651 karma · joined April 15, 2019
They look like:
- fsclp_pl_dp_12
- fsclp_pl_dp_11
with each link having a distinct number, counting down to 1.
It doesn't look like a typical referrer ID, so it is probably something that Amazon generates, although I don't know under what condition.
- scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2124872/us-government-admits-it-studies-ufos-so-about-those
- content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860871_1860876_1861006,00.html
- video.vice.com/en_us/show/motherboard-spaced-out
- video.vice.com/en_us/video/the-man-who-hunts-spy-satellites/559be69ea8feaf3c462823a0
- worldufoday.com/about-world-ufo-day/whatwherewhywhen/
- vice.com/en_us/article/z43ygx/some-of-the-very-best-alien-conspiracy-theories-world-ufo-day
- nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/los-angeles-fire-season-will-never-end.html
- doomsdayprep.com/shop/bear-grylls-sliding-saw/
- americansurvivalwholesale.com/
- rei.com/c/camping-tents
- basspro.com/shop/en/camping
Some of the sites I looked at do not even have any trackers on them.
Although it is the most important part of the data. Why are men increasingly chosing to end their lifes?
Could there be a relation between the growing dominance of anti-male 4. wave feminist viewpoints in society and propaganda in the media and this statistics?
Coincidentally the fourth wave feminism started exactly one year before the increase in suicides.
> Finally, yeah, first-party cookies... hard to counter. We're also working on it (is anyone else doing so?), but that will be a tough fight.
That sounds awesome. Ad-tech is a burden to society.
What's complicated with first-party cookies though? Didn't Apple for example just give them a limit of 7 days? I guess Apple just accepts that people have to log-in again after the 7 day period, but I haven't looked into the technical details about this feature.
Not only that, Safari also started to partition web cache in 2013, and it's still the only browser with such partitioning. [2] Without it, tracking doesnt even need cookies.
"If you only block cookies, you still have all the other storage and stateful things to worry about." - Safari ITP engineer John Wilander [3]
Also the spin of the article is slightly dishonest, simply turning off third-party cookies in Chrome achieves to negate most of the explicit criticism in the article. The author probably had the conclusion of the article in mind (setting up good Firefox against evil Chrome) before looking for supporting arguments.
It's a bit ironic. While mainstream media starts to discover the existence of third-party cookies, which had been a known issue for around 20 years, Big Tech tracking has already moved to first-party tracking, fingerpringing and cache tracking.
For example, Facebook switched to first-party cookie tracking in 2018. [4]
Everyone who wants to understand the dynamic needs to look into the relationship between Apple and ad tech, with Apple's recent counter-move being the addition of ITP 2.2. [5]
Since the release of ITP 2.1, even first-party cookies now are limited to 7 days, and all first-party cookies that are even potentially tracking cookies get deleted after already 1 day. [6]
Firefox doesn't play much of a role in this fight. In fact, Firefox never did anything pro-actively to make ad-tech sweat. The decision by Mozilla to block all third-party cookies in 2013 [7] was reverted in fear of Ad-Tech.
Mozilla is better at marketing than with the technology, and still hasn't enabled tracking-protection except for new users.
[1] https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/982631777574338561
[2] https://twitter.com/johnwilander/status/1126191449161158657
[3] https://twitter.com/johnwilander/status/1126208457214836736
[4] https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/the-facebook-pixel-will-...
[5] https://webkit.org/blog/8828/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
[6] https://webkit.org/blog/8613/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
[7] https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2013/02/25/firefox-gettin...
If one has critical personal data on a computer and use it to casually browse the web, one should probably rethink that approach and use different physical devices for different purposes.
Most of the projected population increase in Africa is based upon a small number of countries like Nigeria, where most of the people live on the countryside, and there never have been reliable census to accurately predict the future population.
The only thing we know is that Africans moving to cities stop having many children, and that the fertlity rate in the richer African areas is rapidly decreasing. In Northern and Southern Africa the fertlity rate is already below 2.5, approaching sub-replacement levels. [1]
Which means it is definitely possible that the entire world will be entering sub-replacement level in the coming decades.
Unfortunately the African coutries with a high-fertility projection haven an interest in lying about their numbers, because it means more NGO money and political influence. [2]
The country with the lowest fertility rate in the world is South Korea, which has a fertility rate of <1. [3] South-Korea is facing extinction. [4]
Additionally there are hints that China is lying about their population numbers as well. [5]
India, which is the most populated country in the world, has already fallen to sub-replacement levels in almost all counties, and stands at a fertility rate of 2.2, as of 2017. [6]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
[2] https://qz.com/africa/1221472/the-story-of-how-nigerias-cens...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/south-koreas-f...
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/south-koreans-could-be-extin...
[5] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/china-has-be...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_terri...
I have some experience with adtech, and I know a significant part of it is exploiting low-education low-income people to spend money with manipulative ads.
The people who actively exploit are the advertisers, and they use technology provided by ad-tech who make sure that the amount of money being extracted out of people is as large as possible.
The way to achieve this is to get as close as possible to users, which means breaking boundaries of what is basically a human right to privacy.
There's no one to blame, but the overall effect of the technology has some significant side-effects, which need to be curtailed, as those low-educated people don't know how they are being played.
The Threonate makes the magnesium available to the brain.
Other forms of magnesium are usually taken in the 400-800 mg range.
Guess this kind of cognitive dissonance happens when a company rises from $160 to $560 million in yearly revenue within 5 years, without having to report to anyone outside the company.
Now that the writing is on the wall for ad-tech revenue they aggressively try to shift the narrative about themselves, because the last thing they want is to be associated with the "evil google". Unfortunately, as long as they take more than a million dollars every day from them, these things are just lip service with not value.
I miss the old mozilla because it was such a great grass-roots movement but they should have never accepted the money from google.
It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk for political moves of "keeping users safe", which I don't really know what it means, but the image that comes to mind is that of pre-school children being protected by overly protective helicopter parents.
I have long thought that Mozilla should essentially dissolve the Foundation, as the Foundation under Baker is abusing the work of the corporation. Unfortunately the Foundation holds all the power, which explains why Mozilla is behaving so erratically.
The CEO is basically reporting to the Foundation, so the people who work for the corporation have a boss that is not acting independent, but in the interests of a shadowy group of people who don't even interact with the employees. Most of the people managing the Foundation get enourmous salaries, while some of them only appear on site a couple of times a year when it comes to voting.
And that also explains the move. If they had a great second product, it would stand for itself, no matter the name.
This move is a desperate attempt of saving a product that is becoming increasingly meaningless (the browser).
- Firefox Monitor is simply a copy of HIBP, so no innovation here. It's a nice-to-have, and maybe would have it's use case if it was directly implemented inside the browser.
- Firefox Lockwise doesn't have many use cases, and apparently also not many users. It is hard to know what kind of product it wants to be, or what kind of problem it wants to solve, as it is no competition for the more well known password management tools.
- Firefox Send offers a quick way to send some files. Not bad, but already offered by countless competitors.
So basically all three products are simply nice-to-have gimmicks, they are no stand-alone products and they certainly don't need a branding.
They all have in common that in the current state you can't make any money with them, and Mozilla doesn't monetize them.
What they do instead, is use each of the above services to get people to register for a Firefox Account, in an attempt to bring people into the "Firefox ecosystem".
And this brings us to the problem with Mozilla. They want to be part of the big players, but they are just a 1000 employee company.
They will never establish an ecosystem.
They will never profit off the email addresses they collect with Send, Lockwise, and Monitor.
They will not be profitable with Pocket.
Everything they do to save their brand from going under is, at the moment, a money-losing business.
Ironically the only product that is indeed at least a stand-alone product, namely Pocket, is not included in the re-branding.
> Cost per click on Google properties — which roughly measures the amount Alphabet charges advertisers for each ad served on its web sites — dropped 29 percent from last year and 9 percent from last quarter, which might be alarming investors concerned that Google’s pricing power for ads is eroding. [1]
Additionally, Firefox is losing users, around 50,000 - 100,000 per day. [2]
They now want to add all kinds of additional stuff in order to make money. For a browser this is a death sentence. A browser can not be more than a browser, and ad tiles are the only practical way of making money next to search engine deals. While a pro-version of Firefox is certainly an interesting idea which can be sold to a tech-savvy minority, it neither can diversify their revenue in a meaningful way, nor is clear yet whether Mozilla is going to offer a paid Firefox version, or simply tries to upsell a software bundle branded with their name.
Mozilla paid around 30 million to aquire Pocket (one of their supposed foundations for making money), but there isn't any data to show whether they are profitable with it. Given the low number of ads in Pocket, they probably aren't profitable. In 2017, according to their financial report, they only made 2,5 million with Pocket ads.
Opera is the only other major browser that has to survive without having a tech giant behind them. They do everything they can to make money with Opera. And it has boiled down to ads in the start page and licensing. There’s nothing more you can do.
Opera is surviving on three kind of deals: [3]
– search (ca 60%)
– ads in start page
– licensing deals on mobile phones
Licensing is off limits to mozilla because they have lost the mobile market.
So all that is left is ads on the start page. Its that simple. There’s also a lesson to learn for Mozilla from the time Opera abandoned Presto: [4]
> “Because of our switch to the Blink engine, our retention rate on desktop users is much better now. This is because most websites work in Opera since we’re using the same engine as Google. We think we’ve become more relevant after we moved over to the Blink platform, and more companies now start to work with us,” Boilesen said.
> “We’ve got twice as many developers on the desktop browser now than we had with Presto, because all [our] resources went into maintaining Presto. The only error we made with Presto was that we kept it too long. Our change to Blink was because we wanted to get on the offensive with regards to innovation, we used too many resources to keep Presto competitive."
There are only two ways. You either stay innovative and keep up with the times, or you downsize and develop for a small niche group. Mozilla is doing neither.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/alphabet-earnings-q4-2018.ht...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/browser-maker-opera-has-fi...
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/show-me-the-money-how-opera-st...
> Cost per click on Google properties — which roughly measures the amount Alphabet charges advertisers for each ad served on its web sites — dropped 29 percent from last year and 9 percent from last quarter, which might be alarming investors concerned that Google’s pricing power for ads is eroding. [1]
Additionally, Firefox is losing users, around 50,000 - 100,000 per day. [2]
They now want to add all kinds of additional stuff in order to make money. For a browser this is a death sentence. A browser can not be more than a browser, and ad tiles are the only practical way of making money next to search engine deals. While a pro-version of Firefox is certainly an interesting idea which can be sold to a tech-savvy minority, it neither can diversify their revenue in a meaningful way, nor is clear yet whether Mozilla is going to offer a paid Firefox version, or simply tries to upsell a software bundle branded with their name.
Mozilla paid around 30 million to aquire Pocket (one of their supposed foundations for making money), but there isn't any data to show whether they are profitable with it. Given the low number of ads in Pocket, they probably aren't profitable. In 2017, according to their financial report, they only made 2,5 million with Pocket ads.
Opera is the only other major browser that has to survive without having a tech giant behind them. They do everything they can to make money with Opera. And it has boiled down to ads in the start page and licensing. There’s nothing more you can do.
Opera is surviving on three kind of deals: [3]
– search (ca 60%)
– ads in start page
– licensing deals on mobile phones
Licensing is off limits to mozilla because they have lost the mobile market.
So all that is left is ads on the start page. Its that simple. There’s also a lesson to learn for Mozilla from the time Opera abandoned Presto: [4]
> “Because of our switch to the Blink engine, our retention rate on desktop users is much better now. This is because most websites work in Opera since we’re using the same engine as Google. We think we’ve become more relevant after we moved over to the Blink platform, and more companies now start to work with us,” Boilesen said.
> “We’ve got twice as many developers on the desktop browser now than we had with Presto, because all [our] resources went into maintaining Presto. The only error we made with Presto was that we kept it too long. Our change to Blink was because we wanted to get on the offensive with regards to innovation, we used too many resources to keep Presto competitive."
There are only two ways. You either stay innovative and keep up with the times, or you downsize and develop for a small niche group. Mozilla is doing neither.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/alphabet-earnings-q4-2018.ht...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/browser-maker-opera-has-fi...
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/show-me-the-money-how-opera-st...
As I have written elsewhere I consider ABP and AdBlock as "infiltrated" by Google, so they definitely want to see the rigorous blockers disappear first. Should have made that clearer in the comment.
This means they anticipate Google to target the Acceptable Ads program.
Originally I thought 30,000 rules wouldn't be enough to cover things, but according to this research, only a couple hundred rules are enough to block >90% of the ads: https://brave.com/the-mounting-cost-of-stale-ad-blocking-rul...
So maybe there's another limiting aspect of the declarativeNetRequest API I don't know of.
well, anti-trust these days is just a buzzword, in a legal sense it is defined in a very strict way, and the cost for companies to anticipate an anti-trust ruling is way higher than just pushing their own interests.
With 66% market share and countless other browsers available, the only question for antitrust when it comes to browsers is if users have equal access to browsers, not whether google supports ad blocking.
I think they will make sure that the ad blocking capability does not explicicly favor google ads.
This is not about google wanting to harm the current power users. It is probably the idea that someone could come along and destroy their business.
If such an extensions goes mainstream that could seriously harm them.
They may also want to get rid of paying Adblock Plus money for their highway robbery.
Now that I think about it, getting rid of ABP may be the primary reason for this move. They have to basically pay a third party to get access to their own users.
Either way, the battle is not over the power user minority, but over the average user.
The idea is to make the API just powerful enough for the most annoying ads to disappear. Most users would probably be content with this. They will probably make it so they won't lose all of their power users. I think what they really want is increasing the amount of works it takes to have full adblocking functionality to the point where the average user has no access to it.