Link-o-Rama: Google testing new targeted ads, FreeBSD’s big oops, Henry Rollins’ record habits & Robyn Hitchcock’s essential records

Posted On 5 April 2021

Some interesting bits this time around. If you’re a Chrome user you need to read up on Google’s plans for replacing third-party cookies. FreeBSD users, check out what almost made it into 13.0. Music nerds, read on for some gems from Henry Rollins and Robyn Hitchcock.

• From the EFF Deeplinks blog: “A switch has silently been flipped in millions of instances of Google Chrome: those browsers will begin sorting their users into groups based on behavior, then sharing group labels with third-party trackers and advertisers around the web.”
  These days I only use Chrome for work, because Red Hat uses the Google Suite (or whatever it’s called this week) and my work browsing habits don’t really reflect anything else I do. For personal use, I use Firefox.
• Spin has a “5 Albums I Can’t Live Without” from Robyn Hitchcock. A few surprises, for me, despite being a longtime Hitchcock fan. No Syd Barrett, no Captain Beefheart, but Roxy Music and Gillian Welch. The picks are in Hitchcock’s own words, so it’s worth reading.
• The Discogs Blog, features a post by Henry Rollins on why he collects multiple pressings of the same records. “If there is a band that I like, I want all the pressings from all the territories it was released in, and any test pressing or acetate. I find the slight differences in label copy, styles of in-house production in different countries, mistakes, matrix information, etc., to be of great interest.”
  The world needs more music obsessives like Rollins.
• Ars Pro covers how 40,000 lines of flawed code nearly made it into FreeBSD’s 13.0 release. “After roughly nine months of part-time development, Macy committed his port—largely unreviewed and inadequately tested—directly into the HEAD section of FreeBSD’s code repository, where it was scheduled for incorporation into FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.“

More than 20 years ago, when Linux was still wet around the ears, I remember a NetBSD proponent talking my ear off about how Linux was doomed (doomed!) and that the *BSDs would “win” in the long run because their code was more elegant and so forth. I’m still waiting… (To be fair, not all of my predictions and hot takes from the late 90s / early 00s were all that accurate, either.)