Bonus Drop #24 (2023-09-10): Alternative Realities & High-functioning Sociopaths

Alt-ls; Alt-man; Sociopathic Sandboxes

Bonus Drops are normally “paywalled”. But, today's is going out to all readers:

• (a) to partially make up for the unexpected hiatus the other week, and

• (b) because I'm including some important information about Google's Privacy Sandbox (along with a checkup tool) that warrants sharing to a wider audience.

The first two sections are modern (Rust-based) alternative CLI tools, and the last one is focused on the Privacy Sandbox. That last section gets a bit soapbox-y, so feel free to skip to near the end of it to get the URL for the checkup tool I made.

eza

Photo by Aubrey Odom on Unsplash

I've been using UNIX (yes the “all caps” one), Linux, and other variants for decades. As such, it takes quite a bit to convince me to deviate from longstanding muscle memory and adopt fancy new replacement tools that all you cool kids seem to want to use.

That being said, I've been spending some time with eza — a replacement for both the foundational ls utility and the abandoned exa (of which eza is a fork). It's a Rust-based tool, so my preferred way to install it is:

$ cargo install eza

Like ls, eza lists the contents of files and directories, so just how much “innovation” can there be in this space? From my interactions with it over the past few weeks, eza”:

• provides a more visually appealing and informative way to interact with filesystem listings

• has a spiffy “Git repo status” feature

• includes excellent multi-column grid support

all of which have been of specific crunchy goodness, as I've been in front end developer mode this past month at work.

I won't overwhelm you with any clips of directory listings. You can type `eza` as well as I can.

What I will do is provide a list of aliases I have set up to make using it line up with the aforementioned muscle memory:

alias  els='eza --classify --color=always --sort=size | rg -v /'
alias   ll='eza --long --grid --group-directories-first'
alias  lld='eza --long --grid --only-dirs'
alias  llf='eza --long --classify --color=automatic | rg -v /'
alias  llg='eza --long --grid --git'
alias  llh='eza --long --grid --list-dirs --group-directories-first .*'
alias llrt='eza --long --grid --sort=modified'

Run the bare eza versions to see what they do. You may also want to try them with --icons (a neat trick by the eza devs).

Note that I have not aliased “ls” since I have enough, aged, janky scripts that rely on ls-specific output to make that a potential nightmare. Many bits you run from the internets also likely expect ls to behave a certain way, so I'd suggest leaving it unaliased as well.

tealdeer

The tldr.sh project is a community-driven effort to make it easier to use linux commands and CLI tools by adding practical examples to supplement man pages and --help/-h screens.

tealdeer (GH) is a Rust-based CLI tool to interact with those community pages.

Like exa (above), I prefer doing the installation via Cargo:

$ cargo install tealdeer

Immediately after doing that, you should run the following:

$ tldr --seed-config # generates a config file
$ tldr --show-paths  # shows you where it puts bits
$ tldr --update      # syncs all the tldr md files

Open up the TOML config file that you saw from those commands and poke around. I suggest adding/updating the following settings while you're there:

[display]
use_pager = true

[updates]
auto_update = true

Here are the first few lines from a run of tldr awk:

A versatile programming language for working on files.
More information: <https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk>.

Print the fifth column (a.k.a. field) in a space-separated file:

  awk '{print $5}' path/to/file

Print the second column of the lines containing "foo" in a space-separated file:

  awk '/foo/ {print $2}' path/to/file

You can get the raw markdown by adding --raw to the command.

One of the paths shown (if you ran the commands I proposed) is the “Pages dir”. This is where all the tldr.sh markdown files are stored. I've let khoj index those, so they can come up in searches when my long covid brain is on the fritz.

It's super handy when what you really need is just an example or two, vs. having to page through the artifact of someone's supposedly clever “*roff” skills (the typesetting system folks use to author man pages).

Sociopathic Sandboxes

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

In “Leviathan Wakes”, by James S.A. Corey, James Holden, captain of the legendary Rocinante, confronts the person in charge of a space station that he and Fred Johnson (titular head of the Outer Planets Alliance/OPA) just stormed.

The scientists who occupied this station were responsible for the deaths of everyone on Eros — a major space station — because they wanted to run an experiment on them to see what an alien substance would do to them.

Here's an excerpt of the conversation:

“The scientists. The technicians. Everyone you needed to make it happen. They actually had to do this. They had to watch the video of people dying all over Eros. They had to design those radioactive murder chambers. So unless you managed to round up every serial killer in the solar system and send them through a postgraduate program, how did you do this?”

“We modified our science team to remove ethical restraints.”

Half a dozen clues clicked into place in Holden’s head.

“Sociopaths,” he said. “You turned them into sociopaths.”

“High-functioning sociopaths,” Dresden said with a nod. He seemed pleased to explain it. “And extremely curious ones. As long as we kept them supplied with interesting problems to solve and unlimited resources, they remained quite content.”

Google (and, “X”, and Microsoft, and Facebook, and OpenAI, and…) are filled to the brim with high-functioning sociopaths.

Nobody seems to ever just come out and say this.

But, after spending a bunch of hours poking at their new Privacy Sandbox, I'm done being “cordial” to folks who work for these companies (at least the ones who are directly responsible for things like the Privacy Sandbox).

Wired, Ars, and numerous other sites put the Privacy Sandbox on full blast this week or recently; so, I'm sure the majority of readers saw something about it and (at least partially) read one or more of those articles.

For those who did not or the ones who did and need a quick refresher, this new sociopathic initiative by Google has six foundational components:

• Topics: Generate signals for interest-based advertising without third-party cookies or other user identifiers that track individuals across sites.

• Protected Audience: Select ads to serve remarketing and custom audience use cases, designed to mitigate third-party tracking across sites. (This API was previously named FLEDGE. As we head towards launch, we've updated the name to better reflect the functionality.)

• Attribution Reporting: Correlate ad clicks or ad views with conversions. Ad techs can generate event-level or summary reports.

• Private Aggregation: Generate aggregate data reports using data from Protected Audience and cross-site data from Shared Storage.

• Shared Storage: Allow unlimited, cross-site storage write access with privacy-preserving read access.

• Fenced Frames: Securely embed content onto a page without sharing cross-site data.

The only purposes for this new feature set are to turn Chrome/chromium into an even more functional advertisement-serving utility, and make you easier to track by the other members of the sociopathic surveillance capitalism cabal. I mean, the word “ad” is even in most of the bulleted descriptions.

The developers. The program managers. Everyone you needed to make it happen. They actually had to do this.

…

As long as we kept them supplied with interesting problems to solve and unlimited resources, they remain[ed] quite content.

I'm using the “s” word because no well-intentioned human being could work on this set of technology features. Much like the recent stories on the sociopaths who run automobile companies destroying your privacy every time you get into a new-ish vehicle, all the folks contributing to the “Privacy Sandbox” efforts are ultimately turning you even more into a product than you were before. There is no other real purpose served by any of these new features; no other real problems being solved. A couple could have, but they just provide cover for selling you out with fancier words.

The Ars piece is short, so I'll shunt you there vs. tread the same waters that Ron Amadeo did.

Rather than just complain and deride, I’ll focus on what you can do to protect yourself if you still need to use Chrome/chromium. I do use chromium, since I'm kind of addicted to the Arc browser. While I would be sad to see it go, I'll tell you what I'll switch to before the end of the piece (if Google makes it impossible to opt-out of these features).

First, head over to chrome://flags/#privacy-sandbox-ads-apis and ensure that feature is set to DISABLED.

While you're there, enter “privacy sandbox” into the settings search bar and set everything that comes up to DISABLED.

Next, head to chrome://settings/privacySandbox and ensure everything is DISABLED on that page and any sub-pages (click each item in the list).

You should also pop on over to chrome://flags/, search for “fencedframe” and DISABLE that as well.

Thanks to a spiffy tip, you should also head to chrome://flags/#private-state-tokens and DISABLE that as well.

Google (and others, like Firefox, who sells your DNS out to Cloudflare) can also track you via “secure” DNS, so you should strongly consider disabling that, as well, at chrome://settings/security. If you don't disable it, at least point it to something you control.

To keep an eye on whether the sociopaths at Google have decided this Privacy Sandbox is just going to be an unchangeable default (or enables it randomly on a whim), keep an eye on chrome://private-aggregation-internals/. If anything is in there, you need to do all the above again.

I've also put together a Chrome Privacy Sandbox Checker that will run some diagnostics (read the source, the vanilla HTML/JS file is short and very readable) and report back the status. If any item is not “❌😎” you need to poke at your settings again.

This is what it will look like if you've been pwnd by Google:

and, this is what it will look like if you've successfully thwarted them:

(I spent time crafting that tool/page thanks to the Bonus Drop supporters.)

If things do get worse and this becomes unavoidable, I'll be moving back to — and supporting — Orion. It's a true privacy-oriented browser, based on WebKit, and made by the folks at Kagi — a search engine y'all should be using instead of Google or DDG if you can afford it.

I fear a major reckoning is coming in many areas of our modern socio-political lives. If we don't start fully acknowledging — and calling out — reality, those of us who aren't high-functioning sociopaths will likely be on the bad side of said reckoning.

FIN

I'll do my best to say off the soapbox the rest of the week. ☮