Forum: Author Hangout

If not, rebooting the router will change the IP address

Actually, unless someone else is rebooting their router at the same time, the odds strongly favor you getting the same IP address back.

Can they see my device even if I'm behind a router? If yes, it's pretty much hopeless, no question. If not, rebooting the router will change the IP address, even if it will remain with the range my ISP has assigned to my area.

NAT(Network Address Translation) tends to mean they're likely to have the MAC address of the originating device(unless explicitly run through a proxy, in which case the MAC for the proxy will be used).

And rebooting the router won't change your MAC address. That is assigned at the time your device was manufactured, and while it can be changed, most people never will do so, and no consumer software is likely to do so without user prompting.

I find it hilarious that some people go to extreme measures to avoid 'tracking' while using Chrome as their browser

So which browser do you recommend?

if you don't have a Mac, you can't use Safari

Link for downloading Safari for windows.

http://www.browserwin.com/safari/

Apple is the only company that doesn't seem to engage in user tracking as they don't do advertising and have long championed user privacy and are creating technologies that preserve user privacy

I've run a Mac for 10 years or more. I also run some apps - NoScript - Ghostery - Disconnect - Adblock Plus to help stop and/or get around ad trackers.

Apple... does not - regardless of their publicity - block or restrict tracker cookies.

Almost every site I visit (98%+) have a cookie called 'Google-Analytics' and guess what... no script blocks 'em (and dozens more) as default.

I'm not saying that Google doesn't track my internet usage, but I choose to not make it easy for them.

Oh... I taped over - just in case - my camera. ;-)

DO NOT trust any mega-corp to have your best interests at heart... they do not.

No, but it doesn't mean they're out to get you.

Truth, that.

As an unaffiliated individual, anyway.

As a member of a group, more problematic, as groups have greater impact upon their operations and goals. Get active in a group in conflict with them, things might change in how they look at you as an individual.

But that's true for everything, with everyone, not just mega-corps.

So which browser do you recommend?

Try Pale Moon, the Firefox alternative.

www.palemoon.org

I find it hilarious that some people go to extreme measures to avoid 'tracking' while using Chrome as their browser, nullifying all their efforts in avoiding tracking.

I use Opera, because I didn't want to use Crome or M$ Internet Explorer.

HM.

The way Tor works, fundamentally, is by creating unusual traffic. That's how it provides anonymity. It looks a lot like how a bot would look by design.

I don't know enough to say you are wrong, but my browser appears to be telling me that all traffic from all currently open tabs is going through the same three IP addresses before entering the internet, and then coming back in the reverse order.

I switched to a different search engine.

Don't bet on a different search engine not tracking you the same way Google does. Targeted advertising is how all of the search engines make money.

Try DuckDuckGo, they declare themselves as a non-tracking search engine.

I would take any such declarations with a small mountain of salt.

Search engines make their money from targeted advertising. Some level of tracking (even if it's only keeping tract of what you search for) is vital to targeted advertising.

If they don't make money, they will vanish.

Unfortunately, they don't seem to be willing to allow you to decide for yourself when you'd like them to apply it to your search.

Whenever it is possible (such as your Ukrainian model) I will specify a country and even a town. In your case there must be 50 others with her same name somewhere in the world - perhaps on a social site

In your case there must be 50 others with her same name somewhere in the world - perhaps on a social site

That was the thing, I didn't have a name; that's what I was trying to find. And the originating site's logo had been removed, so I didn't have a clue who she was modeling for.

All I had was an image, with no information other than the website I'd found it on IDing her as a Ukrainian model. In Japanese, of course.

Trying to narrow the search to the Ukraine might not have been all that useful; I don't remember who this particular model turned out to be, but The Metart Network, for instance, is managed by a firm located in Seattle, Washington, so while many of their models are Ukrainian, the websites are American.

This is where an image search engine that actually tries to match all the details of an image is crucial. If Google successfully IDs the image, it will link to tons of useful information, but if it doesn't, it may decide it's an image of a female, and return images of females, without any regard to age, ethnicity, stance, etc. Yandex will return images that match the stance, background, and most of the time ethnicity and hair color. Google will filter it's results based upon your profile in their records. Yandex doesn't, so far as I've experienced.

Dumb question, but did the image have a watermark? They can be quite hard to see sometimes.

Not a dumb question at all! Watermarks can be very helpful in tracing the history of an item.

Not that I'm aware of; at least, my examination of the image searching for details to help differentiate it from all the similer models didn't reveal one. I wasn't specifically looking for one, however.

if it does, that's the end of ANY semblance of security or privacy on the internet, at least without jumping through hoops

I guess I'm more "mixed" on this. I've pretty much concluded "privacy in a high technology setting" doesn't exist. BTW we don't currently qualify for this particular usage of "high technology."

As technology becomes increasingly advanced, it is becoming increasingly clear that tracking things in general becomes MUCH easier.

Which just leaves open the matter of how society itself adjusts to that new reality. It can either go for a dysfunctional path where hypocrisy continues to try to rule, or a more practical path of "most things don't really matter in the grand scheme of things."

But that means fostering a culture of tolerance and openness that even the "Social Justice Warriors" who claim to be all about acceptance and tolerance, don't seem to be able to buy into.

Maybe after enough rounds of hypocrites(not to be confused with openly practicing bigots) getting burned on their own proverbial stakes things will start to shift, but that probably going to take a few generations to get there. And that will only be possible if information is allowed to "remain free" rather than being locked away behind closed doors that only a select group of people can tap into at will.

As discomfiting as the idea of a world without privacy is, the "practical side" of it the implementation/preparation for it is largely straight forward enough:

Part one: Promote rational thought over emotional thought. (We're so fucked)

Part two: Conduct your life in a manner of straight forward honesty. If you don't try to harbor any "deep dark secrets" or go about perpetuating lies and hypocrisies in the first place, there should be little to fear.

Of course, the fly in the ointment right now is society itself does not truly want total honesty. Hypocrisy is the modus operandi of far too many people. (But their ability to continue doing so is waning)

For the ones that aren't being hypocritical, that doesn't inoculate them from being wholly irrational when it comes to certain topics.

Which is perhaps the biggest problem facing society as we progress into a social milieu where secrets are difficult to keep secret. The irrational, unthinking, response to things people haven't given any real consideration about beyond how they feel about it based on some anecdotal information they picked up somewhere that they may not even remember. "Everybody knows....."

I worry about corporate interests (Google, in this case, or Facebook's feed), dictating what search results I see based on what they know about me.

They've been doing it for years:

https://www.frequencycast.co.uk/filterbubble.html

Or to get the direct link (2011 presentation):

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would connect us all together. And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. But there's this shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible. And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time -- my Facebook page. I'm progressive, politically -- big surprise -- but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared

Google's doing it too. If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at -- everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located -- that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see. You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's.

All of this is addressed in detail in my series 'A Well-Lived Life'. Of course, you have to get through quite a bit of drama before you get to the 'good stuff' if you're looking for analysis of the anti-social developments in our 'modern' society...

A lot of the anti-social stuff we're contending with today are the direct result of either a small handful of 19th Century philosophers or the Royal Court of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain etc etc etc.