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The Grokkist letter is Danu's monthly letter about the whole Grokkist community: what people are making and thinking about, gatherings coming up, and a handful of Snackables, small good things worth your time.

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🔦 Blacklight

Blacklight is a real-time website privacy inspector: enter a URL and it scans for ad trackers, third-party cookies, session-monitoring scripts, and the dreaded Facebook Pixel, then reports back. A scan of one major news site turned up a whopping 46 ad trackers and 102 third-party cookies.

Grokkist Press

25 November 2023 · 1 minute

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themarkup.org

Blacklight is a real-time website privacy inspector: enter a URL and it scans for ad trackers, third-party cookies, session-monitoring scripts, and the dreaded Facebook Pixel, then reports back. A scan of one major news site turned up a whopping 46 ad trackers and 102 third-party cookies. It's built by The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions use technology to change our society — and publishes its datasets, code, and methodology so you can check the work.

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Keep reading

Nearby on the shelf.

Surprise meWild Margin

🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen

Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedSoma Isles

🎨 Sculpting with Tree Sap and Time

A 15-minute documentary following Kyoto artist Mine Tanigawa as she creates sculptures from urushi lacquer, a material used in Japan for over 7,000 years. Less a 'making of' than a portrait of attention: raw tree sap transformed through layer upon layer of colour, polishing and curing, eac

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedEntangled Vale

👁️ Iris Murdoch and Love as a Way of Seeing

Matthew Crawford revisits Iris Murdoch as a philosopher pushing back against thin, hyper-rational models of human life. For Murdoch, morality isn't mainly abstract reasoning but attention — the difficult practice of seeing the world, other people and oneself more clearly. Her radical claim

Grokkist Press · 1 min