Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox project for in-browser adtech is mostly over. Google’s Privacy Sandbox Is Officially Dead by Kendra Barnett at Adweek Google Pulls The Plug On Topics, PAAPI And Other Major Privacy Sandbox APIs (As The CMA Says ‘Cheerio’) by Allison Schiff at AdExchanger The easy answer to why the project failed is, well, of course it did, they tried to pack in too many anticompetitive tricks to maintain compatibility with their existing system. Look at all the details ...| blog: Don Marti
Previously:Block AI training on a web site Content Signals Policy is an extra set of features for robots.txt intended to make it possible for sites to set separate permissions for search, use by AI, and for AI training. Content Signals is a Cloudflare project. See Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews by Samuel Axon. In making this look a bit like a terms of service agreement, Cloudflare’s goal is explicitly to put legal pressure on Google to change its policy of...| blog: Don Marti
Previously:fair use alignment chart It’s pretty clear that we need some kind of open content license that allows for Creative Commons-style re-use by other writers or artists, but also includes some kind of protection from machine learning training. We’re not getting a noai license from the original Creative Commons organization, though. Instead, they’re offering a separate signals system with at least one major loophole that would make it ineffective in practice. There is no requiremen...| blog: Don Marti
Previously:Goddammit, Mr. Noodle! Remember when if you were into computers it was a big deal to get early access to some new thing, or line up to buy the new release? Now the power user tips are about how to keep your old thing working or turn some new feature off. This time it’s programmatic ads coming to the New Tab page in Firefox, announced at Advertising Week New York. Mozilla Ads announcement for “adding trust to your ad buy”According to Mozilla, this has something to do with tru...| blog: Don Marti
People mock US politicians for exaggerated claims about the importance of coal, even as coal is a steadily declining part of the energy mix here. But EU politicians are doing the same thing with the IT market. Somehow they assume that the problem of replacing today’s Big Tech platforms is as hard as it would have been back in the days when people were lining up for the latest Microsoft Windows version or Apple iPhone, and US-based firms such as Oracle were the leaders in large-scale server ...| blog: Don Marti
Lina Khan: Activision-Blizzard buyout is ‘harming both gamers and developers’ by Andy Chalk. As dominant firms become too-big-to-care, they can make things worse for their customers without having to worry about the consequences. A MacBook pro for $280 is unheard of — so grab one before this deal disappears on Mashable. (Lots of bargains on Intel-based Apple hardware. Not very future-proof for running Mac OS on, but it looks like people have done reasonably well at getting Linux going o...| blog: Don Marti
04 Oct 2025| blog.zgp.org
04 Oct 2025| blog.zgp.org
previous:accounting help needed The advertising duopoly of Meta and Google is having a hell of a good year. The two companies are already about half of the total advertising business in the world, depending how you measure. One problem at their moment of triumph, though. The market expects both companies to keep growing at double-digit rates. For years, they have been able to pull off this extreme growth by eating the rest of the advertising business. But within a few years, the duopoly will ...| blog: Don Marti
Firefox for Apple iOS has a new, experimental, “shake to summarize” feature. I just ran into it, by accident. When I accidentally shake my phone, I want the content of the web page I’m reading to be replaced by AI slop. —no one ever On some iPhones, the AI runs on the phone itself, while on others it is invoked securely on a cloud-based service. Whether you get the battery-sucking AI or the security-risk, bandwidth-sucking AI is based on what phone you have, and as far as I know you c...| blog: Don Marti
previously:living with a bigger ad duopoly tl;dr If surveillance advertising benefits legit small businesses, then it must also benefit consumers, because every win-win deal has two sides. For every sale by a legit small business, there must exist some positive outcome for some consumer. If you can’t show benefits to consumers you’re not helping legit businesses either. Another privacy law season coming up, another big PDF about the claimed benefits of surveillance advertising. Deloitte, ...| blog: Don Marti
Looks like the Alameda Free Library got one of the books I recommended in Linux books for beginners. photo of a new book on a library bookshelfThis is the new edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python which is not really a Linux book specifically—the material should work on all the commonly used OSs—but a lot of the kind of stuff that people get Linux for. This book covers the Python modules for handling commonly encountered file types like PDFs (including OCR!) and office suite do...| blog: Don Marti
A must-read from Rob Leathern for anyone trying to comprehend the surveillance advertising problem or ad reform in general: Rob’s Notes 29 - The AI Ads Cash Machine. The advantage is the whole factory: systems that identify users and extract features in milliseconds; multi-stage ranking models that combine different types of predictions; experiment platforms that measure long-term effects across thousands of overlapping tests; attribution systems that connect ads to purchases days or weeks ...| blog: Don Marti
21 Sep 2025| blog.zgp.org
Oil Giant Saudi Arabia Is Emerging as a Solar Power by Ed Ballard. Until recently, Nishant Kumar, an analyst at Rystad, didn’t think the kingdom could get close to the 50% target. But new projects keep popping up. He now thinks low-carbon energy could represent a third or more of Saudi Arabia’s power mix by 2030, up from 2% last year. That would put the kingdom in the world’s top five markets for new solar capacity over that period, Rystad forecasts. Meta ran 4,000 more ads for AI nudif...| blog: Don Marti
Previously:turning off browser ad features from the command line I like Privacy Badger as a privacy extension for normal use, but the problem with running it—instead of a full-service ad blocker like uBlock Origin—is the Google Search ads. The FBI warns people to Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. and blocking elements on the page is out of scope for Privacy Badger, so it can’t block the search ads on its own. But it’s still important to do something about...| blog: Don Marti
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How does this work?| blog.zgp.org