Linked List: April 16, 2021

Friday, 16 April 2021

Delivery Man Gets COVID-19 Vaccine While Dropping Off Hoagies ★

You’ll never guess what city this happened in.

EFF’s ‘Am I FLoCed?’ Page for Chrome Users ★

Helpful page for Chrome users from the EFF:

Google is running a Chrome “origin trial” to test out an experimental new tracking feature called Federated Learning of Cohorts (aka “FLoC”). According to Google, the trial currently affects 0.5% of users in selected regions, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States. This page will try to detect whether you’ve been made a guinea pig in Google’s ad-tech experiment.

If you don’t have the choice to just stop using Chrome, this is a good way to see if Google is using FLoC against you. Also, DuckDuckGo has a new Chrome extension to block FLoC.

Every Other Browser Maker to Google: Go FLoC Yourself ★

Dieter Bohn, also doing some real work at The Verge today:

Google is going it alone with its proposed advertising technology to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it’s unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web. […]

One note I’ll drop here is that I am relieved that nobody else is implementing FLoC right away, because the way FLoC is constructed puts a very big responsibility on a browser maker. If implemented badly, FLoC could leak out sensitive information. It’s a complicated technology that does appear to keep you semi-anonymous, but there are enough details to hide dozens of devils.

Anyway, here’s Brave: “The worst aspect of FLoC is that it materially harms user privacy, under the guise of being privacy-friendly.” And here’s Vivaldi: “We will not support the FLoC API and plan to disable it, no matter how it is implemented. It does not protect privacy and it certainly is not beneficial to users, to unwittingly give away their privacy for the financial gain of Google.”

FLoC is a terrible idea. Google’s goal with FLoC, clearly, is to maintain its surveillance advertising hegemony while further obfuscating the privacy ramifications from today’s status quo. The rest of the industry, led by Apple, is moving toward giving users control over surveillance advertising; FLoC is an attempt to circumvent such control.

Six Months Later, There Still Isn’t a MagSafe Car Charger ★

Nilay Patel, doing some actual work at The Verge for once:

Unfortunately it has been six months since the iPhone 12 was announced, and there is a pitiful shortage of MagSafe car chargers. In fact, there are no officially-sanctioned MagSafe car chargers. Instead, there is this Belkin Car Vent Mount PRO with MagSafe, which, as the name suggests, allows you to mount a phone to your vents with MagSafe, in, um, a professional way. However, it does not charge your phone.

Add car chargers to the list with portable battery packs.

Crazed Gun Owner Kills 8 at FedEx Warehouse in Indianapolis ★

The New York Times:

The authorities were searching for a motive on Friday after a gunman stormed a FedEx facility in Indianapolis late Thursday, fatally shooting eight people and injuring at least seven others in a fast-moving, chaotic scene that emerged as the latest mass shooting to rock the nation in a matter of weeks.

Officials said at a news conference Friday morning that they had not yet identified the victims, in part because the coroner’s office had not been able to go onto the scene. By early afternoon, bodies began to be removed from the facility.

So seven people get blood clots after getting the J&J vaccine and we pull it, but eight people get killed by a crazed gun owner and it’s just another Friday in America. Makes sense.

Mac Chimes of Death ★

Stephen Hackett:

We’re all familiar with the Mac’s startup chime. While it has changed over the years, it has greeted users with its friendly tone for decades. What you may not know is that for years, the Mac also came with a death sound, that would play when the machine was unable to properly boot.

And they are glorious.

I knew about these, but I don’t think I ever heard one in the wild. I used the hell out of my own Mac LC from 1991 through 1997 and it never once “died”.

Hands-On With Anker’s Portable Magnetic Inductive Charging Battery Pack ★

I don’t see the appeal of this dingus at all. It’s magnetic, and it works with MagSafe iPhones, but the charger itself doesn’t support MagSafe. It’s just a lousy 5W Qi charger that has a circle of magnets to help it stay in place — charging is going to be very slow compared to actual MagSafe, and even slower compared to using a Lightning cable charger. When I use a portable charger to top off my phone, I want it to work fast. It also seems very inefficient — why would a 5,000 mAh charger only be able to charge an iPhone 12 Mini once? (I also don’t know why MacRumors is promoting this as “MagSafe”. Yes, in the review, they do mention that it’s not MagSafe, but the headline says “MagSafe” and the promotional graphic for the review just say “$40 MagSafe”.)

Let’s hope Apple is nearing completion on the portable MagSafe charger that Gurman said they were working on.