The project involved selling the ministry an Artificial Intelligence Platform that uses reams of classified intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack. In an understatement several years ago, Karp admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” the morality of which even he himself occasionally questions. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’”
Mullvad Browser is one of 2 daily drivers. I spin up and down others, but I consistently bounce between Mullvad and Firefox where I’m always running multiple profiles. Wait. Wat?! Why would I make my life so annoying and tedious, you ask?
They’re all out to getcha. This is not a secret.
Explore browser fingerprinting for maximum rage inducement.
I prefer to keep aspects of my online life segmented, a separation of concerns. Some things are similar enough that I don’t mind the related sites understanding who I am and what I’m doing there. Dev work and all of it’s associated activity sits in one profile. Newspapers, magazines, library websites and such live in another. Each profile’s cookies, browser histories, fingerprint, etc. remain unknown to the others. For more discretion (within reason) I’ll hit sites via Mullvad where I’m regularly creating new identities, escalating to Tor on occasion … sensitive topics like health.
Juggling all of these browsers def ain’t easy. What if I’m on a page in Firefox but want to open the link in Mullvad? Well, you say, you copy the link, paste it into Mullvad and don’t look back. But if it’s something you rinse and repeat all day it becomes hellish. There is a better way. Didn’t find any existing solution, so I just rolled my own.
WTF is this noise?
OK. I’ve got the dueling browsers (minimum). And they don’t talk to each other. By installing Hammerspoon and writing a Lua script I’m able to do a Cmd+Shift+Click combo, and with that open the clicked Firefox link in Mullvad. Nice.
The video may be tough to follow, but at about 30s I clear the event viewer, you see that Cmd+Shift are pressed, then a click, then waves hands, link opens in Mullvad Browser.
A floaty banger, that one.
I’d rather not do this with an extension or use other simpler methods as doing so translates to a more unique fingerprint. So then comes the wrastlin: Grab the code. Use the code.
Here’s a high‑level overview of my script, ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua:
hs.eventtap to intercept left mouse down events.absoluteString).AXURL / AXValue on the elementAXLinkUIElements / AXLinkedUIElementsOK, but why Mullvad Browser?
Self-care. Get some.
While I’m already familiar, that Bruce Schneier share got me to take another look at the Ring doorbell relationship with law enforcement.
This time I caught the heartwarming mention, “Ring is ‘exploring a new integration with Axon that would enable livestreaming from Ring devices.’”
good lookin’ out
the incorporation of “BOLO” (“Be On the Look Out for”) alerts by companies on behalf of law enforcement has the potential to become — and may already be becoming — a powerful nationwide government surveillance dragnet.
Cute move Rite Aid:
In 2023 the FTC investigation found that “Rite Aid specifically instructed employees not to reveal Rite Aid’s use of facial recognition technology to consumers or the media.”
We know the technology makes false positives all the time, and that there’s typically no human in the loop.
If such sharing networks emerge — much as blacklists of “troublemakers” (i.e., labor organizers) were shared among companies in the 20th century — someone who is falsely accused might find themselves unjustly banned from a significant number of retail stores.
This article collects a lot of scattered details concerning the issue, so would be a decent jumping off point for your exploration.
Something I try to share with people is the need to test links before you click them. Not all links, but anything suspicious. For me that means anything I receive via email.
VirusTotal has been a tool/service I’ve been using for a long while. Their browser extension facilitates the scanning of suspicious links by situating the functionality into the context sensitive menu triggered by a right click.
Selecting that menu option triggers the VirusTotal URL scan page to open and initiates the scan of that link. Results of that scan are returned and from those you can decide for yourself if you trust what’s on the other side of that link.
May your clicks be merry and bright
luv luv luv me some Jim Campbell
Opening: This Saturday, January 24th, 5 – 7 PM @ the lovely bitforms gallery
One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work – to be ”worth” that many human souls.
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It was open-eyed class war.
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If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.
Written in 1984 👆 heh
You don’t have to trust Obscura—you just have to trust that not both Obscura and Mullvad are compromised.