Nearly 20 years ago, I was in a computer programming class surrounded by clunky towers and desktops.

Suddenly, a loud popping, then one of the machines starts belching smoke like a budget fog machine. The kid using it is calmly moved to another station while the prof investigates.

Fifteen minutes later - pop. Smoke again.

Turns out the kid was jamming a paperclip into the power supply like he was playing Operation: Arson Edition.

That was his last day.

On the bright side, computers are a lot cheaper now - and kids are still dumb. So, maybe progress?

Only the bots have rights

As you say, even with Internet connection, LLMs only infer. The software you run it on (or online) is a different story, and it’s literally already the case with everything else for decades (although it is getting worse).

We weren’t upset enough when Google started scraping everyone’s emails, or how Meta/Amazon/Google/Microsoft/ByteDance track all your Internet activity right now via browser fingerprinting.

This is literally the plot to Trillion Game.

Can barely comment on this stuff anymore because of the literal horror being inflicted

I’m glad I read to the end; your comment got me laughing and checking my life insurance

Thanks - good notes

Great note - thanks for the contribution.

E: I noticed a couple mistakes. Lemme know if you spot others and I can edit (at time of this writing anyways)

Privacy focused browsers can help (but don’t fully resolve). Not to redo the work of others, copy/pasta:

What makes fingerprinting a threat to online privacy? It is pretty simple. First, there is no need to ask for permissions to collect all this information. Any script running in your browser can silently build a fingerprint of your device without you even knowing about it. Second, if one attribute of your browser fingerprint is unique or if the combination of several attributes is unique, your device can be identified and tracked online. In that case, no need for a cookie with an ID in it, the fingerprint is enough.

A couple of useful articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint

https://blog.torproject.org/browser-fingerprinting-introduction-and-challenges-ahead/ (Excerpt above)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2022/3363335

There’s also a number of interviews with white and red hat hackers who delve quite deeply into the subject and how they’ve used this telemetry to go after black hats (mainly to emphasize that even with some degree of sophistication this can be difficult to evade, especially when compounded with other methods and telemetry already modelled against your identity).

Frankly already a moot point - your browser fingerprints are already uniquely identifying (even before IP, cookies, and backend analytics). Realistically, tho, just more info for them to sell, leak and then eventually pay $0.25 per person in Google Play credit in the class action settlement.