An example of this:
Bitcoin mining started on cpus, then moved to gpus, and now exists on dedicated asics.
A $200 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the ASIC is going to be a faster sha256 calculator
A $2000 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the GPU is going to be a faster sha256 calculator
A $200 GPU from today vs a $200 ASIC from 10 years ago vs a $200 CPU from today?.. You get the idea.
There’s no way to know without specific details which will be faster. You could be running software encryption on a raspberry pi from 5 years ago or the drive could be running an encryption ASIC from 10 years ago, etc
It’s almost certainly related to cloud-init, (the canonical tool for handling deployment automation) or Ubuntu pro (extra long support for backporting security packages to older distros, plus some conveniences). They’re pre installed as a convenience to paid users of those services, that’s the (IMHO, quite reasonable) model they use to fund the distro. I would expect that some or all of that traffic would disappear if you disable/remove those two services.
I have to imagine that most of these data brokers don’t have automated ways to remove information, it’s probably designed to be as annoying as possible to prevent people from doing it en-masse. If someone on mozilla’s end has to fill out a form and mail it and deal with ~200 brokers worth of constant intentional subtle constant changes (designed to break automation) to try and make services like this harder, the $9/mo seems almost reasonable.
Context/region blocking is a very quick and inexpensive path to basic security. At work I have sets of iptables rules to block regions by country code and by context (i.e VPN provider, datacenter provider, etc). I’ve found that some services will go from tens of thousands of brute force attempts per day to 1-2 per month. It really is crazy the amount of routine attacks that come through VPN providers if you host services in the professional world.
Does this mean that legitimate users can’t use a VPN to access our services? Yes, but we also don’t sell any data to any third parties so I don’t feel so bad about it.
Also, the first five digits were the same between the two numbers. Meta is guilty, but they’re guilty of grifting, not of giving a rogue AI access to some shadow database of personal details… yet? Lol