181–190 of 367 posts
'Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 css classes to every single post in the timeline to make it more difficult to identify and block 'Sponsored' posts, oh my.' Wondering what else is going on here, other calls etc
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The font one seems like it's pushing it too far even for regular users since it breaks copy and paste. Also this all seems like it would break accessibility regulations.
China has accessibility regulations?
I know it's currently trendy to make digs at China (increasingly common in HN comments) but it's a huge country with plenty of talented engineers and accessibility advocates. With an aging population [0], such accommodations are becoming increasingly important.
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I choose to believe we could have a better world, where loading a local news site doesn’t look like a virus-ridden Windows 95 desktop, where just trying to talk with friends isn’t interrupted by.. (checks twitter) payday loan lobbyists. Where the smartest people of my generation are using every dark pattern in the world to take my attention away from what matters to me.
It's called a subscription and even with that local newspapers were filled with pages of color soaked ads. Dark patterns existed before your generation..
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In what context was this done/could you provide more details (without giving away any information that you don't care to share)? Sounds like something I would enjoy doing as well!
It was from a previous employer and I can't remember what I signed in my NDA, so I'd rather not put myself at risk. Sorry!
When I would work my way through their auth layer, I'd be sending them like 500 login requests every hour. They never contacted the account I used, so I have to assume they weren't checking for abnormalities like that.
The only time I really fucked up was when I tried to do that with a particular broker in Singapore. Singaporean companies have their shit _locked down_. I spent one hour debugging one of their endpoints, and it let off so many alarms that the CTO of their company was woken up in the middle of the night.
At first I thought that this might be another good indication that having "Facebook" on your resume isn't the golden egg it once was. Then I realize it's even better than before because it demonstrates for a potential employer that you'll push whatever buttons you're asked to in exchange for money, regardless of whether it's good for the user, the internet, or society as a whole.
This is why I genuinely believe STEM majors should be required to take more liberal arts (e.g. ethics) classes as a requirement to graduate.
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Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.
I'm sure there were a lot of interesting challenges creating the V2 rocket that terrorized London...
If you don't mind getting rid of every post in the timeline, there's News Feed Eradicator for Facebook: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
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It sounds like a fun challenge. It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever. Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) .... That's where I'd want to nope out.
Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product? And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything ? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; the…
So it’s not just whether “ads” are good or bad. And it’s not enough just to block them. They are like a virulent symbiote. They seep into every aspect of the platform they live on, because the platform’s survival depends on them. And then the infected platforms poison their users, ad blockers or no.
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I choose to believe we could have a better world, where loading a local news site doesn’t look like a virus-ridden Windows 95 desktop, where just trying to talk with friends isn’t interrupted by.. (checks twitter) payday loan lobbyists. Where the smartest people of my generation are using every dark pattern in the world to take my attention away from what matters to me.
I think it is very possible, even with ads. So ads are often a place where dark patterns happen and such. But take Apple for instance. Apple seems to respect user privacy to a fairly far extent compared to say, Facebook, Google. If apple wasn't around ... we would probably say something about "you can't have these fancy smartphones without someone stealing all your data". But clearly Apple can do it (for a lot of rea…
I remember one of the Amazon Kindles sold 2 versions: one with ads that was cheaper, and one without ads that was more expensive. So people do pay at least to get rid of ads (I'm sure both versions collect your data), it just costs more, and most end up not being able to afford it.
For all the good in the iPhone, year after year android gains ground worldwide by virtue of being cheaper and more flexible.
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100% true. Have written PLENTY of scrapers and methods like this are ultimately ineffective. Even if you absolutely mangled the HTML/selectors/DOM/etc. I feel you could always have it process screenshots of the interfaces to rip text/figure out how to interact etc. If it's human readable, it's bot readable imo. (but in years of botting it's never came to this - I've always been able to figure out how to use the exist…
+1. At a previous employer we fed images of interest from the web into Google's OCR API to see what we could see. In addition to scene descriptions, the API will transcribe any text it detects. With all the easy to use tools available to programmers today, it would not be terribly hard to use OCR on a screenshot to find the text of interest and derive the scraping code by searching for the OCR'd text in the markup. I…