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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#221

Post by mirimir »

jancsika wrote: post #218
sago wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The eternal September was 1993. I remember that change well and the earlier flavour I remember nostalgically. And it was tied to the rise of the web. There's a good argument to say the web killed the internet. But all things change. Every phase has good and bad points. IMHO

I'll take 2000-on to the 1993 web/net any day. I get: * an up-to-date encyclopedia * all the music referred to by said encyclopedia (Napster) * an impressive number of books referred to by said encyclopedia (Demonoid) * 2010s bonus-- a lot of the scientific articles cited by said encyclopedia (Scihub) * 2010s bonus-- a searchable cache of stupid questions to do an end-run around the pain of interacting with the asoci…

OK. But most of that stuff is noncommercial, and not part of the neo-AOL/Prodigy thing that the Web has become.

In my alternate history, the Web would have all that. And so much more like that.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#223

Post by BlueTemplar »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #98
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

> there's no competition to Search on the horizon This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com. What are yo…

I don't want to use neither Bing nor Yandex either, and AFAIK DDG isn't a proper search engine, but takes all of their results from those three. With the recent "collapse" of Qwant, what am I supposed to use now?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#224

Post by mirimir »

z3t4 wrote: post #42
mirimir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not joking. It's not so much e-commerce that broke everything. Although there were many who did argue that. For me, it's been the shift from self-published (and indeed, self-hosted) to Google, Facebook and cloud services. And the tide turned in the late 90s. Edit: When I first got online, it was AOL, CompuServe, EcoNet and The Well. I was on all of them except AOL. And then we had Usenet and websites. And net…

It has never been more easy to self publish ... via Twitter and Instagram. But the real problem is that you only have 1 hour of free time, spread out in five minute intervals during the day. Being an adult sux.

Those are all centralized. And trivially censored.

I'd rather have stuff like Aether, NotABug, Tor onion sites, and so on.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#225

Post by mirimir »

blackflame wrote: post #188
mirimir wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean static HTML.

Why that is the web anymore than a javascript enabled version makes no sense.

It's arguably rude to be running code on someone else's machine without explicit permission. Except for websites, indeed, it's generally illegal.

That's why prudent folk use tools like NoScript.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#226

Post by headsoup »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #189
salawat wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20+ years ago, we wouldn't discussing the ethics of server/client based tracking with a straight face, because that shit is creepy as fuck. Now, everyone takes tracking for granted as if the option of not being tracked is some sort of unachievable goal. That's the issue. It isn't tracking A as opposed to tracking B. It's tracking period.

I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?

If they're not buying your product and not subscribing, they're not your customer yet.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#227

Post by BlueTemplar »

marc_io wrote: post #139
buboard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful That meant to imply that google is neutral? The strong nuclear force is powerful that doesn’t mean anything on its own. It can be harvested for good electricity or bad bombs. Of course the consensus on this is almost universal, the consensus on google is much more ambivalent. Corporations may well be good or evil

Yes, Google is not neutral, it definitely have a clear, intentional agenda. But it's non-moral (not imoral, or evil) as are all corporations. It just uses it's power as a way to complete it's objectives. This is way different from being neutral.

In a republic, the government - representing the people - is supposed to have the biggest stick. Huge companies with their own agendas are throwing a spanner in the works. And they basically only care about money. So the bigger they are, the more inherently evil they are. And it becomes even worse with transnational companies whose headquarters are basically out of reach.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#228

Post by kkm »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #213
pythux wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point! We wrote about how we're doing it on whotracks.me a while ago, if anyone is wondering how that could work: https://whotracks.me/blog/private_analytics.html

this is useful, thanks... couple questions: 1. Do you grab the country from the IP address before anonymising it? (I know VPN's are a thing, but we would like to know where our customers are coming from) 2. Why encrypt with a daily key instead of just hashing the IP address and storing the hash? Do you ever decrypt the IP address? 3. How have you found CloudWatch? I'm logging all requests to our own database, because…

Hi Marcus,

Thank you for your questions.

Disclaimer: I also work on WTM from time to time, so I hope can answer these questions to some degree :)

1. WhoTracksMe is served via CloudFront, it only get's the IP that CF reports. To get the country, there are two ways that can be used. IP => Country mapping via a Database or additionally, because CF has multiple edge locations, if needed the you could see which edge location served the request, that will help you narrow down the location at a country level. Ofcourse, in both cases if the user is using VPN, you would only records the VPN location.

2. The problem we want to avoid is same IP with same hashing algorithm will produce same value. Which can then be used to co-relate user activity across days. Second, depending on what hashing scheme one is using, rainbow tables can be used to get back the original value. Therefore, to avoid, we used the approach of daily key. Now that I write, we could also use some hash + daily_salt. This should give the same guarantees. - Needs to be checked.

3. In this setup we are not using Cloudwatch but Cloudfront, which is the CDN provider from AWS.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#230

Post by marcus_holmes »

nathcd wrote: post #210
marcus_holmes wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a Privacy Policy linked right from the landing page that states we will collect user behaviour information to improve our product. If you walk into a shop, you have an expectation to be observed (both to check you're not shoplifting, and also to see how customers behave). They don't tell you that you'll be observed, it's just one of those things you expect when you walk into someone's shop. We effectively hav…

> If you walk into a shop, you have an expectation to be observed (both to check you're not shoplifting, and also to see how customers behave). They don't tell you that you'll be observed, it's just one of those things you expect when you walk into someone's shop. The problem is that this is a poor analogy to computer networking. I send you an HTTP request; you send me an HTTP response. I'm not visiting your shop; we…

Sorry, but we'll have to agree to disagree on this. Visiting amazon.com is exactly like walking into a shop, and nothing like "sending messages to a server".

I totally understand that that's what's happening behind the scenes, but that's like saying "I vibrated the air in specific harmonics" rather than "I said yes".

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