> * Sending all microphone input to a remote server would be really bad for battery life and data usage.

Not if you transcribe it first, and upload compressed text.

That would be "'96 MacBook Pros..." or I guess, since it was written by a Mac user, "’96 MacBook Pros..."

This comment pretty much sums it up:

  I, too, have not read the original article and have no urge
  to. This article is brilliant and just my cup of smart-
  ass-take-that kind of writing.

I concur. Besides, who believes what HuffPo says, anyway?

To clarify: The quality of the comment I quoted is indicative of the quality of TFA.

Here's how I'd trace him:

1) get access to the request logs of third-party includes on his page

2) look for requests made just before the page is published publicly

All requests are made through Tor. The Tails OS is configured to allow absolutely nothing through the clear internet.

Let's see who's watching us on stopwatching.us:

  dig MX stopwatching.us | grep -c google.com
  >>> 6

  curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c 'google.*\.com'
  >>> 6

  curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c facebook.com
  >>> 1

  curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c youtube.com
  >>> 0
  curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c youtube-nocookie.com
  >>> 1
  hey, at least someone /thought/ about it

  curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c typekit.net
  >>> 1

  curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c twitter.com
  >>> 5

  curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c cloudflare.com
  >>> 3

The list goes on...

EDIT: I should note that these could be harmless <a...> links, but most aren't, and I'm too lazy to update the regexes and rerun. You get the point though.

Seriously.

Why does every website come with 10thousand f#cking scripts loaded in the background? I hate this. Host your own goddamn js, fonts and whatnot.

Quite the opposite. The video -- because it's huge compared to JS, CSS, etc. -- /does/ make sense to host on YouTube. The /player/ does not belong embedded in the page though. Take a screenshot, host that on your own crummy web server, and link to YouTube, ideally with a notice to the effect of "Clicking this link will share your information with YouTube..."

Amen brother, amen!

As far as irony goes, I think the headline says it all:

> Rally Against Mass Surveillance Livestream [video] (stopwatching.us)

Don't worry, you can use DDG and still be tracked by Goolge! With content of some sort loaded from Google's servers on around 80% of all sites, this mostly happens without you doing anything. But if you're really concerned, just use Chrome and/or set your name servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Hmm, interesting point about the Google DNS servers. I'm not too familiar with DNS servers; anyone can give more details on how they could be used to track people? Does a DNS request contain enough information to allow for the kind of thing?

Just piecing together known data here but...

My IP address requests a particular site form DNS, in theory that request could be recorded. Even if Google doesn't know that I'm at that IP (which they could have gotten from some other site I'm logged into (say Amazon)) they know that my particular ip address has requested certain sites. They can then serve ads to that IP based on context

it is safe to assume that Google record IP information (among other things) from Google Adsense and Google Analytics... which you probably visit at least one site that use one or the other at least once a day..

DNS is a service that resolves a domain name to a specific IP address that handles requests for that domain, and is transparently invoked when visiting websites and other services.

See Google's FAQ: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq#privacy

That's a very well written FAQ.

Makes me feel much better about using their DNS.

Agreed. I just searched "PRISM" on DDG, and 8 out of top 10 results had some element loaded from a Google server (GA, fonts, jquery, search box, embedded youtube, etc.) Are you using Google's DNS server? Google owns the web. Face it.