131–140 of 160 posts
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.
See https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam
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It predates even usenet, eg FidoNet, BIX, CompuServe. 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 the…
Downvotes for truth, here, I suppose. You could add in the Mont Pelerin Society,Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas Network, and Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Adam Smith Institute, Mercatus Center. And personnel: Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, the Kochs (Fred, Charles, David), for completeness. Mark Ames has an excellent general summary: http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-hi…
At least someone on the Internet recognizes the Mercatus Center for the Koch propaganda machine that they are. It's unfortunate, the influence they have on the GMU graduates.
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Downvotes for truth, here, I suppose. You could add in the Mont Pelerin Society,Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas Network, and Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Adam Smith Institute, Mercatus Center. And personnel: Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, the Kochs (Fred, Charles, David), for completeness. Mark Ames has an excellent general summary: http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-hi…
Ah, good. At least someone on the Internet recognizes the Mercatus Center for the Koch propaganda machine that they are. It's unfortunate, the influence they have on the GMU graduates.
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Downvotes for truth, here, I suppose. You could add in the Mont Pelerin Society,Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas Network, and Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Adam Smith Institute, Mercatus Center. And personnel: Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, the Kochs (Fred, Charles, David), for completeness. Mark Ames has an excellent general summary: http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-hi…
Thanks for Mark Ames link. TL;DR: They were always hucksters for hire. I recently read a magazine article that covers same history as Mirowski's book. Hayek's motivations and strategy for pushing his ideas (take over economics depts in higher ed) are fascinating, instructive. Sadly, I can't imagine how the left could replicate that effort for reality-based polcies. On mobile, sorry no link handy. I'll edit if I can f…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_M...
I'm not immediately recalling or coming up with a Hayek reference, though it wouldn't surprise me in the least, and I'd very much like to see what you're thinking of if you can find it.
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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…
I think you're right that "not being tracked" should be the default, in so much as having an adblocker and blacklisting known trackers should be defaults. These are things that my user-agent should be doing automatically to protect me and improve my experience. On the other hand, DNT is intended to be an opt-in polite request for other agents to change their usual behavior. An adblocker or tracking blocker at the bro…
Yeah, I considered bringing this up in my original post - DNT is garbage for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones being that it actually sucks for privacy, especially if it's not used a ton. It's one more thing that can make you trackable.
It's interesting how Microsoft killed DNT - by supporting it. Once they made it the default, it was all over. It was so obvious that doing so would kill DNT that I have to wonder if they did that on purpose. It's definitely an interesting way of stopping something you don't like - support it to such a degree that those who asked for it don't want it anymore.
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…
Privacy standard thay works as long as people are not using it and fails the moment they start to, is just a lie.
(Kicking around an idea to build this:) Would anybody be interested in a local DNS server that automatically updated its list of black-holed domains through a mechanism that preserved your privacy? (Assuming, of course, a decentralized representation of the block lists.) Would anybody be willing to sell their attention by accepting payment (BTC), perhaps through a dutch auction, to re-enable a black-holed domain for…
Ghostery has a nice little library of stubs for e.g. ga that are injected in each page. I think any good solution will need to have such shims. Doing it on the network level (like redirecting to a stub hosting webserver) has problems with SSL
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I really don't think this is a new / Internet phenomenon, by any means. I've been re-reading John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua , published in 1864, describing the author's conversion from the Church of England (where he was one of the most visible clergymen of the time) to Roman Catholicism. It was written in response to another clergyman making accusations that, not only was Newman being dishonest, that dish…
And entirely off topic, but a hundred and fifty years after introducing that phrase, one of my favourite post-hardcore bands of all times used it as their name (Poison The Well). It's funny how that happens!
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…
Ever seen those "here we'll be setting cookies because we're going to track you if you agree (agree/fuck off)" in Europe? A EU directive or something of the best intent mandates that when you're tracking someone beyond technical needs this boilerplate is required before setting a cookie. Guess what if you disagree there's no way to store the user's answer, so the box keeps popping up, forever nagging the privacy cons…
How about a browser extension that hides any overlay divs with the string 'cookies' and input buttons?