- Lug-nuts - bigbrie.com

by saclug＠garymcglinn.com

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.

9 months, 3 weeks

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Re: Privacy

by Gary

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 > >

9 months, 3 weeks

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BRACE FOR IMPACT

by Linus Sphinx

2025 will be the year of Linux desktop, Happy Holidays.

10 months, 1 week

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Social meetup at Kupros Tuesday

by Brian E. Lavender

See everyone at Kupros on Tuesday 6:30pm! https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/january-2025.html Many thanks to Sen for nudging me to get the word out! 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

10 months, 3 weeks

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anybody here?

by Brian E. Lavender

I am at Kupros upstairs. I have a little tent sign with SacLUG. I have a feeling that this might be a slow night! Anybody coming to the social tonight? 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

11 months, 3 weeks

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standford study says 9.5% of research engineers do virtually nothing.

by Brian E. Lavender

Seen on Slashdot and posted Xitter. Stanford Research Reveals 9.5% of Software Engineers 'Do Virtually Nothing' https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/11/26/1346219/stanford-research-re… Seems like an interesting study. 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

1 year

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better top

by Brian E. Lavender

Someone said that there is a way better top these days. What is it? 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

1 year

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thank you to everyone who came

by Brian E. Lavender

We had an interesting meetup. Next meetup is in December. We talked Debian, purple air, putting IoT on its own network, code correctness using Spark/Ada, dotNet 9, and miscellaneous stuff. See everyone back in December. https://www.saclug.org/articles/2024/december-2024.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

1 year

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SacLUG social this coming Tuesday at Kupros

by Brian E. Lavender

We will have the next social this coming Tuesday! Kupros Craft House in Midtown Sacramento: 1217 21st Street Sacramento, CA 95811 6:30pm - 9:00pm 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

1 year

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dotNet 9 released

by Brian E. Lavender

Hey everyone, DotNet 9 was just released https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-9/ You can find the installation instructions for Fedora here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-fedora 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

1 year

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2025

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