Author: Brian Carnell

Google recently announced a significant change to its advertising platform, effective February 2025. Until now, Google has barred advertisers using its platform from using device fingerprinting to track users. Beginning in February 2025, it will allow advertisers to use fingerprinting technologies as long as the advertiser “discloses” this.

Fingerprinting collects information that your device and browser send to a website to associate that device with a user. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes,

At first glance, the data points that third-party trackers collect may seem relatively mundane and disparate. But when compiled together, they can reveal a detailed behavioral profile of your online activity, from political affiliation to education level to income bracket. As long as this trove of data about you is linked back to you, your online activity can be logged. Ad networks primarily rely on two methods to maintain this link: cookie tracking, and browser fingerprinting.

. . .

A digital fingerprint is essentially a list of characteristics that are unique to a single user, their browser, and their particular hardware setup. This includes information the browser needs to send to access websites, like the location of the website the user is requesting. But it also includes a host of seemingly insignificant data (like screen resolution and installed fonts) gathered by tracking scripts. Tracking sites can stitch all the small pieces together to form a unique picture, or “fingerprint,” of your device.

Evading fingerprinting can be difficult because it often utilizes details about your device or browser that are not easy to change. Think of it a bit like trying to hide your identity in public: covering your face with a mask gives some privacy, but it’s much harder to change your height, weight, and other physical characteristics that might be used to identify you.

It is disappointing but not at all unexpected that Google has chosen to go down this route. With the company actively working to sabotage ad-blocking efforts and rolling out AI slop to pollute its search results, Google seems to be on a trajectory of embracing the worst of dystopian big-tech corporate culture.

Monolith is one of a number of tools available to save a web page and all of its assets into a single downloaded HTML file.

Unlike the conventional “Save page as”, monolith not only saves the target document, it embeds CSS, image, and JavaScript assets all at once, producing a single HTML5 document that is a joy to store and share.

If compared to saving websites with wget -mpk, this tool embeds all assets as data URLs and therefore lets browsers render the saved page exactly the way it was on the Internet, even when no network connection is available.

Monolith is cross platform so it works on Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows.

I typically rely on Single File to auto-capture and save web pages as I browse, but having more tools like this is always good.

I ran across this Hacker News discussion about ShredOS, which is a utility designed to securely erase data from a hard drive.

This is one of a number of available tools that attempt to render data unrecoverable by overwriting the hard drive with other data. ShredOS has an impressive number of options, from a basic “fill the device with 0s” to DoD 5220.22M compliant wiping, which requires overwriting the data 7 times.

The Hacker News discussion notes that this doesn’t really work for SSDs, and there is some discussion about alternative methods for those.

I used to use tools like this when disposing of hard drives, but instead, opt for this process now:

1. All the drives I use are encrypted with a long, unique passphrase key.
   
2. When I’m ready to dispose of a drive, I change the encryption key to a random string that I do not record anywhere.
   
3. Have the drive physically destroyed.

A bit paranoid? Absolutely, but a small price to pay to never worry about that drive again.

LOL. So, errors with floating point math in programming languages are such a common question that someone built an excellent website–0.30000000000000004.com–to explain this to folks.

The title refers to the fact that .1 + .2 will frequently be represented as 0.30000000000000004 because of how floating point systems represent repeating decimals.

The site includes language-by-language examples of how simple operations such as .1 + .2 are handled by popular programming languages.

This is a nice online tool for generating a list of calendar dates.

For my purposes, I needed to generate a list of all dates for specific years going back to the 1980s.

The tool has a robust set of options that let me specify the date format to exactly what I needed and even add a “.md” extension at the end of each date because, ultimately, this list gets fed into a tool that outputs empty Markdown files.