I love how Americans describe Canada as socialistic (intended as an insult) and yet call for the same thing when big corporations do what it is they are naturally inclined to do. Waiting for a corporation to screw you over for money is like waiting for the tide. It's what the system naturally encourages. Maybe this needs to be a larger discussion on how to hybridize capitalism into incentivized socialism.

You will never know. The reply and the references, or their tendency, will be paid for by some organization, including by a large foundation, but you will never be able to tell.

Perplexity is all right if you want to ask it something of a purely technical nature, where no-one has anything to gain or lose by the answer. Say, for instance, that you are trying to answer some technical question about the best way to code something in Python. Or how to sharpen a serrated paring knife. or set up a block plane. That will be fine.

Ask about the merits and controversy over puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, though. Or which glues are best for a given application. Or whether a given weedkiller is safe to use, and what its best used for. You'll get an answer and a list of references. But who funded it? You will never know that.

Its as much trouble, probably more, to try and figure out if the answer its given is biased in some way, as it was to do the research yourself without it.

That's what I thought. Vaguish question. Claim ignorance in your reply and then disappear. Tactics on how to discredit without actually answering to the issue. Do you consult for the Republicans?

If I misunderstood your question, which I may have (hence the initial question mark), then how about you explain the question. What aspect of "routing to mobile devices across external networks" is relevant to or causes inherent tracking in a context which I didn't address?

Routing.... as in network routing? I don't much care about tracking network routing since IP tracking is more and more becoming yesterday's news. There is a already a lot of (old but still valid) common-carrier legislation on the books protecting your phone location data obtained from what cell tower you are on from being sold or used. Which is why Google et al are making it harder and harder to do anything on any app without signing away your phone's satellite location data permissions - they need it. As far as mobile device IP, most phones have an IP address that doesn't move when you cross cell towers, and are part of IP pools which geo-locate to central locations which are often very far from you. And VPNs are becoming more ubiquitous, even on mobile devices. It is, however, interesting to see Google fighting the trend and trying and punish VPN users (by making you jump through repeated CAPTCHA hoops every time it detects you using their network through a VPN), which is annoying and something I would also be in favour of spanking them for through legislation.

What people can do today:
- VPN on your phone to protect your network traffic and usage from tracking. Wireguard is your friend.
- Put any app which doesn't absolutely need it into a firewall jail. Unfortunately, current Android firewall apps don't work if you are on a VPN (because it uses a pseudo-VPN to route the traffic from untrusted apps to oblivion), but there are projects in the works to marry Wireguard with firewall. Stay tuned.
- Refuse all geolocation permissions for apps you don't know and absolutely trust, and refuse to use apps which want to brow-beat you into it.
- Use browsers that are resistant to fingerprinting
- Never use Google or Apple anything, and de-Google your phone as much as possible (you can't de-Apple a phone).
- Consider a fully de-Googled phone (e/OS slash Murena)

Legislation we need:
- Expand common-carrier protections to include most if not all current "free" internet infrastructure. For example, email conversations should be absolutely protected from access without a warrant - they should be protected the same way a telephone conversation is.
- Prohibit any terms in any license agreement that make users sign away certain privacies in exchange for services. You may not offer a free e-mail app which requires the user to sign away their right to e-mail privacy.
- Prohibit scraping geolocations from photos in social media posts, prohibit requiring you to give an app permission to access geo-location where it is not a well-defined use case (there are many "free" apps which don't require geolocation for their function which ask for it and make you sign away that data), and prohibit that data from being transmitted back to their servers when there is a use case. Prohibit online mapping technologies which can track you by which mapping tile your app downloads - require anonymization or map caching to at least the state or region level.

Absolutely not true. It is not remotely inherent in the technology, it's inherent in the way the technology is currently implemented. It should be no surprised that private interests have implemented it this way, since it gives them the ability to sell your location. The entire online/social media/freemail/goole experience is tailored around divesting you of your privacy, and even today it is completely possible and doable to deny them this.

Addressing your "It's not really avoidable" assertion, the technology isn't just possible, but easily possible to implement in a way that sends no locations outside the device. Apps like Osmand have a downloadable map infrastructure that would be easy to adopt as a subsystem in Android itself. Any time an app or web site wants to show your location, it could invoke this which would require no data outside your device. It wouldn't be hard at all to manage your maps, and wouldn't take up much space on your device.

For people today, you can use Osmand instead of Google Maps, say no every time a web site wants your location, use services like Open Street Map for web access, (which anonymizes all access), and even just kick Google out of your life. If you want, there are even Android alternatives like e/OS (Murena) which takes LineageOS (AOSP made workable) and further de-Googles it. It's not just for resistor-heads and nerd-fests any more, it's getting more and more traction and it's even quite possible to buy phones with it on it. I personally use a Fairphone FP5 running Murena and it is implemented in such a way that stuff just works. It has a Google Play Services replacement that lets 99.5% of programs run, even if you intercept or deny access to Google push. I even have the ability to easily, form the OS level, turn on and off location spoofing, in case there are any bad-player apps that I give location access to.

Don't just give up and roll over. Don't assume it's a necessary evil.

Here is where we 100% agree. But I would go a step further and impose penalties for even collecting it. I would even go another step further, and pass consumer protection laws that state that no free service can be operated where allowing the operator permission to collect, peruse, and/or share your data is a required component outside of the immediate context of that service. IE: If you offer an email service, they can't predicate it on you agreeing to give your location, and they can't look at your emails. If they offer a map service, they can't store your location, and they can't make you agree to let them as a condition of the service. If that means that we lose a lot of free stuff, so be it. I don't mind killing Google's current revenue paradigm.

We need something, because 14-year-olds don't care what they give away, and by the time they are 19 or 20 they are saying things like what you opened up with.

You sound pretty bitter yourself.

Not very palatable here either, is it? Or maybe I'm just an acquired taste that you just need to train yourself to like and after that you'll be hooked.

Nah. Bitter just sucks.

What do they mean "even" better? Beer tastes awful. There is a purpose to the taste "bitter" and making things taste good isn't it. More thousands of years of evolution than beer has existed for has made bitter the sense for things that poison you. That's why when you put a bitter berry in your mouth your first reaction is to spit it out.

Name me someone who thought beer was good on the first try and I'll show you someone with third degree burns on their tongue. It's so ubiquitous as to be a joke that you give beer to a kid and watch his face twist.

There is something intrinsically wrong with a drink that tastes so awful that bitter actually makes it better, and there is no amount of AI that can fix that.

They will catch up, and quite likely even excel. These are very smart, able people, led by a regime that is clear about what it wants. They will get there. This is just technology of a known sort which has to be first equalled and then surpassed. A country that could go from Mao's famine and the idiocy of the cultural revolution to space launches in a matter of decades? That could go from being almost totally rural with no or minimal manufacturing to being able to build stealth supersonic aircraft and ships to put them on, again in decades? They can and will do it.

There is another sort of thing that its a lot less clear they will succeed at. This is where the anarchy of the market and the personal freedom of the population allows innovation at a demand level. France, for instance, invented minitel, sponsored it at a state level, and it was a great success in its own terms. But it was a dead end. Whereas the Internet's main uses and attractions have zigged and zagged and along the way gone through many uses and applications which would certainly have been banned by the Chinese government.

China in the past had almost all the required ingredients to start the first Industrial Revolution - except for the political and social organization. Its not clear how much innovation of a fundamental sort a bureaucratic state can manage. The kind of innovation which changes the structure of society and displaces classes and occupations.

Anyway, we will find out, it seems, because they are going to have a complete IT and communications structure with 'Chinese characteristics', so we will see how that works, and whether they manage to come up with the next big thing ahead of the West. I am a little skeptical, but not totally, and we will see.

All they seem to have got is the UK Open Register, which is available to anyone who wants to buy it. You can opt out of this.

There is also the Full Register, which is not available to buy, and can only be used for electoral purposes. For instance a candidate wishes to do a mail shot. You cannot opt out of this.

But you can register to vote anonymously, if for safety reasons (for instance) your name should not appear on either register. In this case it will not.

They seem only to have got the Open Register, so its not clear why this is very serious. Maybe the intention revealed in the hacking is an indicator of something bad? Or maybe they got something more than the Open Register, but short of the Full Register?

https://www.gov.uk/electoral-r...

"....the ludicrous and thoroughly discredited theory that "Russian agents" distributed "Novichok" in a bungled assassination attempt in England...."

Out in force today!

"The UK had a Russian-backed Brexit campaign"

Evidence for that?

Am pretty unacquainted with current Chinese literature/fiction. Idle musing therefore, just wondering. Both of these works are by authors in sufficiently good odor to be able to remain and write in China. Both are quite explicit about events which seem to be banned from public discussion in general. So what is happening? Why are they permitted at all?

The Fat Years one can see one possibility why - the very long monologue at the end by the representative of the ruling committee comes eventually to the conclusion that the current authoritarian regime is the only possible way to run China in a way which works. The real flow of the book is to dismiss dissidence as both futile and rather childish. It essentially promotes the view that what there is now is the best China can do. Is this why its tolerated? Rather as Yevtushenko was tolerated by the Soviet Union - a lot less of a dissident in practice than the West generally assumed him to be from his words.

Though he did write one decent poem:

    How sharply our children will be ashamed
    taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
    remembering how in so strange a time
    common integrity could look like courage.

Is it also true of the Three Body Problem what may be true of the Fat Years?

I don't think Curry is a 'climate change denier' - though the meaning of the accusation is admittedly not completely clear and definite. It presumably means something like one who persists in not accepting a statement or theory despite having been confronted with overwhelming evidence in its favor, and despite not being able to give any reason for refusing to accept it. She is certainly not that.

She's skeptical of some of the mainstream views about global warming, and more attentive to uncertainty when it comes to forecasts and policies than many of the committed activists would like. But she is entirely reason and evidence based in her approach, and her work with Nic Lewis on climate sensitivity is worth reading. As is her recent book. You may agree or disagree with some or all of it, but its rational argument and worth considering if only to be clear why she is wrong.

As to the reference, yes, its six or nine months old. But it at least gets into specific mechanisms of how exactly some of this warming may have been driven. In that respect I find it much more illuminating than the typical Guardian article which just waves arms in air and recites 'climate change' about everything.

These events are not CAUSED by climate change, they ARE climate change. Or they may be, the jury is out on this one, it has not been going for long enough, nor are the proximate causes clear enough for us to be sure.

Go here:

https://judithcurry.com/2023/0...

A careful explanation of the mechanism. You may feel that the mechanism is caused by global warming. But at least this piece explains what is happening so that you can see what is causing it.

The mainstream reporting on this so far has by contrast been only a mixture of arm waving and wailing.