### Issue 2122 - Wednesday 17th July, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- YouTube subtitles slurped wholesale, without permission, for AI model training
- Firefox's new "privacy-preserving ad measurement" feature is enabled by default
- Squarespace's lazy transfer of domains from Google makes for easy domain takeovers
- Chrome and Safari are doing things to help make the internet suck too
- Another day of Amazon Prime Day deals (and some from eBay, JB & Scorptec)

## The News

### YouTube subtitles slurped wholesale, without permission, for AI model training

An investigation by Proof News and Wired has revealed that "subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce". They all used a source of data called The Pile, a now obsolete "825 GiB diverse, open source language modelling data set that consists of 22 smaller, high-quality datasets combined together", collated by a non-profit called EleutherAI and distributed freely, to train their various AI models. Of course, EleutherAI didn't even bother to send any of the YouTubers a simple "hey do you mind if we include your subtitles in our data set?" message, they just went ahead and did it. Fuck getting consent, right?

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### Firefox's new "privacy-preserving ad measurement" feature is enabled by default

Firefox 128 popped up last week and one of the new features is "privacy-preserving ad measurement", that Mozilla says is as "an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people". Sounds all well and good but Mozilla turned it on by default without telling anyone. You'd only have found out if you bothered to read the release log. Very shit move by Mozilla, but not surprising since they acquired an ad-tech company recently. Mozilla sadly seems incapable of finding an alternative way to fund their activities that isn't participating in the poison that is the advertising industrial complex.

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### Squarespace's lazy transfer of domains from Google makes for easy domain takeovers

You know how Google got bored of running a profitable normal business selling domain names and gave it to Squarespace? Well lots of people who had domains with Google still haven't bothered to set up a Squarespace account to manage their domain, so hackers are using an email address attached to the domain (easy to get via WHOIS) and making Squarespace accounts so they can take over management of the domain. Sounds bad, but the hacker needs access to the email account to verify the new account, yeah? Nope, Squarespace just asks you to enter an email, then make up a password and drops whoever does that first into the domain's control panel. Pathetic work Squarespace, zero stars.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Chrome and Safari are doing things to help make the internet suck too

I wrote about Mozilla's shenanigans above, but they aren't alone. Google got busted recently hard-coding into Chromium (the core of Chrome that's used by many other browsers, like Edge & Brave) a default extension that gives extra privileges to websites on google.com domains beyond what the user has allowed. It looks like it was used to monitor system processes (CPU, RAM, etc) on Google Hangouts/Meet, but who knows what else Google was slurping up? Over in WebKit land (aka Safari), they've announced Private Browsing 2.0, which on the surface sounds great as it automatically enables a bunch of privacy features but they couldn't resist themselves and "expanded Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) as a replacement for tracking parameters in URL to help developers understand the performance of their marketing campaigns even under Private Browsing". Fuck it all.

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## Bargains

Samsung ViewFinity S90PC 27" 5K monitor - $1395 at Scorptec Steam Deck OLED 512GB, Pixel 8A 128GB, Pixel Watch 2 - $962.99/$647.99/$269.99 from Mobileciti's eBay Store Massdrop X Sennheiser HD 6XX Headphones - $281 from Drop Samsung Galaxy S23 - $691 at JB Hi-Fi Elgato Facecam MK.2 Webcam - $172.32 Apple AirPods (3rd Generation) with Magsafe case - $249 Logitech MX Master 3 Wireless Mouse - $99 Apple iPad 10th Gen 64GB Wi-Fi Blue - $558 Corsair RM850e (2023) Fully Modular ATX 3.0 Power Supply - $135.20 Samsung Bar Plus 256GB USB 3.1 Flash Drive - $26.09 Nikon NIKKOR Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR Super-Telephoto Lens - $2218 KRK Rokit 5 G4 Studio Monitor (single) - $151 Terramaster F4-424 NAS (N95 CPU, 8GB RAM, 2x 2.5GbE, 4x 3.5" bays) - $607.99 GL.iNet GL-MT6000 (Flint 2) Wi-Fi 6 Router - $197.20 Starfield for PC - $39 UGREEN 100W USB C Gan II Charger - $64.90 Apple Watch Series 9 GPS 41mm Smartwatch Midnight - $534 WiiM Pro Plus AirPlay 2/Chromecast/Spotify Receiver - $263.20 Xbox Series X/S Wireless Controller - $63.95 Epson EcoTank ET-8500 printer - $718

## Image Of The Day

Samsung VR400G Transparent Blue VCR VHS Player (Retrospekt)

## The End

📻 Corridor - Jump Cut

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