[LMG S7] Issue 79: A Base for Data
Previously: Modern webpages rely on many third-party resources for their functionality. Blocking access to some domains may cause these webpages to break and...
![[LMG S6] Issue 78: uMatrix: voyuering the voyeurs](https://github.com/ngjunsiang/laymansguide/blob/release/season6/issue078/issue078_01.png?raw=true)
[LMG S6] Issue 78: uMatrix: voyuering the voyeurs
I belatedly realised that this issue was mis-scheduled, which is why there wasn’t an issue last week. My apologies! Previously: The default settings of most...
[LMG S6] Issue 77: Wearing clothes on the Internet
Previously: Cookies with the same domain as the site are first-party cookies, while cookies with domains different from the site are third-party cookies....
[LMG S6] Issue 76: Third-parties and cross-site resources
Previously: By not enforcing strict cookie policies on their own sites, publishers allowed advertisers to sneakily set cookies on their site audience. This...
[LMG S6] Issue 75: The Costs of Data Leakage
Previously: Data companies use the data they have gathered to determine what ads to serve you when you visit sites that load their cookie-setting scripts....
![[LMG S6] Issue 74: The Walls Have Pixels](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ngjunsiang/laymansguide/release/season6/issue074/issue074_01.png)
[LMG S6] Issue 74: The Walls Have Pixels
Previously: When a page loads advertisements through header bidding, it sends your cookie along with other information to an ad exchange. The ad exchange...
[LMG S6] Issue 73: The Heart of Darkness (Header Bidding)
Previously: QuantCast gathers a large amount of data on internet users directly through its cookie (which other publishers serve through their websites), and...
[LMG S6] Issue 72: The Data Brokers
Previously: In 2006, Quantcast offered complete audience analytics for any site that puts their cookie on the site. In this way, they managed to gather...
[LMG S6] Issue 71: The Rise of Audience Analytics
Previously: A tracking script retrieves the existing cookie on a web domain if there is one, or sets a cookie on a webpage if there isn’t an existing one....
![[LMG S6] Issue 70: The Cookie Factory](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ngjunsiang/laymansguide/release/season6/issue070/issue070_01.png)
[LMG S6] Issue 70: The Cookie Factory
Previously: Cookies are little fragments of information with a name and a value, and associated with a domain address. They are most commonly used to...
![[LMG S6] Issue 69: The Cookie Monster](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ngjunsiang/laymansguide/release/season6/issue069/issue069_01.png)
[LMG S6] Issue 69: The Cookie Monster
Previously: The old CPM model (cost per thousand impressions) in the early Internet was replaced by the CPC model (cost per click) after the dot-com bust....
[LMG S6] Issue 68: The Age of Bloat
Previously: Each click on a link, or even an ad, sends data to the server. This information can include an ID for the link you clicked, or the category of ad...
![[LMG S6] Issue 67: The Innocent Times](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ngjunsiang/laymansguide/release/season6/issue067/issue067_01.png)
[LMG S6] Issue 67: The Innocent Times
Previously: DoubleClick, the first commercially successfully ad server, launched in 1996. It ran a system that tracked the performance of banner ads across...
[LMG S6] Issue 66: Before the Cloud
Previously: Shared memory helps to reduce the amount of memory needed by all the applications running on an operating system. It also allows applications to...
![[LMG S5] Issue 65: Memory Sharing in the Operating System](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ngjunsiang/laymansguide/release/season5/issue065/issue065_01.png)
[LMG S5] Issue 65: Memory Sharing in the Operating System
Previously: Meltdown and Spectre require the programs executing them to have access to kernel memory space. Kernel address isolation attempts to prevent the...
[LMG S5] Issue 64: Fixing Meltdown and Spectre
Previously: For Meltdown and Spectre to work, they need two things: (1) Permission to carry out instructions (i.e. run programs) on the OS, and (2) knowledge...
[LMG S5] Issue 63: Limitations of Meltdown and Spectre
Previously: To snoop the cache, we: Flush the cache corresponding to the 256 memory addresses (to get a cache miss when attempting to load the data from...
[LMG S5] Issue 62: Cache snooping
Apologies for the delay in Issue 62, it took longer than expected to work out how to laymanise it enough to be easily understood. Much thanks to Alex for his...
[LMG S5] Issue 61: Mapping the cache
Previously: Speculative execution is a feature that lets the CPU speed up execution if it correctly predicts a decision point. The CPU carries out the...
[LMG S5] Issue 60: CPU Optimisation Part 2 – Speculative Execution and Spectre
Previously: A set of instructions can trick a CPU into reordering load instructions so that the data is temporarily loaded into the cache before the...