Brian Merchant, How email open tracking quietly took over the world , in Wired, 11 December 2017. [Online]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-email-open-tracking-quietly-took-over-the-web/ It is no longer a secret that every website you visit silently tracks you in an effort to maximise ad revenue. What is less known is that emails also track you, through the use of tracking pixels and redirect links. These techniques were used by spammers and legitimate companies alike when creating newsletters or other mass email, in order to figure out their reach. What’s happening now is that private people are also using these techniques in order to create invisible and intrusive read receipts for email, which is incredibly frustrating from a privacy point of view. My solution to the tracking woes? I only open the plain-text component of email, which gets rid of tracking pixels entirely. Redirect links are harder to beat, and I don’t have a good solution for this. Dan Luu, Computer latency 1977–
Samuel Vee, I see trad people , in Status 451, 5 November 2017. [Online]: https://status451.com/2017/11/05/i-see-trad-people/ It seems that more and more, I’m sharing articles that would be frowned upon by the mainstream. I see this as a way to break some of the bubbles that are a part of life in a left-leaning college town. In this article, Samuel Vee cites theories by Haidt and Graham to understand why people who identify either as progessive or conservative do things that are decidedly un-progressive or un-conservative. In doing so, Vee argues that our political leanings come in through our moral foundations, and that these are innate, therefore identifying as part of the other political ideology is akin to being in the closet. Vee makes another point right in the beginning of the article pointing out the social progress that we have already achieved, and mentions, rightly so, that we should view today’s moral and social issues through the lens of society fifty years ago. This re