June 2025 – Page 3

June 3, 2025 ⌥

Meta and Yandex Apps on Android Have Been Tracking Users in Newly Creepy Ways ⇥ localmess.github.io

We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps — including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser — silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica:

The covert tracking — implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers — allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they’re off-limits for every other site.

The difference between targeted advertising and spyware is there is no difference.

After Girish, et al., disclosed this behaviour, Meta’s apps ceased tracking users with this method, and Goodin said Yandex will also stop. Meta is still under a consent decree struck in 2019 with a $5 billion penalty after violating a 2012 agreement. Executives at Meta do not care about privacy, rules, laws, or common sense. They will keep doing stuff like this. Ad tech is an indefensible industry run by megalomaniacs who would better serve society if they were made to live in a cave under an ice sheet, though I do not care which one.

June 3, 2025 ⌥

A.I. Calvin and Hobbes Strip ⇥ social.lol

This, from Adam Newbold, is a perfect encapsulation of a bunch of ethical problems related to artificial intelligence. The prompt:

Generate an image for a Calvin & Hobbes strip. Four panels. Calvin and Hobbes are walking through the woods, talking to each other, both holding smart phones and looking at them intently the entire time.

Panel 1: Calvin says to Hobbes, “This strip was made entirely with ChatGPT, which should be impossible given the strict intellectual property rights restrictions on Calvin & Hobbes content.”

Panel 2: Hobbes responds to Calvin, “Oh? Then how did it make it?”

Panel 3: Calvin responds to Hobbes, “Some guy just typed this into a box and clicked a button. That’s all it took.”

Panel 4: Hobbes responds to Calvin, “That’s so fucked up.”

This is entirely doable without generative artificial intelligence, but it requires far more skill. The ease of this duplication is maddening. I find this offensive in exactly the way Newbold intended it to be.

More important, I think, is the control exercised over the likenesses of Calvin and Hobbes by the strip’s creator Bill Watterson, as Newbold noted in the strip. Watterson famously rejected all but a handful of licensed merchandising ideas. But the mechanism for how he might protect this is the same as the one used by Disney when it fights parody and reinterpretation of its vast intellectual property, even though the motivations are different. Watterson’s protective quality is admirable, driven by artistic integrity to the extent he has left many millions of dollars’ worth of tchotchkes on the table to retain the spirit of the strips. Disney’s is entirely business motivated, evidenced by the tens of billions of dollars in licensed tchotchkes sold last year alone.

This is not the first “Calvin & Hobbes” strip made with generative A.I., nor does generative A.I. begin and end at self-referential prompts like these. Some assholes have created plugins — more-or-less — to badly emulate Watterson’s unique style in generative A.I. programs. It is awful.

I want to live in a world where we can differentiate between the necessary reinterpretation of intellectual property while respecting the wishes of artists. This is a tricky line, I know. It requires us — individually, but also the organizations responsible for generative A.I. stuff — to think about who is making such a request in good faith, and decide whether we are going to honour that.

One more thing: Watterson is a pretty private person, rarely giving interviews. But, right above this paragraph, I think we can get a sense of how he might feel about this.

June 2, 2025 ⌥

A.I. Answer Engines Are Worth Trying ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, TidBits:

To distinguish these tools [Perplexity and ChatGPT’s web search] from traditional search engines like Google and Bing, I’m calling them “answer engines.” Although they are performing live Web searches for you, the focus is on answering your question rather than displaying the results of the search. I see answer engines as the next step in networked knowledge acquisition because they fundamentally change how we find and absorb information online:

[…]

The key benefit of answer engines is that they typically provide you with exactly the information you want, with no additional effort required. They’re a bit like Wikipedia in this way—you could fact-check statements with the listed sources in a Wikipedia article, and you can often learn more by following links to related topics, but most of the time, you’re happy to read the article and move on.

I think Engst is, in an ideal world, correct — A.I. search is positioned as a way to get straight to the answer. It, theoretically, cuts through a web poisoned by bait for search engines, marketing copy disguised as information, and thin articles suffocated by ads.

So far, I have rarely been satisfied by the results I have received. It has never been satisfactory for someone to say “according to Google” when asked how they know a piece of information, and the deadpan way answer engines frame their responses gives them an unearned authority. I have found it necessary to double check everything. I recently documented ChatGPT’s answer with an invented report with an invented quote that led me to the results I was looking for after some web searches. I have also posted screenshots from Google’s A.I. answer engine on Mastodon. It made up an Excel option and cited it to Microsoft’s documentation; it claimed Noah Wyle co-starred with Alex Horne in “The Pitt”. In fairness, I would like to see that.

Even so, these answer engines have been helpful for me as starting points. It can sometimes be difficult to know what search terms to use, even if you can formulate in your head the question or type of answer you are hoping to receive. I have found this particularly helpful with web development questions. They are tools that can support someone on a research journey. But we should remain skeptical that some trained black box of mystery is able to directly answer questions accurately. We must check, and re-check. Our ability to use these products depends on a well-developed skill for research.

Meta and Yandex Apps on Android Have Been Tracking Users in Newly Creepy Ways ⇥ localmess.github.io

A.I. Calvin and Hobbes Strip ⇥ social.lol

A.I. Answer Engines Are Worth Trying ⇥ tidbits.com

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