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Splitting the Web

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Re: Splitting the Web

#191

Post by RalfWausE »

MattyRad wrote: post #183
RalfWausE wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When i started to get into computers and later the internet my normie friends thought of that stuff as utterly pointless. Sure, they were sure that there was some use to computers in big businesses, replace the typewriters and make the life easyer for accountants, but everything else? Nah, nothing interesting for the wider populous, just nerd toys. The internet? Why should anyone want to write an email if you could s…

The corpo-web, I really like that term, it perfectly encapsulates the soullessness of the modern web. Is that term from something or did you come up with it yourself?

To be honest: I have no idea. It may be that i have read it in some cyberpunk story or in some gopherhole... but i have it in use for the last couple of years, so who knows? ;-)

Re: Splitting the Web

#192

Post by vGPU »

8chanAnon wrote: post #2

From the article: But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider. It’s not me. It’s people living for and by advertising who are the outsiders. They are the one destroying everything they touch, including the planet. They are the sick psychos and I don’t want them in my life anymore. My thoughts exactly. Like the author, I don't have patience for glossy websites anymore. If a site needs third-party JS to be…

If a website tells me to disable Adblock to use it, I go somewhere else.

The modern web is already too damn heavy. I just built a new PC. I figured 32gb of RAM would be enough for a while.

It wasn’t.

I now have 96gb of overpriced ddr5 just to be able to basic tasks.

I wonder if windows 10 is the culprit? 16gb of ram was more than enough for windows 7 doing the same work.

Re: Splitting the Web

#193

Post by esalman »

vGPU wrote: post #192
8chanAnon wrote: post #2

From the article: But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider. It’s not me. It’s people living for and by advertising who are the outsiders. They are the one destroying everything they touch, including the planet. They are the sick psychos and I don’t want them in my life anymore. My thoughts exactly. Like the author, I don't have patience for glossy websites anymore. If a site needs third-party JS to be…

If a website tells me to disable Adblock to use it, I go somewhere else. The modern web is already too damn heavy. I just built a new PC. I figured 32gb of RAM would be enough for a while. It wasn’t. I now have 96gb of overpriced ddr5 just to be able to basic tasks. I wonder if windows 10 is the culprit? 16gb of ram was more than enough for windows 7 doing the same work.

I wonder what kind of basic task would require 96GB of RAM.

Re: Splitting the Web

#194

Post by vGPU »

esalman wrote: post #193
vGPU wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a website tells me to disable Adblock to use it, I go somewhere else. The modern web is already too damn heavy. I just built a new PC. I figured 32gb of RAM would be enough for a while. It wasn’t. I now have 96gb of overpriced ddr5 just to be able to basic tasks. I wonder if windows 10 is the culprit? 16gb of ram was more than enough for windows 7 doing the same work.

I wonder what kind of basic task would require 96GB of RAM.

Firefox with a few extensions is an insane memory hog. ThinkorSwim, TD’s brokerage app, will easily get to double digit numbers in 3-4 hours.

The thing is, I was using the same exact software, doing the same exact tasks on windows 7 with 16gb of ram and I rarely had issues.

Not to mention windows 10 has completely borked my network stack. I can’t get a single WiFi card to work.

Re: Splitting the Web

#195

Post by esalman »

vGPU wrote: post #194
esalman wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what kind of basic task would require 96GB of RAM.

Firefox with a few extensions is an insane memory hog. ThinkorSwim, TD’s brokerage app, will easily get to double digit numbers in 3-4 hours. The thing is, I was using the same exact software, doing the same exact tasks on windows 7 with 16gb of ram and I rarely had issues. Not to mention windows 10 has completely borked my network stack. I can’t get a single WiFi card to work.

That does sound awful.

I am longtime Firefox faithful. But I keep extension usage down to minimum- multi account container, ad block for YouTube, leechblock, clear url, zotero and fpl tools (fantasy football) right now. Tbh Firefox rarely bothers me nowadays with resource usage. I am confident I haven't had to restart Firefox since last November.

My work laptop is a Lenovo P52 with 32GB of ram and win10. Home laptop is a Lenovo legion with 16GB of ram and win11. I had so many issues with performance in the past that I just trained myself to never keep resource-hogging stuff running in background that I am not actively using.

I regularly have zoom and Firefox running while playing MMO games on home laptop. Firefox, SQL server etc. running in background while running multi-core data analysis on work laptop. I never had issues with Firefox, and if there's a memory crash I usually know what caused it. But it is down to hardcore discipline using the machines, and I understand it is not usual patterns for others.

Re: Splitting the Web

#196

Post by IIsi50MHz »

Dunedan wrote: post #178
c22 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently got a CD-rom from a hospital containing X-rays of my leg to share with my doctor. Upon finding a computer with a functioning optical drive I was dismayed to discover that the CD-rom contained not 3 simple images of the bones in my leg, but almost 400 megabytes of impenetrable binary data in over 30 nested directories and an .exe called MedicalImageViewer which I was unable to run on the latest version of W…

Guess what your doctor does to look at your X-rays: The chance is high that he'll just execute the .exe file on the CD-Rom too. I've witnessed that already multiple times and always cringe, because of the obvious security implications. It'd be so straight-forward to compromise a doctors office by handing them over a different CD-Rom with malware instead.

The one I worked for also included a viewer on discs burned for distribution (typic'ly to patients, but could go elsewhere if patient signed the right document), but we used a couple different viewers internally. If we received a disc, that DICOM data was imported using our viewers, never whatever was provided on the disc. Local network traffic was…closely monitored.

Occasionally, a remote doctor (not from our office) would call for help with the viewer we provided on disc. Usually, because some advanced feature they could have used at their office didn't exist in the patient viewer, or worked differently.

Normally, instead of discs, we just transceived images via PACS, or accepted physical films to be scanned into our PACS.

Re: Splitting the Web

#197

Post by toastal »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #164
Dalewyn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven't seen the sites that demand JavaShit just to load JPGs and PNGs that you told the browser to open directly. As in pointing the browser at a JPG or PNG and getting redirected to a page with JavaShit to load that JPG or PNG. Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.

A lot of paywalled websites won't throw up a nag screen and will let you read the whole article if you turn off javascript. You won't see the pictures (probably because they want to discourage people from turning off JS) but that's fine with me.

Surprisingly then clicking reader mode, some of those images come back. Anyone know why?

Re: Splitting the Web

#198

Post by superkuh »

anthk wrote: post #68
the_gipsy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am ignorant of the underlying mastodon protocol, but couldn't there be a (mostly) HTML-only frontend for mastodon, or something like that? I really hated that about twitter too, that for reading a goddamn SMS-lenghty tiny text it couldn't just have been "prerendered" on the server, no, you have to fetch a million things and watch different spinners before you get at it.

There is: https://brutaldon.org

I must be misunderstanding this site. Is it really a third party you give your login/password to who then uses it to log into the instance and handle the activitypub?

And people do this?

Re: Splitting the Web

#199

Post by willywanker »

UnlockedSecrets wrote: post #111
8chanAnon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stopped using NoScript because it was breaking my own apps. It was fine until Mozilla changed something in Firefox. The problem is that NoScript inserts a lot of JS into the web page and some of that JS gets broken by some sort security lockout. It may be a bug in Firefox and maybe it's been fixed but I wasn't satisfied with NoScript anyway. I'm now using uMatrix. It doesn't insert JS on every active element (ju…

Umatrix has not been maintained since 2021.

Pale Moon users have a still maintained fork called eMatrix.

Re: Splitting the Web

#200

Post by willywanker »

What do I do? Been blocking ads since I discovered it was possible in 1999, while on a shitty dialup and observing that banner ads loaded before the page itself. Back then I used a network level adblocker/firewall combo called AtGuard, which Symantec acquired later. Then moved onto AdMuncher on Windows for the next 15 years or so. Now I use Pale Moon as my primary browser - unlike Firefox that pretends to care about privacy while doing the opposite, this one, forked from Firefox 24 and maintained independently, does not have a shred of telemetry or analytics or 3rd party Pocket like bullshit that requires 50 different 'hardening' about:config tweaks to remove. uBlock Origin and eMatrix (a current fork of the discontinued uMatrix), both with an aggressive set of filter lists keep the web spanking clean for me.

On Android, I've always rooted my phone to install AdAway, as a next level now I use AppManager (get it from muntashirakon.github.io) to disable advertising/tracking components within apps, and Google Play Services itself. Youtube being a special case, I use ReVanced Extended. Took some doing, but now I've managed to happily use whatever the corporate web throws up minus every piece of track advertising/analytics/tracking crap that they throw at me on either laptop or phone/tablet. Occasionally I look at the uBlock Origin logs and shudder to see all the crap that got blocked.

Tl;dr - I don't have to turn hermit and seek out indie websites exclusively when I'm able to extract exactly what I want from the mainstream web. Ultimately, your devices belong to you; you have to take back control over what gets sent to it.

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