71–80 of 318 posts
Have you ever driven across a bridge, or along a highway and run over one of those "hit counter" cables that the Department of Transportation lays out to know how many people are driving on that bridge, or that highway? Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.
That's a passport book.
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How exactly do you ban a browser extension? How do you consider legitimate traffic illegal?
>How exactly do you ban a browser extension? browser vendors can blacklist it. >How do you consider legitimate traffic illegal? It's fairly obvious that sending traffic for the sake of generating traffic isn't "legitimate" by any means. Your excuse is flimsier as websites that sell ddos services as "stress testing" services.
How would they do that? They can remove them from their list of extensions, but I can just download it from elsewhere and add it manually, right?
Have you ever driven across a bridge, or along a highway and run over one of those "hit counter" cables that the Department of Transportation lays out to know how many people are driving on that bridge, or that highway? Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.
That's E-ZPass, FasTrak, etc. Also those toll bridges where they take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill that includes a $6 "convenience fee"
I feel browsing the web is long overdue having a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted, leaving the "People in Norwich are using this genius trick"-style nonsense on the cutting room floor. It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.
If it was trivially possible, Firefox would already be doing it. But there's always an arms race with stuff like this. Our robot butler would be able to figure out how to parse the web today, but the advertisers would completely change the structure of pages tomorrow. Facebook used to have their ads wrapped in ` `. Now, they're buried a thousand divs deeps, and the ads and content both have nonsensical, non-semantic…
I am thoroughly unconvinced of this, as a Firefox user for two decades. There are so many simple power-user features that Firefox has chosen to ignore.
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The only reason users are staying longer is because the embedded video slows down the whole page loading, especially on mobile. News sites that have these are cancer and I actively avoid opening links to them when I'm on my phone. I can see my battery life lose whole percentage points when I open these pages. Can't see the content though; between the cookie consent toast, the video embedded in the lower right corner,…
It is a tragic situation. These sites obviously provide some value (or else you wouldn't be reading them) yet they cannot get paid for that value because google&FB have coopted the entire ad market for themselves. As technologists this is a problem that we should solve, not simply something to complain about
Nah, they find sticking to the 90's punch the monkey style ads and blaming FB and Google for "coopting" the market to be a better strategy.
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Why stop there? Maybe websites you don’t like should have a crowdsourced assassin come to kill the relevant developers.
There's an argument to be made that the developers are the new crackers, the new enablers of abusive behaviour. Perhaps they should feel some burn for their actions.
How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…
Why not just use a browser that doesn't do things you don't like?
How many independent browser engine variants are viable today? Three?
Ramping the difficulty of that problem has specifically limited choice and options.
One class of devices (iOS) mandates a single browser engine (Webkit / Safari). Android has a slight pretense of greater openness, but bundles Chrome into most apps.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…
Or just share the site's reputation with other extension users.