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
05 Sep 2025| blog.zgp.org
Previously:August 30, 2025: Alameda Linux Installfest We had a Linux installfest at the Alameda Free Library and got a pretty decent turnout. Some of us were there all day and we had people coming in and out as intended. So yay us. Linux installfest at the Alameda Free LibraryBesides run-of-the-mill laptops, one of our volunteers helped a new user install Linux on a Chromebook (from across the table it looked like the hard part was removing a bunch of screws to put it in developer mode, and t...| blog: Don Marti
Don’t go to ChatGPT or some other LLM-based service for privacy advice. Here are four reasons you should read my article instead. (or find somebody’s. I have links.) Whatever the LLM puts out is based on the documents in its training set, and the Internet has a lot of material that looks like credible privacy advice but is either expired or wasn’t really useful in the first place. Some of the problem material that will have been fed into an LLM includes: Out of date information. Today, ...| blog: Don Marti
The title of this comes from an old Reddit post. So there’s only one channel in this motel. This morning when I was getting ready I was watching Sesame Street. They were doing this bit where some clown was trying to wash his hands but kept washing his feet or his elbows and Elmo would go, “no mister noodle, your HANDS!” and all the kids would laugh. Around the fourth or fifth time he couldn’t find his hands, I heard a grown man yell from somewhere else in the motel, “GODDAMMIT, MR. ...| blog: Don Marti
Previously:advertising personalization: good for you? Looks like the Dubé et al. paper, a review of claimed benefits for personalized advertising, is making the rounds again. The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Privacy Regulation for Consumer Marketing by Jean-Pierre Dubé, John G. Lynch, Dirk Bergemann, Mert Demirer, Avi Goldfarb, Garrett Johnson, Anja Lambrecht, Tesary Lin, Anna Tuchman, Catherine E. Tucker. One argument that the paper makes against restricting personalized ads is...| blog: Don Marti
19 Aug 2025| blog.zgp.org
AI teacher tools show racial bias in suggestions for struggling students by Norah Rami. (say the line, Bart…) After Chalkbeat asked about Common Sense Media’s findings, a Google spokesperson said Tuesday that Google Classroom has turned off the shortcut to Gemini that prompts teachers to Generate behavior intervention strategies to do additional testing. AT&T CEO’s Memo Just Made It Official: Workplace Loyalty Is Dead by Aki Ito. (This is also why I’m cautiously optimistic about the c...| blog: Don Marti
09 Aug 2025| blog.zgp.org
30 Jul 2025| blog.zgp.org
Bonus links| blog.zgp.org
15 Jul 2025| blog.zgp.org
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26 Jun 2025| blog.zgp.org
08 Mar 2025| blog.zgp.org
How does this work?| blog.zgp.org