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When Yeeun Jo, a student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) contacted me in 2025 to ask about data tracking in app advertisements related to women’s health and pregnancy I was a bit skeptical. I think I first told her along the lines that while such data collection was broad it was rarely so…
Today I was setting up Hermes to see how it does with web research. I chose DeepSeek V4 because I know it is cheap, but seeing it’s pricing next to Anthropic and OpenAI ‘frontier’ models is crazy. Nearly a 50x price increase based on tokens alone, let alone how much pondering any of their models…
AppGoblin lets any user, from anywhere, request to scan any mobile app for the SDKs, trackers and API calls the app makes. How it works? Want to scan a lot of apps? AppGoblin has a 100% free android app that lets you select apps from your device. This lets you select groups or multiple apps…
Clipboard contents: sudo bash -c ‘rm -rf .local/share/waydroid/data/media/*’ I was reminded today that the Cursor app I’ve installed likely has access to my clipboard. After an SSH debugging session fixing a full disk I opened Cursor and without haven’t even touched this file in week it auto suggested the above function name and command.
Cash in on the investor frenzy: a quick PSA that LLMs have free tiers While some people (my friends included) are out there paying $200 a month to OpenAI and Anthropic, I’d just like to share that if you need to save some money now is the time to cash in on the high valuations…
I’ve been pretty cavalier with using AI. I think once I got used to not fully trusting it’s truthfulness, and instead using it like a teacher that I question and verify. But this past month I’ve been getting more uncomfortable with the answers. Especially ones that I can see are digging up little nuggets of…
About 5 months ago I made the decision to start self hosting my own S3. I was working on AppGoblin’s SDK tracking of the top 100k Android and iOS apps so was wanting a lot of space, but for cheap. I got really lucky with getting a second hand Framework laptop. The laptop was missing…
I recently started helping a less technical friend and had my first chance to see/use Contabo VPS. I’ve been really surprised at their default security practices so far. Contabo’s default VPS creation seems to be root user and password? If you go to “Advanced” the default is to create a user called “admin” (good!) and…
This is the full list of the main API endpoints that apps send data to. This is across ~70k android apps and the smallest endpoint has about ~90 apps that send data to it, meaning it’s unlikely to be an app developer’s domain. Then I checked whether these domains were in any of: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts, https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt…
I recently started using Contabo VPS’ while working with some friends and at some point we decided we wanted to use local networks. On all other major cloud providers this is free, faster and encouraged to send data over the private local network rather than across the public internet when communicating with two instances. Contabo?…