because of this sexy boi
Who’s that?
Edward Snowden
Nice. Thanks.
Back in the covid lock downs, I went down a rabbit hole with alternative operating systems. I found TheHatedOnes video on GrapheneOS, got the cheapest pixel from a pawn shop, and started experimenting on the mobile side of things
As for my PC, I’m not sure if this video exists, or it did and its gone, or I was just dreaming, but I’m sure there was a SomeOrdinary Gamer video about how windows 10 wanted a 1080p webcam.
That was the final straw for me, and I started duel booting to get used to Linux. I knew back then I would never go to windows 11, so I knew the sooner I start switching, the more comfortable I would be when windows 10 reaches EOL.
goat youtuber
Entirely accidentally. My clinical colleague had an “odd looking” laptop screen. It was Ubuntu. He’s a genius level clever lad, and after some questions, he helped me to set up dual boot on my windows machine. Within 5-months, that was an Ubuntu only machine. Now on Debian, still can’t do anything much more than basic with the terminal, but the roads led here very naturally.
Group read on “Surveillance Capitalism” but in truth…
- tinkered with Linux as a kid
- contributed to Mozilla
- loved the ideal of free software relatively early on
… so it was rather coherent with related yet orthogonal efforts.
I think it was ~2008 I was shopping for something online. Then for the next several days, every website I went to would feed me ads for that website I was shopping on. I didn’t understand why it was happening and it was deeply concerning. Oh, to be ignorant again…
By working as a data engineer in ad-tech companies and seeing how big is actually an amount of information collected about you.
Oh, I never seen anyone say they worked as a data manager. Never even heard about this job.
How’s it? What do you do?
There are petabytes of collected data (even in a relatively small ad-tech companies I had a chance to work on; on a facebook/google scale it is much more). Someone should write all the cleaning, processing, de-duplication and matching (aka fingerprinting) steps as well as make this data usable by AI / Machine Learning guys, who will make models that predicts what ad to show to each user based on the available data. I’m working on processing, cleaning, matching and preparing of these data.
oooh
I know that I’m working on a “dark side”… But ad-tech are offering really interesting tasks about building very complex infrastructure besides they are paying well.
Another sem 👽
*data engineer
I’m also one but I don’t work for advertising. Most data engineers work for consulting companies that work for banks. We program automatic data processing pipelines. For example, bank transactions are stored somewhere, all the historic data, that needs processing to then be graphed out for exec number 3, or for whatever.
Other companies might send you files that need to be automatically processed, cleaned, and put correctly where then other tools can pull that data correctly.
We basically do all the background work concerning data manipulation. File processing, databases… all that stuff. And by databases it can be normal ones like posture to distributed ones like hdfs/hive/athena/whatever.
Ad world is basically the same but with tracking info instead of transactions.
If you are interested in day to day work, it’s a mix of coding SQL processes, then porting them to spark/pyspark for distributed massive processing. There are new shiny tools for those that don’t know much of the technical side to manage, sorta.
started debloating my windows install and installing custom roms since i had a shit pc and phone, then got to know linux and naturally got privacy conscious
I don’t really remember TBH, I got into Linux at a pretty young age, but that was more about hating Microsoft than privacy. Then got into VPNs because of downloading stuff, gradually drifted down the Ubuntu > Manjaro > Arch pipeline, started hanging out on privacy forums and now I’m one of those people who needs a Yubikey to decrypt a chain of LUKS-encrypted drives to boot into a laptop that has nothing of any value on it at all lol.
Data stealing? I thought people are just giving it away.
Although I remember when the fb app was discovered to be spying on other stuff outside of usage within the app, whenever that was.
There’s a mom joke here somewhere, which of us is brave enough to retort as such to the OP?
People can’t be blame for not paying attention to that. All are not really techie, just following current trend, and for sure big tech doesn’t make the task easier.
They are to blame later when risks are explained and people from their surroundings are willing to give help.
A long time ago. I’d guess it was around the time Facebook became popular, because it was inconceivable to me that people were just sharing their private info online, and treating people who didn’t as the odd ones. Later on my I was vindicated, but I’ve been wary of Google and Microsoft’s data hoarding from the beginning I think. It has been frustrating to see tech go this way, and people just accepting it, gleefully.
The library giving uo on asking for my email because it didn’t have my full name on it::
The revelations that came out from the Edward Snowden ordeal.
I like knowing what my computer is doing and that was noticeably less and less the case as I went from Windows 98 to 10 and all the major versions in between. Before learning about Linux, simply going through the options in debloat scripts made me realize how invasive Microsoft was behind the scenes.
I know that he’s not necessarily the best resource, but Rob Braxman’s videos were first to bring mobile privacy concerns to my attention. Also, while his promotion of his custom phone didn’t lead to me buying one of them, it did lead to me learning about custom Android ROMs and eventually buying a Pixel for GrapheneOS.
I got bored when I was in early college. I already held leftest views and didn’t love a lot of what Google and other big tech platforms where doing. I started with Proton but honestly mainly due to there lack of even decent Linux support changed over to Tuta. I feel lucky that I did all of this about a year and a half ago so just before they shoved AI in everything.
Secret services mass surveillance programs in 1980s and 1990s.
Probably around the time when the internet became a thing. I’ve always lived a rather private life. Not a lot of fanfare, I just need the basics. Then I started a fully licensed internet radio station, promoting indie music. At the time I probably had 4k - 5k listeners a day. This was back in the pre-Napster era and Napster was just starting to get popular. So, I self hosted and automated the entire set up. When I was at work, everything operated like a terra-radio station would, with announcer drop ins, promo drop ins, multiple playlists that would randomly select maybe 5 songs from the top 50 list, 5 or 6 songs from the ‘b’ side and deep cuts, etc. I honestly had a blast and I was doing it all out of my own pocket. I personally feel enriched by the experience. I got to work with a lot of companies like the now defunct MP3.com, and others.
Then the RIAA got involved and deemed internet radio the same as illegal downloads off of Napster, even tho we paid ASCAP, BMI, SESAC et al, licenses. and fees A bunch of us went to Washington to plead our case for internet radio in front of a special panel, but in the end, the RIAA made it so difficult, with fees that didn’t even apply to terra-radio. A big swath of us just went dark. We just couldn’t cough up the additional required fees and such. That was by design tho from the RIAA itself. I will say tho, that if Shawn Fanning had not have scripted Napster, I think the music industry on the internet would look quite different than it does today. He pushed the envelope.
