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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been.

    Is it still more expensive if they just shelve it and pretend to give it extra development? I haven’t seen any details on why it wasn’t ready for release or what they are changing or adding? A quarter billion dollars in savings seems like pretty good motivation for a company to park a project for 6 to 12 months.
















  • Really bad headline. The actual article is about a study showing that browser fingerprinting is being used in real time in pricing target ads to your browser.

    To investigate whether websites are using fingerprinting data to track people, the researchers had to go beyond simply scanning websites for the presence of fingerprinting code. They developed a measurement framework called FPTrace, which assesses fingerprinting-based user tracking by analyzing how ad systems respond to changes in browser fingerprints. This approach is based on the insight that if browser fingerprinting influences tracking, altering fingerprints should affect advertiser bidding — where ad space is sold in real time based on the profile of the person viewing the website — and HTTP records — records of communication between a server and a browser.

    “This kind of analysis lets us go beyond the surface,” said co-author Jimmy Dani, Saxena’s doctoral student. “We were able to detect not just the presence of fingerprinting, but whether it was being used to identify and target users — which is much harder to prove.”

    The researchers found that tracking occurred even when users cleared or deleted cookies. The results showed notable differences in bid values and a decrease in HTTP records and syncing events when fingerprints were changed, suggesting an impact on targeting and tracking.

    Additionally, some of these sites linked fingerprinting behavior to backend bidding processes — meaning fingerprint-based profiles were being used in real time, likely to tailor responses to users or pass along identifiers to third parties.