u/Mestik78

Hey everyone!

I recently noticed something slightly creepy while looking at the self-hosted, anonymous analytics (Umami) of my personal blog. I was getting weird, synchronized spikes of traffic at very specific times of the day from the same regions.

It turns out that mobile (and some desktop) browsers, in an attempt to save memory, suspend old forgotten tabs. When you open your browser app, it anticipates you and restores them in the background, sending a ping to the server.

This seemingly harmless memory-saving feature is basically broadcasting your sleep schedule, your working hours, and your daily habits to every single website you left open weeks or months ago. And while my self-hosted Umami doesn't trace the original user, other big platforms and trackers definitely use this for Browser Fingerprinting.

This realization got me thinking a lot about metadata leakage and how our browsers handle background tasks. I ended up writing a post on my blog reflecting on this issue and explaining why I've decided to start using Tor Browser for my everyday, casual surfing to mitigate this specific type of tracking.

You can read my full thoughts here: https://mestik78.com/en/blog/2026/06/28/metadatos-y-tor/

Has anyone else noticed this kind of background telemetry from modern browsers? What browser do you currently use for casual, non-authenticated browsing on your phone to prevent this?

I was trying to download some local AI models (Ollama) to my home server recently, and my connection kept dying. After 40 minutes of tracing packets, I realized the issue wasn't my setup. It was football.

In Spain, the professional football league (LaLiga) has been granted unprecedented, unmonitored power to combat piracy. Whenever there is a match, major ISPs activate dynamic, massive IP blocking.

Because they are currently at war with Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), they are blindly blocking shared IPs (like Cloudflare's) instead of specific domains. The collateral damage is massive. Recently, this blind blocking took down Docker's entire infrastructure for Spanish users just because a match was playing.

We even have a community website literally called "hayahora.futbol" (is there football right now) that developers use just to check if the Spanish internet is currently broken.

I wrote a short post translating this situation and diving deeper into the technical aspects of how this absurd censorship works. You can read the full breakdown here.

Have any other countries faced this level of collateral damage from corporate piracy enforcement?

I was looking into how neural networks process images and the parallel with human psychedelic experiences is mind-blowing.
In machine learning, if you take an artificial neuron trained to recognize something (like eyes or geometric shapes) and you intentionally "overload" or saturate it, the AI generates images that look exactly like classic psychedelic visuals (fractals, pareidolia, breathing geometry).
It made me realize that it's the same process behind psychedelics in our brain. By agonizing 5-HT2A receptors, they facilitate uncontrolled cross-talk and hyper-activate our visual cortex. The brain starts seeing patterns where there are none, just like an AI trying to find a dog's eye in static noise.
I wrote a short blog post exploring this philosophical connection and included some of the AI "trip" images for visual comparison. I think studying AI might actually be the key to decoding the human visual cortex during trips.
What do you guys think?