aki

“Indian staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft entered Mars’s orbit.

On November 5, 2013, a rocket launched toward Mars. It was India’s first interplanetary mission, Mangalyaan, and a terrific gamble. Only 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by major space organizations—NASA, Russia’s, Japan’s, or China’s—had ever been a success. No space organization had succeeded on its first attempt. What’s more, India’s space organization, ISRO, had very little funding: while NASA’s Mars probe, Maven, cost $651 million, the budget for this mission was $74 million. 

This was not the only success of the mission. An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space.”

[Since the dawn of time, human beings have asked some fundamental questions: who are we? why are we here? is there life after death? Unable to answer any of these, in this paper we will consider cohomology classes on a complex projective manifold that have a property analogous to the Hard-Lefschetz Theorem and Hodge-Riemann bilinear relations.]

THOU ART LISTENING TO

*fireball explosion*

102.3

*bubbling cauldron*

REAL WIZARDS FM

*shimmering mana crystal*

WHERE WE PLAYETH NOTHING BUT CHANTS, CHANTS, AND MORE CHANTS

*wololo*

THIS ART NOT THINE ELDER MATRIARCH'S STATION

don't use any of these browsers, they're also chrome

Here are my favorite firefox plugins for security/anti-tracking/anti-ad that I recommend you get

Adblockers (and most tracking blockers) work by comparing the resources your browser is asked to fetch against a large list of ad and tracking domains. They block all the resources they think are related to ads or tracking. That’s great, but it’s not perfect, and there’s a continual arms race between advertisers and list creators to evade or subvert these rules (e.g. Google's Web Bundles).

The key here is that every extension has their own set of rules which all block different domains. These unique rules can be used by a smart adversary to determine which adblocker you are using. By loading a bunch of resources and seeing which ones get blocked, it’s easy to see which tool is doing the blocking. The problem with using a bunch of tools is that most people don’t, so when you do, you stand out.

Let’s say that 5 million people use uBlock Origin. Already you've reducing the number of people you could be from over a billion to less than a percent of that. How many of those 5 million use Ghostery too? Probably less than a fourth of them. How many of that group also use TrackMeNot? AdNauseam? Adblocker ultimate? It only takes a few rare behaviors to make you uniquely identifiable.

And there are a couple of specific issues with specific tools:

Ghostery sells your data.

AdNauseam is mostly theater and doesn't do much of anything, especially not when other extensions are getting in its way.

HTTPS everywhere isn't needed, it's default behavior in Firefox now.

Facebook Container is also now built in to Firefox. Just turn on the Containers functionality.

Stop just installing things. More is not better. Here's the list I use:

UBlock Origin (by far the best general-purpose adblocker)

Privacy Badger (blocks tracking stuff)

That's all you need. There are a few more tools that don't do anything companies can notice, but do make the browsing experience better:

ClearURLs (removes referral links client-side, making it harder to understand who is sharing what with who)

Unpaywall (Finds preprint or open access versions of papers)

SponsorBlock (makes YouTube bearable)

Using DuckDuckGo or Searx (this is an obvious one)

In addition to all this, you should respect the default Firefox behaviors of blocking non-HTTPS requests and not allowing third-party cookies. Add containers for accounts you may need with all the major adtech companies. I have Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Reddit containers, as well as one for work which is signed in to all my company accounts. They're fantastic.

If you want to understand more about browser fingerprinting, Cover Your Tracks is a really cool tool from the EFF. It tests your browser to see if it can be uniquely identified. You'll probably find that no matter what you do, your browser sends enough identifying information to be fingerprinted. This is the case even for a brand-new, vanilla browser install, mostly due to canvas fingerprinting. There isn't much you can do about this short of using Tor (and Tor itself is identifiable as Tor, which causes other issues) or other tools/techniques that make your user experience worse.

If you use the modern web, you are being tracked. It's a fact of life.

The best way to avoid giving up your data isn't to install extensions. Those can only give you a false sense of security, and security theater is worse than insecurity. The best way to avoid being tracked on the web is to be on the right side of the web. No amount of blocking helps when the websites you visit and the browsers you use are cooperating to track you. Find the websites that aren't. Browse Mastodon or another ActivityPub network. Put your blog or portfolio or resume on your own domain. Check out neocities. Self-host Nextcloud on an old laptop and invite all your friends to use it. Install Firefox and Linux and pirate all your media. Hack your shit, hardware and software, just because you fucking can. Take charge of your browsing and you will take charge of your data.

Always remember that the web is what it is because of open standards and free information. We own the web. Not Google or Facebook or the feds. We built it, programmers and nerds and posters, weirdos, friends from far away and you. People make the content, the product we consume. Own what you consume. Instagram, Reddit, and Tumblr are package delivery services which control the flow of information. They're trying to convince you that means it's theirs. It's not. Anyone can do anything on the internet, but we have to fight to keep it that way. Being a digital citizen is just like being any other kind of citizen: you have to participate or you will lose the right to.

He was a punk she did ballet: ❌

On my old server, there was a character named ßillyßadass.

This never failed to make me laugh, because that letter is not pronounced like B. It is a sharp S. 

Д as an aesthetic A? Дon’t be a дumbass.

И as an aesthetic N? don’t be sillи.

П as another aesthetic N? stoп it.

У as an aesthetic Y? ty bad.

Ш or Щ as an aesthetic W? nope. it’s “sh” and “shch”!

Я as an aesthetic R? surprise! it’s “ya”.