31–40 of 203 posts
I have noticed this, but I have never understood what is happening. Still don't, but nice to see a fix.
Tracking is happening. It's the goog after all. As for Chromium-based ones, perhaps the goog thinks that it already knows enough about them?
Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
Not to be facetious but Wow - I'm not sure how we let that "feature" slide past the "privacy" folk.
While this might solve the problem for the Google search engine it is but a patch to a bigger problem. Instead of applying this patch on each and every device you happen to use it is much more effective to refrain from using these search engines directly by using a meta-search engine like Searx [1]. This not only solves these obnoxious attempts at leaching a bit more data from you, it has an even bigger advantage: it…
Btw the list of public nodes is here: https://searx.space/
What is the difference between SearXNG [0] ("next generation," i.e. the one you just linked) vs. SearX [1]? NG claims to be a fork, but it's not clear why? The main SearX has recent development activity.
Use DDG (or some other search engine)
Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
Note the caniuse link says "While still in the WHATWG specification, this feature was removed from the W3C HTML5 specification in 2010." Another reason I prefer Firefox. Why implement a rejected non-standard feature whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance?
Google search is good because it tracks what links people click and knows when they come back to go to a different url on the page. if 99% of people visit the top result for a query, return, then hit the second one, chances are that the top result never answers what the search query asks.
Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
I don’t want my clicks to be tracked!
Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
It’s also a notable DDoS amplification vector[1]. [1]: https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/83890/hacking/ddos-html...
Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
Firefox has a browser.send_pings setting to control this, not sending any pings when it is set to false. This is explicitly a valid browser implementation of the ping attribute: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#hyperlink-... > 2. Optionally, return. (For example, the user agent might wish to ignore any or all ping URLs in accordance with the user's expressed preferences.) The problem isn't that Firef…
Although I admit some searches I have to send to Google to get the result I'm looking for.
To add a little color and for clarity: Some google links (notably shopping links for products) don't just point at a google-owned redirect (presumably for ad tracking/payment calculation?), they also change the link target on click (?!?evil!?!). There are redirect-removal addons which re-write the original URL correctly, but the on-click handlers mangle the target of the link if the event is not blocked.
On-click event handlers should never have been allowed. Hijacking the browser UI is never in the users interest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually prefer short userscripts like this over addons, because I can immediately see it's not doing anything nefarious and I only need to trust the addon that I install the user script with.
> I only need to trust the addon that I install the user script with I wonder why this is even necessary. User scripting should be a standard feature of browsers. We should have direct access to a complete Javascript environment every time we launch a browser. Just like Emacs gives users a Lisp environment.