Even before the GDPR, text-only news sites seemed to be making a comeback. On bad cellular connections, these two are great: https://lite.cnn.io/en https://text.npr.org
These are also worth including:
GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
181–190 of 213 posts
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a couple of years back and the difference is astounding.
I'd be willing to bet your "small number" of white listed websites is actually a lot more than you think. Turning off Javascript breaks a ton of sites, IME. Same thing with cookies. On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off nowadays,…
I've found the Cookie AutoDelete browser add-on works really well for dealing with cookies.
Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I good compromise is uMatrix, which by default only allows first-party JavaScript and cookies and makes it easy to quickly enable JavaScript/XDR/cookies when necessary using a point and click matrix: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
Isn't uMatrix fully included in uBlock if you simply enable Advanced Mode?
no. you get a 'lite' version of uMatrix is uBlock, you gain significantly more control w/ uMatrix
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
We haven't "created countries on the Internet". The Internet exists in the real world, and it exists in countries. Those countries have laws, and they always applied. Governments can take time to adopt to new technologies, but this was always going to happen. And GDPR is an awesome thing, it's an example of governments doing the right thing.
> We haven't "created countries on the Internet". We have though. Your world on the internet looks different based on citizenship( ipAdress) and ppl have to get a visa (VPN) to go that country on the internet. People hated it when China did this but somehow EU doing this is somehow commendable. Now people are europeans, americans, indians ect on the internet. I just want to be a human being.
> ppl have to get a visa (VPN) to go that country on the internet
That has always been the case for people on "third-world" countries. Hulu, YouTube (the publisher of this content has not made it available in your country), and even stuff more tangible as Amazon.
Now you're just catching up with what the internet has been like for basically everyone outside the US and Western Europe since ever.
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#185Websites can be "documents" or they can be "apps". It's great that we now have the option to build the latter, but far too many things that should be simple documents (news sites, I'm looking at you) are trying to be apps, and it's virtually always a worse user experience, setting aside the cost in load time, memory, and battery usage. I'm saying this as a JavaScript developer.
The market has spoken. No seriously, if it sucks so much, why haven't users responded by going somewhere else, thus incentivizing sites to behave well?
why do you assume it's a market in the first place?
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#186The day I added an ad blocker (Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock origin) was the day my CPU fans stopped spinning almost constantly, my battery life improved, web pages loaded faster and were more responsive. My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be. I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.
If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a couple of years back and the difference is astounding.
if that's too extreme try just disabling images.
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long have you used the Internet with that opinion?
I’ve been using the Internet since the mid 1990s. It peaked around 1998-2002. It took me awhile to realize what crap it had become. These days, I stick to native apps for Maps, FB, mail, etc., plus websites that look like they’re out of the 1990s (e.g. HN, Westlaw, Google). To the extent I read the news, I get it from subscriptions on my iPad. (Mostly I just wait for my wife to fill me in based on pod casts she liste…
Consuming written content on the Internet got materially worse (I might dispute how much worse, but it's a material difference).
Consuming any other kind of content on the Internet has gotten so much better it's hard for me to imagine, in the late 1990s, predicting how good it is. I had a laptop hanging 1 hop off a default-free peering core router and never would expected this network to replace all of radio and television.
Similarly, creating any kind of content is drastically better than it has been at any other point in the history of the Internet. For 90% of what I need a word processor or spreadsheet for, free Google Apps is more convenient than MS Office on my laptop; I'll use them simply to avoid launching the app. I'm still in native apps to draw diagrams, but I bet I won't be in 5-10 years.
Finally, with respect to written content, I think you take the good with the bad, too. Specifically: in the 1990s, every news source in the world wasn't crudded up with 100mB of Javascript grinding your machine to a halt, but there was much less news on the Internet. Add the Kindle Reader back into the mix and I think we're out ahead even on this axis.
And don't forget: Flash is dead.
On balance, I think we're much better off than we used to be.
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been using the Internet since the mid 1990s. It peaked around 1998-2002. It took me awhile to realize what crap it had become. These days, I stick to native apps for Maps, FB, mail, etc., plus websites that look like they’re out of the 1990s (e.g. HN, Westlaw, Google). To the extent I read the news, I get it from subscriptions on my iPad. (Mostly I just wait for my wife to fill me in based on pod casts she liste…
Consuming written content on the Internet got materially worse (I might dispute how much worse, but it's a material difference). Consuming any other kind of content on the Internet has gotten so much better it's hard for me to imagine, in the late 1990s, predicting how good it is. I had a laptop hanging 1 hop off a default-free peering core router and never would expected this network to replace all of radio and tele…
The quality of most content is so poor it’s almost physically painful though. Clickbait is pervasive, divisive trolling is ubiquitous and it infects everything. Look at how hard this site has to work day in, day out, just to keep the rot at bay.
There’s an ocean of content, but most of what’s actually born online is an aggressive waste time, designed to maximize engagement and nothing else. There are 10 minute+ YouTube videos on topics that could be better encapsulated in a paragraph of the written word, but of course it’s easier to monetize the video. The pervasive online business model is industrial scale invasion of privacy, news media is teetering, blogging is suffering, forums are mostly dead.
A majority of the population visits a handful of sites like Facebook and Google, the latter of which wants to subvert email. Brandolini’s law rules, and has been turbocharged with the power of a thousand retweets and a million echo chambers. White supremacists and all other manner of kooky fucks finally have the global audience they’ve always dreamed of. Twitter and other platforms have fueled an outrage culture with the soul of a jackal and the attention span of a gnat.
I do like streaming content, but it seems like a bad trade off.
Oh yeah, and we have the security disaster that is the IoT and resulting bothers.
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consuming written content on the Internet got materially worse (I might dispute how much worse, but it's a material difference). Consuming any other kind of content on the Internet has gotten so much better it's hard for me to imagine, in the late 1990s, predicting how good it is. I had a laptop hanging 1 hop off a default-free peering core router and never would expected this network to replace all of radio and tele…
The quality of most content is so poor it’s almost physically painful though. Clickbait is pervasive, divisive trolling is ubiquitous and it infects everything. Look at how hard this site has to work day in, day out, just to keep the rot at bay. There’s an ocean of content, but most of what’s actually born online is an aggressive waste time, designed to maximize engagement and nothing else. There are 10 minute+ YouTu…
It's hard for me to take seriously the idea that we're in the midst of a security disaster today; I got started professionally in the mid-1990s, during an era when virtually every computer system on the entire Internet was riddled with stack overflows. It was so easy to exploit memory corruption in 1995 that you could sometimes write a code execution exploit blind.
Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The federal government in the US is profoundly dysfunctional to the point where this isn't worth the time or money If everyone who says that voted in the primaries and mid-term elections it wouldn’t be true. The party of dysfunction is in charge now but only because so many people choose not to vote.
In their defense, last vote was on a working day and not all employers let their employees skip work to vote. It's weird that voting does not take place on a non-working day in the US (like Sunday, for example).
Does the US not have some kind of law that guarantees employees the opportunity to take at least a few hours off work for voting?