81–90 of 154 posts
Proof: you won't see this unless you show dead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that popular uses for the Web today include social networking, e-commerce, web apps, and online access to services like banking, I think the idea that sites should just display static information and should work better without JS and cookies is at least a decade out of date. Pushing for a very limited web is a battle that was lost long ago. What needs to stop is the idea that just because JS is useful for inter…
> Given that popular uses for the Web today include social networking, e-commerce, web apps, and online access to services like banking, I think the idea that sites should just display static information and should work better without JS and cookies is at least a decade out of date. Do you realise that every item on your list wasn't just possible but flourished without JavaScript, and works fine without third-party c…
No, I don't realise that at all.
Imagine how tedious it would be even to use a relatively simple discussion forum like HN if you had to wait for a full page reload every time you hit a voting button or expanded/contracted a thread.
That's about as simple an interaction as you can get, but there are countless other simple examples where JS-based interaction is much more responsive and easier to use than a round-trip to the server. Think real-time form validation, for example.
At the more complicated end of the spectrum, how exactly would you implement a web app like, say, a spreadsheet, without any client-side interaction?
JavaScript is ... swallowing up what was a thriving hypertext infrastructure.
Sure it was, 20 years ago, but the technology has evolved to serve new purposes, as technologies do. The Web of 2017 is unquestionably far more useful for far more people than the Web of 1997, and the interactivity offered by JS is a significant contributory factor.
What we really need is a device/OS level "ID" that can be read by any app or website so that it is stable. Since it's controlled by the OS, resetting your identity is as simple as generating a new ID. This single change would improve security and performance across the web and remove the vast majority of fingerprinting being used today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Navigation is typically comprised of text and/or images. Some websites need more than text or images.
Very few websites, maybe 1 out of 100, most offenders are just rendering content in the browser for some reason. Although even bigger offenders are not individuals, but companies, outright blocking access to client's websites without javascript. So far it's mostly Cloudflare, I think most people using the web without javascript hate them the most, hopefully the trend won't continue.
1. Is there anything the site owner can do to turn that off?
2. Is it because they inject some kind of DDoS prevention/tracking thing? This suggests crawlers load JS, which I wouldn't have necessarily assumed.
Identity (as in a stable handle for your browser/device/profile) is an important part of the web. It's tied into all kinds of functionality and security. What we really need is a device/OS level "ID" that can be read by any app or website so that it is stable. Since it's controlled by the OS, resetting your identity is as simple as generating a new ID. This single change would improve security and performance across…
Resist! Use adblockers, disable cookies which live over the session by default, turn off JS if you can. When we get to critical mass, the advertising networks will come back with a new deal. I wonder if we can come up with a widely adopt(able|ed) fingerprint that we can mask ourselves with, do any of these identifying bits actually make the web more usable for us?
How is this news? The adult and casino industries have been using this technology for years now to avoid fraud.
1. Are ad companies ahead of the research and have been doing things like this all along? 2. In theory you can look at JavaScript served from ad sites and reverse engineer to see what they are tracking. Has anybody tried to make a database of which ad vendors run which things in browsers? (Similar to how malware is reverse engineered?)
Take a look at the work of Steven Englehardt around cookie syncing and gpu fingerprinting [0] [1]
[0]: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2014/08/07/the-hidden-perils-o...
[1]: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/01/12/retrospective-look-...
Resist! Use adblockers, disable cookies which live over the session by default, turn off JS if you can. When we get to critical mass, the advertising networks will come back with a new deal. I wonder if we can come up with a widely adopt(able|ed) fingerprint that we can mask ourselves with, do any of these identifying bits actually make the web more usable for us?
Not all of those identifying bits have anything to do with the web. For example, your OS, your monitor size and color depth, the fonts you have installed. Those things make your overall computing experience useful, whether or not they improve your web experience. It might be more practical to work towards browsers that do not have access to data that is not relevant to the web experience. I do need to know the size o…
Isn't that info still enough for finger printing the browser, if they have enough different capabilities?
Resist! Use adblockers, disable cookies which live over the session by default, turn off JS if you can. When we get to critical mass, the advertising networks will come back with a new deal. I wonder if we can come up with a widely adopt(able|ed) fingerprint that we can mask ourselves with, do any of these identifying bits actually make the web more usable for us?
Unless you disable JavaScript it would be to hard to stop the fingerprinting. If you shut off JavaScript a lot of sites won't work