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@serebit @skinnylatte what got him was paying for his “anonymous” account with his Platinum Visa like a normie buying socks on Amazon.
Proton handed over the payment identifier, Swiss authorities passed it to the FBI, and suddenly your anonymity has a name on it.
if you’re not paying with Monero or cash, you don’t have an anonymous email. you have encrypted email with a billing address. those are very different things.
@serebit @skinnylatte unless you’re planning on self hosting there is literally no other email service you could jump to that hasn’t done the same thing.
@boojum @skinnylatte 10000% this.
@CandlesARG @ublockorigin just checked - lumo comes back clean - 0 blocked requests.
in case you want to check it out for yourself, here are the docs: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger
@joseph11lim @sergiodomeyko anytime, internet friend :)
Did I understand this thread correctly that Mistral also does the same "bouncer" function as UBlock origin, but with the added advantage of EU ethos?
Not quite - it's not that Mistral is doing the same "bouncer" function as uBlock, it's that Mistral is built differently than the other AI websites in that it doesn't discretely spy on you.
In essence, there's very little (or nothing) for the bouncer (i.e. uBock) to do when you're using Mistral.
either way I highly encourage everyone to use uBlock :)
@dancingtreefrog @ublockorigin so long as you're using the LLM stuff within a browser, it's all the same ;)
@QuercusMacrocarpa @ublockorigin uMatrix is unfortunately abandoned — development ended in 2021, same developer as uBlock Origin, he just stopped. there's also an unpatched vulnerability in it so I'd avoid it at this point.
uBlock Origin in medium mode covers most of what uMatrix used to do for this specific threat — it blocks third party scripts and XHR requests by default which is exactly what catches the telemetry pipelines I documented.
one important caveat though: if you're on Chrome, uBlock Origin was gutted by Google in late 2024 as part of their Manifest V3 changes. the full version no longer works on Chrome. for real protection you need Firefox or Brave with uBlock Origin installed. which, honestly, is probably worth a separate post.
@jakebrake @cloud @OlivierBurnier @ublockorigin i’m fucking terrified to ask why you know that.
@sergiodomeyko every time you open one of these AI chat websites, before you type a single word, the website is secretly making hundreds of connections to other companies’ servers in the background.
those connections are sending those companies information about you — what browser you use, what computer you have, your screen size, your timezone, sometimes a unique digital fingerprint that can identify you specifically.
you’re paying a monthly subscription for these AI tools, and they’re ALSO selling information about how you use them to analytics companies, ad companies, and in Google’s case, adding it to the giant file they already have on you from Gmail, Search, Maps, and everything else.
uBlock Origin is a free browser extension that blocks all of this. it’s like a bouncer for your browser. Lmk if you want some help installing it :)
hope that helps. welcome to the modern internet - it’s a mess out here.
@siklist pihole can block requests by fqdn, but as you’ll notice, a lot of the third-party tracking infra was being proxied through other non-tracking infra to get around this. If Claude code is somehow loading in JS artifacts (idk if it can or not) it could bypass pihole.
Mistral: two blocked requests.
Cloudflare Insights ("is the site up") and a single Intercom beacon POST that didn't even retry.
that's it. no Statsig. no tracking GIFs. no Google Analytics. no distributed tracing. no proof-of-work challenge. no KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD. nothing.
a French AI company nobody talks about is running the cleanest frontend in the entire field by a factor of roughly 150x and we're all sleeping on it
les français ont tout compris
@Viss ask and you shall receive.
@dancingtreefrog @ublockorigin download the browser extension! it will work with the default config :)
You're paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.
I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.
Claude:
ChatGPT:
Gemini:
When uBlock blocks Gemini's requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.
KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.
Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.
All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.
Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin
@Viss I mean aren’t you curious though? What exactly are they watching? Perhaps they want to simply share it with you ;)