing something? Everything I know suggest that I would have had to visit a Facebook site sometime between my Gemini request and my receipt of an email from Facebook. Or possibly have visited a Facebook site before my Gemini request and not have directly entered a URL or used a bookmark in the interim. AFAIK, those things didn't happen.
OK. They have a cookie. I'm not at their site, they can't read it. They can't read other sites cookies either. That's the spec.
I have to go to their site or use an associated site, to pick up the pixel. I didn't do that.
There is no magic.:)
Regardless of all that tracking, how would they know my query/request?
To me, the only reasonable answer is that Google and Facebook share info behind the scenes, i.e. directly.
As I understand it, a tracking pixel works because it is on the page you visit. It comes from, .let's say, Facebook's server, and they know the page that requested it. And they can get the info in the request header. To know who you are, whoever wrote the page has to have known who you are and encoded that in the pixlel somehow, maybe through it's name, or some other attribute.
I haven't really been following a lot of the changes that have been made to store more information in caches on browsers. I'm wondering if there is something going on there. I really don't like the fact that browsers have taken this direction.
Perhaps I need to look at those specs and see what is going on.
On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 09:10:47PM -0800, Diego R. Martinez wrote:
> Facebook tends to have cookies in your browser and advertising pixels that
> basically track everything you do.
>
> And the thing about it is that, once you're in their system, you will get
> tracked for life. So that probably explains that...
>
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 8:56 PM <saclug(a)garymcglinn.com> wrote:
>
> > I know that there are a lot of ways to have your online activity tracked.
> > And, I thought I understood many or most of them.
> >
> > But, I tried out Gemini with the request, "write a two page article on
> > Stoicism." The results were interesting and pretty good and give me an
> > idea of what Gemini can do.
> >
> > A week, or less later, yesterday, I get an email from Facebook suggesting
> > that I join the "Daily Stoicism" group.
> >
> > WTF. I never use Facebook and basically ignore their reminders on how many
> > notifications or messages I have.
> >
> > AFAIK, there is no legal way Facebook should know what I am doing with
> > Google, unless Google is providing them the information on a back channel.
> >
> > Am I missing something? Everything I know suggest that I would have had
> > to visit a Facebook site sometime between my Gemini request and my receipt
> > of an email from Facebook. Or possibly have visited a Facebook site before
> > my Gemini request and not have directly entered a URL or used a bookmark in
> > the interim. AFAIK, those things didn't happen.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Lug-nuts mailing list -- lug-nuts(a)bigbrie.com
> > To unsubscribe send an email to lug-nuts-leave(a)bigbrie.com
> >
