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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • While that truism might annoy lovers of !politicalcompassmemes@lemmy.world it isn’t invalid, historically-speaking.

    Tell me more…

    From their first use in 1789 (long-short: seating positions) the definitions for left and right were fluid, but generally referred to “change” versus “status quo.”

    In Stalin’s era, left referred mostly to pro-worker policies, the economic change of the communist revolution. That convention was solidified in the US during the red scare, where left-wing came to mean “commie heresy.”

    After that period, the definition was gradually blurred again, perhaps by conservatives carrying forth the McCarthyist tradition of lumping any non-conformist view into “commie heresy.” Regardless, the resulting confusion in public political discourse is the reason Wayne Brittenden made the Political Compass website in 2001.

    By canonizing the economic-policy definition used by the Bolsheviks/McCarthyists as an actual X-axis spectrum, and the social-policy definitions of most other contexts as a Y-axis spectrum, one could easily map both dimensions as a cartesian coordinate. Quite handy.

    Still, as elegant and illuminating as that solution is, it remains a convention.










  • I’ve been checking out the localhost tracking vulnerability and there’s something I can’t work out: it’s not even a terribly obscure or convoluted exploit, especially Yandex’s implementation that’s been chugging for more than 8 years over basic HTTP. It’s just a glaring sandboxing workaround that’s been exclusive to this OS for more than a decade.

    No matter how many ways I look at it, I haven’t come up with a reasonable explanation for how it was ignored, by demonstrably capable engineers, unless Google itself had use for it in the first place. And that fits a pattern of selective competence in information security that they just can’t seem to quit.

    In short it’s the data collection backdoors they leave themselves that defeat the otherwise top-tier security of their consumer offerings, and it’s why I’ll probably never trust anything they’ve touched until I’ve taken it apart and put it back together again.

    So no, you probably shouldn’t use it. Trusting the privacy or security claims of any adtech company will always be a mistake.