Post Aw1l3XKjpzGo4fhVLs by Mondobizarrro@social.xenofem.me
(DIR) More posts by Mondobizarrro@social.xenofem.me
(DIR) Post #AvyAkNBd9xlPHJ7j2u by mook@possum.city
2025-07-09T19:55:07.607Z
6 likes, 3 repeats
turns out that blocking ads, using privacy frontends, running custom android roms and linux, browsing with the tor browser and other things actually do protect your privacy and make it harder for the feds and megacorps to know what you're up to because most of mass surveilance is purely passive and relies on people to actively give out their personal information to data brokers and their profiling or whatever isn't nearly as advanced as they want us to think. remembering we had a friend stay with us who used an iphone and apparrently you can't block ads on safari ( pathetic ) and then we got targeted ads for the first time in years. People actually think this is acceptable.
(DIR) Post #AvyAwBWAMz8EYyMSgK by nyx@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-09T21:37:34.881967Z
3 likes, 0 repeats
@mook I wouldn't want to make the mistake of underestimating the enemy but I think it's a bit ridiculous how people fearmonger about the coming literal 1984 Palantir surveillance state dystopia when you can like... just choose to not use most of this shit and have like a normiesona for whatever stuff you can't avoid being forced to use. it's not that fucking hard and only getting easier because most of the internet has become fucking garbage that isn't worth using. I think the ruling class is just hoping that people continue to indulge in self-destructive social media addiction behaviors forever that are actively ripping apart the mental health of most people in the world, which seems like not a sustainable surveillance state model :trollface:
(DIR) Post #AvyBAuoUl5HX6CxUVU by georgia@netzsphaere.xyz
2025-07-09T21:40:12.001942Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@mook I use lineageos and linux with plenty of ad and tracking blocking. my great sin is gmail and then I use insta for posting tarot spreads and thats it. sigh.
(DIR) Post #AvyCixzNYfLQkQqljU by coolboymew@shitposter.world
2025-07-09T21:57:47.471255Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@mook >And then we got targeted adsAnd the targeting was heavily irrelevantThis is what is absolutely fucking nuts about all this data. They have all this data and still ends up missing massively. Facebook had my interests mapped out and still couldn't figure out that I didn't own the house when I lived at my parents house and I don't even have a drivers license, but I still would get house renovation and car ads. Useless
(DIR) Post #AvyDLSllZ7llDRq6Pg by mook@possum.city
2025-07-09T22:01:32.754Z
2 likes, 1 repeats
@nyx@social.xenofem.me spot on, and with the surveillance shit, when you are surveilling literally everything it's almost worse than doing nothing, now they're using all this AI that doesn't even fucking work, and most of the stuff people used to say about the NSA's abilities turned out to be bullshit, consider how much drug traffick goes thru USPS daily, while there are ways the Feds can de-anymize tor users, the network is bigger than ever and doing that takes more and more resources. The fact that Hamas is still fully operational despite killing hundreds of thousands of people and demolishing all of Gaza tells you all this shit about pattern recognition and fingerprint profiling or whatever was never that great to begin with, just like that attack on Hezbollah with the phones but just old school social engineering, nothing particularly technological about putting an explosive in a walkie talkie -- so what we have most to fear from are the old methods of policing, something mother cops and militaries are worse at than everthe one thing that irks is is the backdoors in smart phones, or how it's harder and harder to get rid of google/apple spyware, tho with GrapheneOS it's more secure and easier to install than any point in history. Windows going full on Malware is a bad sign, but again, no better time to switch to Linux, i have my mom on PCLinuxOS a true boomer distro, she loves it
(DIR) Post #AvyEs7gj49zjLNcRsW by coolboymew@shitposter.world
2025-07-09T22:21:50.828491Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@mook I followed a lot of anime pages and I don't think I got a single freaking anime or anime related advertisement on Facebook. Crazy. What's crazier is that Facebook ads actually disclose how they targeted you... And the Facebook interests? Didn't see them popping up even once, nobody used that shit!You know where I would get "targeted advert" however? The 4chan board banners that are old school ad campaigns and not targeted. I'd actually get anime advert, like from J-List, on an actually related website/part of the website. Crazy, huh?
(DIR) Post #AvyV8xxO6AFXLuSwgi by icedquinn@blob.cat
2025-07-10T01:24:07.786991Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@mook they still scrape loads and send targeted ads. its just you don't see them, so everyone is still paying to buy the data and cram propaganda that misses you entirely. which is especially funny :blobcatdevil:
(DIR) Post #AvyWGJIzDwuvXodOhk by mook@possum.city
2025-07-10T01:34:29.930Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@icedquinn@blob.cat that's true, and funny, i think it's a matter of degree tho, like i will occasionally open up a web browser without adblock and get a targeted add and it's guessing, so sometimes it thinks i'm a single mom, or a hotep or a right wing gun nut
(DIR) Post #AvyWGKhU2M6fs56TWi by icedquinn@blob.cat
2025-07-10T01:36:39.384978Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@mook twitch lately keeps trying to sell me a lexus or a copy of dianetics, and i just laugh because there is a near 0% chance i would ever buy scientology manuals.
(DIR) Post #AvyWIWzFKL7kYYSa5w by icedquinn@blob.cat
2025-07-10T01:37:06.006110Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@mook if they sent synthesizer ads i'd be fucked though. somehow they can't figure it out.
(DIR) Post #AvzLRhB1uBxYQe6C36 by realpetrateal@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-10T08:17:12.953959Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@nyx @mook as one of the people who fearmonger(?) about Palantir, for one, I don't use "most of this shit" (and I do use privacy and security measures like OP mentioned) but I still raise these issues to encourage others to move away from corporate platforms and improve their privacy and infosec. there are people like you describe, but their outrage would only be ridiculous if they only had a personal grievance with being surveilled, and not a broader concern for the world that could only be satisfied by not just themselves but everyone taking action.
(DIR) Post #AvzLRikA53ejHtXlRo by realpetrateal@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-10T08:51:49.301963Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@nyx @mook second, it's not just corporate social media or whatever that is surveilled (side note: on that front, a "normiesona" for what you're forced to use is still a sphere of personal information and activity that is surveilled, so while important to do it's only a containment measure). where we go irl and what we purchase is all tracked as well. our legal information and documents, too, are all in Palantir's database now. along with that, web scrapers harvest data from all over the web, including the fediverse. doesn't matter if that data is tied to a real personal identity or is anonymous.
(DIR) Post #AvzLRjaGxJL7tVvNfk by realpetrateal@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-10T09:00:18.654460Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@mook @nyx tbh, I'm less concerned about what the surveillance state does with my data as I am about what they do with all the data they already have and what more they are harvesting in general (which is a lot more than just surveillance of people btw). in that regard though, I'm also less fearful of their competence (which is severely lacking on both a human and technological level) and more their recklessness and lack of ethics. e.g. Palantir's ineffective predictive policing being racially biased, and people getting detained and blackbagged without due process because they were flagged as illegal immigrants or terrorists (with ICE and the US military getting massive new funding, that is going to get a lot worse). frankly I don't think posting on fedi instead of twitter and watching youtube videos through invidious would have protected anyone from ICE raiding their workplaces that Palantir targeted based on IRS data. hard to call any of that reality "fearmongering".
(DIR) Post #AvzLRkL49KloEdokbo by nyx@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-10T11:10:01.584181Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@realpetrateal @mook I think you've wrongly assumed that what I posted is applicable to you
(DIR) Post #Aw0HXYgcBG5dAtNAfo by kittenlikeasmallcat@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-10T22:00:20.649846Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@realpetrateal @mook @nyx I think I have something like meaningful or relevent to say, do let me know if that's not so, yea? So a lot of my own politics, for lack of a more expansive and applicable word, comes down to "I'm not gonna do shit that grosses me out."Like I don't eat meat for a couple reasons, the most reliable and first is "I think it's nasty." I don't have an instagrtikfacewhatever because I feel, in my skin, that it's gross, its icky, it viscerally displeases me. I value things like consensus, communist egoist anarchist ideologies and methodologies, and non-proprietary technology because the alternatives just make me kind of nauseous, not because I'm fully deluded into believing that my influence is greater than it really is, or that something critical and immediate hinges on those choices. I'm not sure that any of these things are going to change or fix anything about the world -maybe barely even in such limited terms as my own experience of it!One thing this results in is a decoupling of personal practice from global tactics - even when something "doesn't work" to solve something outside of my control, I'm not discouraged from continuing to live out what my values are - it combats the notion of pointlessness overriding my actual will. The ultimate arguable pointlessness of something like not talking to cops, using full disk encryption at rest and adblock and DNS and Signal and a VPN, being ready to fight a motherfucker with a fat metal pipe or my fists, {ABSOLUTELY REDACTED MATERIAL}, inventing methods and aliases to leverage common platforms, et al, is no longer an inhibition from indulging in those things and reaping the possible benefits, even if those benefits are as insignificant as "Not seeing a goddamn advertisement for BLEGH that didn't gross me out." It removes the conditional and cancels the fear, guilt, and perhaps rote obligation that's so often associated with and prompted by deeply paranoid and pretentious scolding shit which presents the panopticon of leviathan as being immortal, invulnerable, flawless, complete.
(DIR) Post #Aw1TTdk8pYImJ9sdKC by mook@possum.city
2025-07-09T20:01:19.320Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
a very common opinion among absolute chodes is that 'what's the point of blocking ads, using linux etc the NSA knows everything about you" okoy well i'm not watching a fucking ad, okay i'm not, maybe if you didn't consume so much explicit brainwashing you'd be less of a sheep
(DIR) Post #Aw1k42zK2x7EIMMZjU by mook@possum.city
2025-07-10T09:55:59.639Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@realpetrateal@social.xenofem.me @nyx@social.xenofem.me where we go irl and what we purchase is all tracked as well. our legal information and documents, too, are all in Palantir's database now. . . this is not particularly a new thing, the tracking of all purchases by credit agencies and so the NSA &c. was going on since well before 1990's, likewise universal surveillance cameras -- tho even now the state of facial recognition is pretty hit or miss -- Palintir has had contracts with the intelligence state since it's founding, and the government always, by definition, has all your legal information, what's new is not the scope of the surveillance, but the extra-legal 'gloves off' policy of the current regime, and even that's a matter of degree. > web scrapers harvest data from all over the web, including the fediverse. doesn't matter if that data is tied to a real personal identity or is anonymous.Yes, but it actually does matter whether it's real or anonymous, because data that can't be linked to you can be anything or anyone, and there's so much data that there's really nothing they can do with it, and it's increasingly difficult to even differentiate between the activity of humans and bots. You can also just not post any incriminating or personal information on the public internet. the point is there's always blind spots and ways to go undetected.
(DIR) Post #Aw1k449zglFJvkMc0O by realpetrateal@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-11T13:19:52.313913Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@mook @nyx the "new thing" is the extent of data integration, alongside the blitz-scaling of Silicon Valley's domination over the clearnet and seizing of state power. surveillance tools used to be more disjointed and various databases were not connected, now it's all being increasingly integrated into a central cloud database (or more accurately, a federated network of databases). Palantir is still far from a true monopoly, especially on a global scale, and until then the surveillance apparatus is not yet a true panopticon, but that is their explicit goal and it (or something close enough to it) is feasible with the political, economic, and social power they have. the Palantir puppet regime of the Trump admin and DOGE have vastly accelerated that process.>Yes, but it actually does matter whether it's real or anonymous, because data that can't be linked to you can be anything or anyone, and there's so much data that there's really nothing they can do with it, and it's increasingly difficult to even differentiate between the activity of humans and bots. You can also just not post any incriminating or personal information on the public internet. the point is there's always blind spots and ways to go undetected.my point there was that it's not just about surveilling individuals. in this case I was the one being vague lol (intentionally). I'll say this: one, anonymous profiles are also surveilled and targeted. two, bulk data on social behavior and information flows has many uses, in the same way that anonymized research data in fields like sociology does. and in fact, they are able to use it (and they do). humans can't do anything with Big Data, but analytics software from companies like Palantir can. it's actually the thing I find most concerning about 'AI', far more than generative LLMs.
(DIR) Post #Aw1k45UEkz262oqICG by k4713@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-11T13:55:16.409330Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@realpetrateal @mook @nyx 2 points:i think everyone is overestimating how much these pieces are actually moving together in an effective manner, whether it be at the government level or on the palantir level. large organizations have control structures that are slow as all fuck, especially in the government. acting like these organizations and everyone inside of it are planning these evil actions and making plotted movements overnight is giving them way too much credit.all the scary hubub about palantir you should take with a grain of salt. tools like Envision & Foundry are only as good as the operators and the data sources. it's the glorified version of dumping all of your information on a spreadsheet and writing equations and dumping it out on a Visio with a shit AI thrown in that won't even give you a final product that you can present.
(DIR) Post #Aw1kJIT6lzRaeOZCrI by Mondobizarrro@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-11T14:58:13.335176Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@nyx @mook i literally had moments recently that were like "man this social media so ass im going outside"
(DIR) Post #Aw1kOgGDk3alt96d8q by jhwgh1968@chaos.social
2025-07-09T21:57:27Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@mook replying to "chodes"Fun fact abt "they know everything about you anyway"They don't know necessarily it's *you*It's an e-mail address, a phone number, a throwaway account, a username, an IP, etc. The data brokers and e.g. Meta's bullshit "provide value" via correlation with "you"DHS was made with its billions of USD back in 2001 to create "Data Fusion Centers" -- bc that problem was unsolvable. Now it's just rly hardWe can't be invisible, but we can be a NULL table join
(DIR) Post #Aw1kWXc1mPP1No3QFE by mook@possum.city
2025-07-09T22:40:43.271Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@nyx@social.xenofem.me worth repeating I think the ruling class is just hoping that people continue to indulge in self-destructive social media addiction behaviors forever that are actively ripping apart the mental health of most people in the world, which seems like not a sustainable surveillance state model. it really is just keep turning up the slop' just like the legacy media increasingly says straight up bullshit without justification -- meanwhile massive austerity, unprecedented police brutality, clearly this can't go on foreverthere's a factoid going around like 'we've created more data in last 5 years than any point in human history, just mountains of bullshit data with no value, and it creates more of a problem for them than for us since they can't differentiate between truth and lie, they don't seem to understand what a problem this is for an information economy and they've fired most of the people who could possibly deal with it. long side-note: notice how AI and advances in data storage feed into each other, since the same financial entities own both the hard drive manufacturers and AI firms, it's only rational for them build data centers to produce slop to sell hard drives, line goes up. I'm reminded of the classical fascist theory of propaganda, which is basically "Yell at people over and over again and you'll persuade them" which obviously doesn't work, but the ruling class now thinks in a simlar mechanistic way, they're not that smart, they just have such a massive accumulation of knowledge, wealth and capacity for violence that it's taking a while for them to piss everything away
(DIR) Post #Aw1l3XKjpzGo4fhVLs by Mondobizarrro@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-11T15:06:35.540556Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@realpetrateal @mook @nyx on that note, i considered a good method of opsec before i knew what opsec was (as i was worried about this shit in HS even due to being in a lot of "fringe" reactoid circles) was to be a "digital nobody" or as id probably call it "digital greyrocking" if the only expectation is that my information will be stored somewhere and used to target propaganda down my throat (something im only barely making an active effort to mitigate, admittedly i could do more) i might as well try to give them as few bones as possible: to look like a normal person they wont bother as much. if i look like plain jane consoomer online (easier said than done if you arent) then the system in theory wouldnt do much. idk in hindsight most of this seems like misplaced naivety.
(DIR) Post #Aw1wdGnNtxiAhgLDVo by realpetrateal@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-11T15:06:31.572635Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@k4713 @mook @nyx >tools like Envision & Foundry are only as good as the operators and the data sources.it's not Palantir's products that make it special. the company started out with an unusable 'prototype' that was hastily copypasted from a PayPal tool; it was the US Intelligence Community, not the company itself, that later developed its actual functional software. Palantir was always from the start a CIA front, and is now akin to a glorified shell company of the network state. no 'tech' company is really defined by its products anymore (they're all basically banks that outsource contractors), but rather by who is behind it and whom it serves. in Palantir's case, it's the most powerful people in the world (namely Peter Thiel) and the US government. that's what makes it special. just as Thiel is the leader of neoreaction, Palantir is essentially the leading governing body of the network state. for that reason it cannot be understood like a traditional company or organization. it also is run like a cult, with Alex Karp basically being the CEO-king (very much a protypical model for a neocameralist corpo-state). it's not giving them too much credit to simply observe the immeasurable evil they have done and are doing. that said Palantir is more like the executive branch of the larger network driving the real conspiracy that is accelerating the world into technofeudal hyper-fascism, so it is important to zoom out.
(DIR) Post #Aw2z9lNS83eFssnFvU by k4713@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-11T18:56:16.806006Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@realpetrateal @mook @nyx > it was the US Intelligence Community, not the company itself, that later developed its actual functional software/gen what leads you to believe that the CIA directly developed it? afaik In Q Tel invests in a lot of things, though you probably know more information than i do on how that actually all works.>Palantir is essentially the leading governing body of the network state. for that reason it cannot be understood like a traditional company or organization.w/ the above in mind, this might be overstated. they're providing a platform to streamline and change how things are processed, but they're just a corporation focusing on creating a solution to a problem as any other ctrs working for the gov are. i think we'd be speaking about it vastly differently if Palantir was a set of open source products created and maintained by a national lab. my point is the 'scary hubub' about palantir farming everything and knowing everything about everyone is misguided, hating on the company for their influence and people involved and who they relate to though i completely agree w/. fuck palantir. government was and could be doing this anyways though, w/ palantir they just have a shiny tool to try and streamline it what they were already doing. :P
(DIR) Post #Aw2z9mHSloS2gazzEG by realpetrateal@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-12T03:44:07.643105Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@k4713 @mook @nyx > /gen what leads you to believe that the CIA directly developed it? afaik In Q Tel invests in a lot of things, though you probably know more information than i do on how that actually all works.In-Q-Tel was Palantir's first outside investor. they invested $2 million (the highest they gave to any startup at the time) and connected the company's engineers with officials from the IC to collaborate in developing the software. https://web.archive.org/web/20150401083729/http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125200842406984303 admittedly I was being a bit facetious to give all the credit to the IC. sparse accounts from Palantir personnel and military & intelligence officials seem to imply that company engineers did most if not all the programming while intelligence analysts advised them on what to do and gave feedback on their progress in frequent meetings over years of trial and error. that happens to be Palantir's method with all their clients. as a lean startup, rather than selling fully-featured products developed in-house, their "engineers" have acted more like sales representatives, meeting with clients to implement requested features and iterate on the products over time. Palantir personnel are as much the service as the software is, if not more.what they developed with the IC was the user interface of Palantir software: a search tool for querying data from existing data sets, using plain language rather than database languages like SQL. interestingly, like the initial prototype, it continued to be a UI without a robust backend. all the actual work of collecting data into those databases remained the task of surveillance technologies and intelligence gathering, and analyzing it the task of analysts and other analytics tools. the signature accomplishment of the collaboration between Palantir and the IC wasn't developing the UI, but integrating the agencies' previously separate databases into one platform. in that sense, Palantir engineers developed the frontend, but the IC itself is the real backend.
(DIR) Post #AwG8xD6dWROeeVALrs by k4713@social.xenofem.me
2025-07-11T19:01:05.602144Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
had someone crash out, incorrectly paraphrase my statements, and claim i was apologizing for fascism by saying "the government is slow and big corporations are too", "palantir tools are only scary when people are using them for scary things", and "palantir tools are actually kind of ass and just streamlining things that are already there". gg...