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donaltroddyn

544 karma · joined February 21, 2016

https://www.obscurity.ie

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/troddyn; my proof: https://keybase.io/troddyn/sigs/YVbOLcnCObGGhqryxJKcyPEvOfu88jczttr2R-J7zhk ]

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donaltroddyn··on Kill The Cookie Banner
> I suspect they are, and the choice of leaving things misconfigured is deliberate.

That honestly doesn't fit our data or my experience. In our scanning, about 60% of the misconfigured sites had a CMP with blocking active but one or two tags bypassing consent controls

Generally those misconfigurations aren't valuable to the business. We don't see for example lots of ad targeting and conversion tracking firing without consent on an otherwise compliant site.

What we do see is things like sites with CMPs generally working, but one or two analytics events tags firing because consent wasn't properly added to a trigger, or embedded Youtube cookies set without consent, or unexpected data from a URL or query param being accidentally ingested by tracking, or devs adding performance monitoring or observability tools to applications without realising the compliance implications

There's not much business logic in paying for a CMP, blocking your own ad stack, but then letting three analytics events pass through

> FWIW, this was a problem long before LLMs were a thing, and it didn't get worse with LLMs.

This isn't supported by our experience. In the last 18 months, we've seen a big increase in ungated tracking that we catch in CI (albeit with overall much higher velocity in general). LLMs will happily add non-compliant tracking to sites, often following defaults that might be acceptable in the US but not EU. If you push back, they'll also happily implement compliant tracking, but it's definitely not the natural default you can rely on

But your comment left me curious, so I just ran an experiment via Codex -p (gpt-5.6-sol) and Opus 5 via Bedrock

Codex returned the vendor quickstart on 5 of 5 neutral prompts. It gated properly when told the company is Irish, with full Consent Mode v2 defaults denied, GA4 only mounting after consent, with a reject button

So models can produce compliant/non-compliant code based on the context you give them, which reflects what we've seen in industry

Our business is giving devs and increasingly LLMs efficient tests to check the tracking they add is as expected for the EU and then providing signed evidence packs that prove that behaviour at a given time

donaltroddyn··on Kill The Cookie Banner
I think you're right that many (most?) CMPs are broken, though usually not deliberately. Most try to gate analytics and ad tracking on consent, just often misconfigured. The common exception is companies that deliberately hide Reject All, which is not complaint

My company scanned 209 European regulated sites in June, and roughly 7 in 10 had tracking that wasn't correctly gated by consent. It's rarely indifference, though. DPOs in the EU hold too much weight for that. It's usually a tag added that was never wired into the CMP or something added by a dev or LLM without going through proper review

Full disclosure: I run https://consentmark.com, which measures what tags actually fire under each consent state to create evidence packs companies can show regulators

donaltroddyn··on An open-source stethoscope that costs between $2.5 and $5 to produce
They can become a lot more expensive than $100, but the difference between a Littman Cardiology and the $15 EMT student stethoscope is night and day.

> Currently, the stethoscope resulting from this project functions as well as the market gold standard, the Littmann Cardiology III

If this is true, it's a major achievement.

donaltroddyn··on MODNet: Is a Green Screen Necessary for Real-Time Human Matting?
Part of it is that webcams are nearly impossible to buy since the pandemic arose, but apart from that, webcam image quality is terrible - even expensive webcams in the price range of ~100's of Euro.

A recent iPhone will wipe the floor with any webcam I've come across, short of an SLR or mirrorless camera.

donaltroddyn··on Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
It also is in Ireland, but there are valid reasons, such as as replacing an ECU or dash cluster.

Unless auto manufacturers are required to fit much more secure odometers, I can't see them in their current incarnation used as the basis for a tax.

donaltroddyn··on Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
I was being slightly facetious in referencing tyre size, although people regularly have to adjust speedo/odometers by 10% or more when fitting large tyres on off-roaders.

Odometers can have their values changed at will, at least in ICE vehicles, often for valid reasons.

donaltroddyn··on Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
I don't think Odometers are reliable enough, especially as the basis for a tax. You'd certainly see an increase in average tyre size!
donaltroddyn··on Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
How do you track the number of Kms driven? Is it possible to do so while maintaining the privacy of individuals?
donaltroddyn··on The first open-source ventilator tested on human patients
Only five US States don't have Sales Tax, and most counties and cities have their own, too.
donaltroddyn··on Pimp My Microwave
Similarly, in Ireland where we run 230VAC single phase, three phase 400VAC allows up to 22kW to be delivered, which is about to become extremely useful as we migrate to electric transportation.

Also, on safety, I don't know the statistics, but subjectively, electricity feels much more dangerous in the US because of the plug and socket design.

donaltroddyn··on Pimp My Microwave
And more safely, as there is no possibility of superheating the water.
donaltroddyn··on British Airways Flight 5390
And the famine was the big hunger (an Gorta Mór).
donaltroddyn··on British Airways Flight 5390
Interesting. In Ireland, they're referred to as RTCs (collisions), although still referred to as accidents in law. Never come across RTI before.
donaltroddyn··on The Most Surveilled Cities in the World
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donaltroddyn··on The Most Surveilled Cities in the World
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donaltroddyn··on Simple Opt Out – Links to opt out of data sharing by companies
The GDPR does not allow the processing of personal data at all without out a legal basis, and the prevention of unlawful data processing does not require that you submit any identifying details at all!

A company may verify the identify of a person making a deletion request for data processed under a valid legal basis, which seems unlikely to be the case here.

donaltroddyn··on I sold my side-project for $30k
The OP is the founder of BetaList.
donaltroddyn··on An Update on MDN Web Docs
Have you found a way to donate? All the links on that page are dead for me.
donaltroddyn··on USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
> I just think the above argument was made from a fundamental misunderstanding of blockchain technology.

Which misunderstanding of blockchains/merkle trees do you believe has caused the argument above to be incorrect?

The system as described in the patent provides no protection that I can see against voter coercion, and in some embodiments, allows a voter to verify that their vote has been counted as cast, which is significantly more ripe for abuse than in-person or even postal voting.

I did read your other comments in this thread, but it seems to me that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of blockchain technology and the problems that it can solve. Your proposed right-to-vote token solution is worse in every way than paper ballots cast in-person at polling stations with private areas, counted by hand in publicly observable count centres.

donaltroddyn··on USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
It's certainly not a ridiculous argument. Anonymity is a cornerstone of fair voting systems, and any system that allows votes to be deanonymised increases the risk of coercion.

The same type of risk applies to postal voting, although with less severity, as with postal voting there is only one opportunity to check the coerced vote. Blockchain based votes can be checked after the fact.

Still, for this reason, postal voting is rare, and most countries that allow it do so only for citizens living abroad or who cannot travel to a polling station die to injury or illness.

Countries like the UK and Australia that allow any eligible voter to do so by mail are rare.

donaltroddyn··on A new design ship in the Philippines is partly powered by wave energy
Just a note: at sea, when the ratio of wave height to wave length exceeds 0.17, the wave will break, so a 1m by 1m is impossibly steep.
donaltroddyn··on Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation
Thanks for working on this.
donaltroddyn··on Reasonably priced color e-ink display
The 7-colour version doesn't support partial refresh and has a 15s refresh time (~0.067Hz refresh rate), so you'd want to be a really confident touch typist.
donaltroddyn··on Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation
It also includes the DPIA, which in itself can be an expensive process. There was a lot of concern/press in Ireland pre-release about the privacy implications of the app. It's hot on the heels of a "mandatory but not compulsory" national ID card fiasco that was determined to be unlawful by the privacy regulator last year: https://www.thejournal.ie/psc-no-legal-basis-4766822-Aug2019...
donaltroddyn··on Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation
It is PR - maybe I should have linked to the HSE's press release: https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/media/pressrel/covid-tr...

The app has been open sourced by the Irish Government, not Nearform who were the developers. The copyright is owned by the HSE (the Irish public health authority).

The app being open source does benefit Nearform, though, as they can sell their services customising the app for other governments.

donaltroddyn··on Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation
I wasn't sure whether to remove that as a gratuitous adjective. Even without that claim, it's an interesting development, especially as the app cost only €850k.

In contrast, our nearest neighbour scrapped their app last month after spending over £11MM (~€12MM) and are now rebuilding on the Apple/Google API: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53095336

The code is already up on GitHub: https://github.com/HSEIreland

donaltroddyn··on Boeing lands $1.2B deal for eight F-15EX fighter jets
> F-22s aren't being manufactured anymore and would far too expensive for the National Guard units these are going to

The 149th and 199th Fighter Squadrons are ANG and fly the F-22A.

donaltroddyn··on [dead]
With JS enabled, there's a banner at the top of the page that links to https://www.xrebellion.nyc/news/we-stand-in-solidarity , so I don't think they're trying to hide their identity.
donaltroddyn··on Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?
I don't think it's your wording that's confusing. You are contradicting the AMP documentation.

AMP's documentation seems to indicate that the LTS is stable only for one month (new features released via the same URL each month), and so is not compatible with SRI (see https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...)

You can specify a version (ie, https://cdn.ampproject.org/rtv/somenum/v0.js), but the AMP validator complains about that.

donaltroddyn··on Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?
For most JS served by CDN, you can (and should) use Subresource Integrity to verify the content. At least the last time I was involved in an AMP project, Google considered AMP to be an "evergreen" project and did not allow publishers to lock in to a specific version.
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