101–110 of 160 posts
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Even better when used in conjunction with Firefox’s Tracking Protection (`privacy.trackingprotection.enabled` in about:config).
Well I guess I didn't know that! I thought 'do not track' was on and I was OK but trackingprotection is a separate option in Firefox configuration.
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What's up with this "Ayn Rand fanboys" meme? I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant.
Pretty much just Reddit leaking into HN. Some people live in a political/cultural "tribe", and see the entire world through a prism where everything they dislike is linked to "the other tribe". They often punctuate every paragraph with some meme jab at the other tribe, even if it's seemingly irrelevant for everyone else who doesn't share the same prism. On Reddit, this results in imaginary Internet points (i.e. upvot…
what if instead of using ad blockers we use ad amplifiers that downloaded 10 or 100 copies of video ads to make sure we got the data correct? Serving video is pretty expensive. How big are the ad networks' margins? Let's see who blinks first.
Ironically if you make this look like "click fraud" you can probably ensure that the site doesn't get paid for serving ads - but the ad network was still paid by their clients.
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This. If any Good citizen site ever thought about honoring DNT they got their plans crushed when Microsoft did this. It was a silly proposal from the start but a hopeful one. Hopeful that people would do the right thing. The web was always built on assumptions that the other side would do the right thing in that context DNT was not so silly. This one failed. Because Microsoft didn't do the right thing. They decided t…
What a nonsense apologetic approach. Define "the right thing"? Blocking tracking by default sounds like the "right thing" to me. I'm not sure how "being a good citizen on the internet" became synonymous with "bending over to advertising moguls" or "thinking about the poor starving blogger who must partake in that advertisement tracking ad tech nonsense and blocking that is taking food from his kids". Advertising and…
The other side of this coin is that when you voluntarily send data to the server, what they do with it is generally their business (complying with local laws etc).
If you want to "block tracking" you should prevent your computer from sending trackable data to the server. Complaining that theyre keeping data about you is tilting at windmills: good luck preventing it.
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This. If any Good citizen site ever thought about honoring DNT they got their plans crushed when Microsoft did this. It was a silly proposal from the start but a hopeful one. Hopeful that people would do the right thing. The web was always built on assumptions that the other side would do the right thing in that context DNT was not so silly. This one failed. Because Microsoft didn't do the right thing. They decided t…
I think you're putting too much blame on Microsoft here. DNT was always garbage, the fact that as soon as anyone used it (it becoming default for IE being the push in this case) it would fall apart just shows that it was always doomed. Shouldn't not being tracked be the default? Shouldn't we be opting into targeted ads, not out of them? Seems reasonable, if DNT weren't garbage, to have it be on by default. But it was…
Ok, honestly, was DNT ever more than a smoke grenade for muddying the privacy discussion? The standard always relied on every single shady data collector out there to act against their core interest, facing not even the risk of detection (let alone punishment) if they don't comply, all just because you asked them nicely. You might as well carry a "do not rob me" card in your wallet. Was there ever a honest belief by…
On the contrary, it was (generally) those in favor of government-mandated privacy and security who heavily supported the DNT efforts. The "Ayn Rand fanboys" just told people to install uBlock Origin
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As far as I recall, the EU cookie law is a bit more global than that: a website needs to get permission/consent whenever it wants to store/retrieve information from the visitor's browser---this isn't just limited to tracking. This means that every single website hosted in Europe/targeted at a European audience need to request the authorisation to use the user's browser storage. A number of websites formulate this as…
Not all information, only those that are not strictly necessary to provide the service (so e.g. a basic session cookie created once a user logs in or starts using the shopping cart, ... should not require consent)
[1]: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm#se...
what if instead of using ad blockers we use ad amplifiers that downloaded 10 or 100 copies of video ads to make sure we got the data correct? Serving video is pretty expensive. How big are the ad networks' margins? Let's see who blinks first.
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Pretty much just Reddit leaking into HN. Some people live in a political/cultural "tribe", and see the entire world through a prism where everything they dislike is linked to "the other tribe". They often punctuate every paragraph with some meme jab at the other tribe, even if it's seemingly irrelevant for everyone else who doesn't share the same prism. On Reddit, this results in imaginary Internet points (i.e. upvot…
I don't think this has much to do with Reddit. "Randroid" and similar terms as a derogatory way of describing a certain cluster of ultra-free-market views has been common on every online discussion service I've been on, dating back to Usenet. Although this may be partly because actual, honest-to-god Ayn Rand fans are also surprisingly common on online discussion forums (and were especially common on Usenet).
My gamer and geek friends have been spewing libertarian flavored Randian nonsense since middle school, circa 1983. I never imagined that worldview would prevail. It was just so puerile. Not so different than the tortured coming of age fantasies embraced by the other subcultures (stoners, metalheads, preppies). Though maybe the nerds were more aggrieved, seeing themselves as an oppressed minority.
Of course, none of us knew about the well funded propaganda machine pushing the whole Austrian/Chicago school of economics. Young Republicans, trickle-down economics, John Birch Society, Hertitage Foundation, disaster capitalism, Grover Norquist, etc.
Edit: TL;DR: Mockery is the only appropriate response.
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> I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant. In this case, it sounds like it's mocking the idea that the market-based voluntary agreements could solve this problem. Lots of people seem to think you can solve any problem by just "letting the market work."
The market is working very well on advertisements. They grow increasingly obnoxious, and the adblockers keep getting better and more prevalent in response. The end result is either reasonable ads (probably too late for this) or the death of this particular flavor of the ad-driven revenue model. I fully expect we'll look back on Internet advertising as a bootstrapper for the early Internet economy as opposed to a last…