Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then they will learn an important lesson.
What is the lesson here?
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. We're taught that for everything from investing to dating.
Companies must stop using Google Analytics
251–260 of 672 posts
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can tell you thats not the case…
I’m curious what you’re working with that is significantly different from one CSP to the next. I put most of my effort into AWS, but when I get staffed on a Google Cloud project, there isn’t much that I can’t figure out pretty quickly, especially with IaC managing everything. As long as the CSP has good docs, I find it relatively easy to move from one to the next. There are certainly some cases where that breaks down…
> I’m curious what you’re working with that is significantly different from one CSP to the next.
I work here:
https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/
There is a lot more to any of the cloud providers than just VMs and networking. I haven’t done anything hardly with a raw EC2 instance in 5 years except for one or two deployment pipelines. AWS alone has 130 services. True many of them are hosted versions of open source products
I work with call centers (Connect), Athena (Apache Presto), Step functions, and I have done some IOT work and of course Lambda and a lot more. I don’t do anything with traditional VMs. My specialty is “application modernization” meaning my work is a combination of DevOps and traditional application development using AWS services.
There are all kinds of specialties within any of the major cloud providers.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or if you're after free analytics, Cloudflare has something. Should be GDPR compliant since they don't use cookies or local storage.
See: https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-first-web-analytics/
I generally found much less accurate as something like Plausible, it seems Cloudflare default analytics are more like where requesting are coming from.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salts provide resistance against bulk bruteforce by making it so that you can't identify which hashes are the same plaintext without actually computing all of them. The issue is still that there are not that many IPv4 addresses and so even with very heavy algorithms it would be trivial to break.
But there are infinite numbers of salts. Please explain how this could be brute-forced as long as the salt is used correctly? What am I missing?
Could you be more precise with what envision by "correctly"?
If you use a shared salt for all or a significant portion of rows, then it's a realistic matter of bruteforcing to cover your entire table, given that the attacker has been able to recover the salt.
Even without any cracking at all, shared salt would mean that rows can be correlated if the attacker can identify a single row and correlate that to the target.
Let's say you use up the game and use per-row salts, like here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4159827/another-question...
Given an attacker wanting to pull out information about a specific user, and they have on their hands your salted dataset, the salts, and a handful of IP addresses that the target is known to be associated with from other datasets, it's still trivial to brute-force.
Even increasing it to a set of a few thousand IP addresses (say, a handful of /24s) it should be perfectly realistic, assuming you don't use enough rounds that your infrastructure is spending a majority of its CPU-time only performing psuedoanonymizing hashing.
Oh, and if you use per-row salts, is any of that data still usable in the first place?
The above is besides the point of the IPv4 address space being small enough to exhaust and shows why this is an issue for IPv6 addresses as well.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not because of skill issues, but maybe forced because they work for a dealership that sells a particular make exclusively or, less often, a specialty shop; most “car repair guys” outside of those environments have to be generalists. Yes, I'd expect any car guy to be able to change your tires. Or change your oil. But even resetting the oil-change alarm or tire-pressure sensor can be a hurdle here: Manufacturers also…
Perhaps you're using a broad/generic example to try and make the point but I'll say this: If a seasoned mechanic is unable to figure out how to reset the Maintenance Reminder or look up how to sync Tire Pressure sensors, run away. In the same way that one can use knowledge of one programming language as a means to leapfrog into other languages, other skilled trades are similar. Perhaps there's something that could be…
Try to get a French car in Poland, most shops are used to deal with VW, Audi.
It is not impossible but if you try to go to a random shop you found on Google and fix your Citroen or Renault you might be surprised.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#256My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…
> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives.
The argument for Universities right here.
I always find the opinion that Universities should make students job ready to be naive, even if well intentioned. There's a place for certifications that focus on job readiness, and there needs to remain a place that focuses on first principles and primitives.
I went to University about a decade into my career as a programmer to fill in the pot holes and absorb the first principles and primitives. I advocate that route every time I can. It's great if people can get a certification and start working with GA right away, and they have a place to level up their career with the money they make if they want to.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get where they're coming from. It kinda reminds me of an old-school iOS app (pre-iOS 7, before everything went all flat design). The skeumorphism, the arrows in the menu, the big black borders on the menu. The layout, styling and font kind of reminds me of the jQuery era (but of course, I was primed to look for this stuff by the GP comment). None of what I'm saying is criticism BTW. Just observation.
Does it make it bad or offputting?
I don't know about the 2008 stuff but I found the site to be pretty broken, as in things clearly not working and the code blowing up. The design is very busy on desktop; I suspect your "clean design" is what you see on mobile. The desktop site is packed to the gills and every page has multiple things animating and bouncing at me. Let me make it clear--this site is busier than most, not cleaner.
On desktop, it's pretty easy to open one of the menus on the top and then have it fail to close. Since the site disables the scrollbars while a menu is open, it breaks the site until you figure out the magic spot to move the mouse to make the menu close again. The magic spot doesn't seem to be in the same place every time. Seems buggy. I spent most of my time on this site with one of the menus open, unable to scroll down and see beyond the first page.
The worst part? The links in the menus don't work. A peek in the source code suggests they are supposed to be links, but clicking them doesn't do anything because they're just s (not real links) and the click event handler simply calls preventDefault (QTools.js line 107). That finicky navbar nearly ruins the entire site. I'm almost entirely unable to navigate around. This site is, unfortunately, pretty broken on desktop Chrome. Test your site on desktop in addition to mobile.
I got the site to hit an explicit debugger breakpoint in Q.js line 10293 just by clicking around the top menu buttons. The author of that code didn't bother writing an exception handler, they just had it trigger the debugger.
I do find it offputting; the site definitely has the feel of "a programmer hacked this together without any input from a designer." The massive drop shadow from the embedded videos actually covers up some of the text on desktop. The font is VERY thin--make sure to check your site on Windows and not just macOS. More generally: hire a designer. Programmer designs stick out in a bad way, and users seeing a broken marketing site will assume the product is broken, too. I certainly do.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#258What I am curios about is how much people actually use ALL the analytics information provided by a lot of these tools. I know Matomo and other such open source/self-hostable solutions, but how much info do you really use? I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed/read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small scri…
Do you know a static host that makes logs available? I happen to be looking to do something like this right now, but I would rather not run my own web server for my simple static blog.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's cool and all, but in the end, you are the end-responsible for it; you can't hide behind your ad provider if the GDPR police comes after you.
I don't care about GDPR
This entire thread is discussing a data protection authority’s decision which was based on the GDPR. It wasn’t a blog post arguing against GA due to concerns about Google or similar.
If GDPR is irrelevant to whatever you’re trying to say, I think you’re in the wrong thread.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#260When I visit a company site and it uses google analytics I know they are either: lazy, ignorant or hostile towards their (potential) clients. This set of possibilities spans all cases and none is actually a positive signal. Companies (and any entity that has an online presence for that matter) are entitled to know what people are doing in their platform and use any appropriate tool for that purpose. They are not enti…
How many do you really think are hostile?
Your average person at your average company will one day think, "how are people finding out about us?". They do a Google search for how to answer this question for their company and find Google Analytics.
This is certainly not hostile. May be slightly ignorant, but can you blame them?