If anyone is interested in this, they should read David Lewis' We, The Navigators, it covers the traditional navigation techniques practiced by Pacific Islanders. Stick charts are covered, but it covers pretty much everything the author possibly could have after sailing around the Pacific islands with navigators of various islands.
Seconded. I have two copies of this book, love it, and just lent one out last week. In exchange, I received Master and Commander, which is an awesome reminder of the bygone floridity of educated English. Currently also working through Mumford's Technics and Civilization (1934) in connection with a pan-cultural inquiry in to machine tool evolution stemming from workshop-based inspiration in my robotics lab.
The stick charts are generally not 'charts' in the normal English sense but rather more like memory palaces for not-to-scale directed graphs. I have a big interest in Pacific cultural artifacts as I started a collection some years ago and live amongst it. Nothing like a giant jungle-struck hardwood oar or a primitive giant balanced hafted axe to make buttering your croissant with illicit Iranian jam an enhanced pleasure at breakfast.
I've had similar experiences. It's kind of terrifying, actually, you have to walk the line of being annoying enough to get what you want but not so annoying they completely ignore you.
One of the things I've learned is to apply the Socratic method, preferably in front of their colleagues if they try to brush you off. Also, if you've got scary symptoms, demand they write down what your symptoms are on your record and why they aren't concerned, then demand a copy of all relevant records (it's your property) -- this often gets them to reevaluate your risk in terms of their career.
Worst case scenario, you can make up medical history. I had a family member pass recently from colorectal cancer. They had symptoms but their PCP kept insisting they were too young. My family member suddenly "remembered" her aunt died of CRC when she was a kid. This got her referred to a gastroenterologist, and they found out she was stage 4...after her PCP delayed her diagnosis for like a year. She actually had grounds for a malpractice suit but who's got the energy or money for that when they're fighting stage 4 cancer?
Also, know your state's agency responsible for policing health insurance. This family member's insurance company routinely tried to deny life saving procedures, but a call to the right govt agency set them in line each time.
To be fair she was asked in an interview how she would differ from her predecessor and she totally choked. It was like she'd never even considered that was a question somebody might ask her. She just didn't have an answer.
She might've been a fine president and she might've actually changed some things. But even more fundamentally than whether she would've changed anything, Harris was a lousy campaigner with an ineffective track record as a politician. As you point out, catching a former prosecutor flat footed with an easy interview question is inexcusable. A last minute shove to the top of the Democrat ticket was burdened with all of that downside from the very beginning.
I've seen anti-fingerprinting plugins and browser configs, etc, but they all seem to make you more interesting for not being fingerprintable, or for turning off a lot of features used in fingerprinting.
Is there any reason a browser or plugin couldn't just spoof the data used in fingerprinting to random values? So it emits different values for each page or resource you load?
Random is often going to be indirectly fingerprintable too, since some values are always the same (or the same given each browser version). Some values can't be set to be random or otherwise non-fingerprintable data without affecting the user, like viewport size.
Spoofing 'Newly installed most recent version of Google Chrome on the latest version of Windows 11 in the US' without leaving any holes revealing something fishy is surprisingly hard, but that or 'Safari running on recent-ish iPhone running up to date iOS' would be the ideal target to blend in with the crowd.
> Spoofing 'Newly installed most recent version of Google Chrome on the latest version of Windows 11 in the US' without leaving any holes revealing something fishy is surprisingly hard
It doesn't matter if it looks wrong as long as it looks differently wrong over time. Don't bother trying to blend in with the crowd because you can't ever expect to catch everything that can be used to fingerprint you. New techniques come out all the time. You can block a lot of information from even being collected. Limit what data you send at all, randomize what's left, change IP frequently (VPN) and you should be fine.
That's the thing, no web page, except for games, should ever need to know about your viewport size. So spoofing would be just fine, imho, with an override option/permission for individual sites.
It can make a small difference on this site, though. Testing it with three browsers (Safari, Brave, Firefox Focus) on iOS with Private Browsing on, each gets a different name and hash — then again, those do stick to the browser pretty well after that and are resistant to incognito mode (or session switch by other means), for example, just like you’d expect. On Safari, Private Browsing masks the IP at least, and Brave has its own tricks.
I use private browsing and could not replicate your result, though I have done a few things on my device such as enable developer mode that the OS has warned me decreases my security.
You can forcefully disable hardware acceleration, that removes a few bits - though javascript can still guesstimate your CPU and memory.
For a more proper solution, you could try to convince Mozilla that granting every website uncapped multi-threading and direct GPU access is a bit much. If webgl/webgpu truly is a must, then maybe each website permission should start with a single-threaded software-renderer that behaves indistinguishable on all supported platforms. And only after granting the website that extra permissions let it determine that a more powerful GPU is available.
First, see our blog post. Consult also other blog posts and other questions in this FAQ.
If you want to have the same fingerprint as many users, We suggest going for Tor Browser (do not install JShelter in Tor Browser).
If you want to make cross-site fingerprinting linkage hard, go for the Recommended JShelter level. If you want better protection for the real data at the cost of having the same fingerprint on different sites, go for the Strict JShelter level.
Keep NBS active.
If you want to detect and prevent fingerprinting attempts, use FPD.
Thanks. I tried this on Firefox for Android and each time I close the browser and load the page my fingerprint ID is different. So it seems to work. Have you had any sites break with this extension installed?
The reason is that the browser maker is interested to support tracking.
On the technical level there is no problem to block tracking - intriduce noise and make APIs unavailable until user permits to a web site. But that is not implemented.
The same with native applications. If your bank app requires you to share your location you can't spoof it. The makers of Android and iOS made spoofing of geo location impossible - you don't have that control, which means the phone is not your device. You have to give up your real location.
> Is there any reason a browser or plugin couldn't just spoof the data used in fingerprinting to random values? So it emits different values for each page or resource you load?
That's basically the ideal. It's become obvious that it's impossible to try to be identical. Web browsers are too leaky, and something will out you. You really don't want to try to blend in the "typical" users because none of them use ad blockers.
Hey this sounds really cool and is giving me Bram Moolenaar vibes. Please try to get some sort of trusted source to vouch for you though, I've been around long enough to see a lot of these charities -- especially involving children from poorer countries -- turn out to be scams.
Thanks for the comment. Could you elaborate on getting a trusted source to vouch for the project? I think thats a great idea but I'm not sure where to start.
I'm not sure, tbh. Perhaps consider reaching out to some reputable news organization. Seems like something NPR might be interested in picking up. I believe they're fairly responsive to their contact forms as well.
Years of seeing ":help uganda" every single day have left me kind of instinctively curious about how to help Uganda, although I have yet to donate to Bram's charity ICCF.
> distinguish between compromising a network and using public apis in a way that might be counter to their intent.
I believe weev got in legal trouble under the CFAA for this very thing with his 2010 AT&T escapade. AT&T had all that data sitting on a public server with no authentication necessary, just a SIM ID to get that customer's PII. Truthfully AT&T should have been hit with negligence...you don't secure a bank vault with a screen door, but we don't hold anyone accountable for other people's data in America.
No I think the orientation of the earth changed relative to its axis. Earth is constantly changing and its density is not evenly distributed, so you see changes in its orientation with its axis. If we suddenly moved (just imagine) 10% of Earth's mass to a band forming a great circle from N45°E0° directly to its antipode at S45°E180°, Earth's axis would shift to make this its new equator.
This wiki page could be worded a little more clearly though, it sounds like the axis could have shifted by ~25°? Or Asia could have migrated due to the shift of the axis ~174 million years ago? 25° change in axis would be quite dramatic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We%2C_the_Navigators
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