241–250 of 261 posts
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If that's the case, why not be up front about it?
Because saying you're the next OpenID won't allow you to be the next social network sensation à la Facebook.
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Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search , turning to duckduckgo, still need to go back to Google every once in a while, when DDG obviously doesn't cut it. The interwebs are filled with Google's advertising products, and the number of Gmail users who evangelically try to beat its interface into behaving well enough to be worth a fu…
It has been so long; I almost forgot the phrase "Eternal September." Keeping an eye on your internet privacy is a pain in the ass: I use DDG when I can, block most scripts and trackers, and keep an eye on my cookies, but it breaks some websites in non-obvious ways, and I'll have to do something else to deal with browser fingerprinting. As long as most people are easily productized, it just doesn't matter.
As for the Eternal September... I used to think it had been just a momentary problem that led to the unfortunate demise of USENET. I am starting to wonder if it wasn't, in fact, a first symptom. Programmers from my generation ought to have been so happy to see this happening -- the WWW available to everyone, connecting everyone. If only it weren't for the wrong reasons. The taste of my dream turned out to be a lot more bitter.
Im thinking about writing a FireFox extension that substitutes the word Google with Panopticon on all of their web properties as a reminder to use their tools less frequently.
Isn't the real point here the relative quality difference between Google's search and the rest of their products? The search result looks pretty good...
This brings up the Google Interface. I used to be able to use + in front of a term I wanted to be treated literally. Now I have to use quotes, which is 4 keystrokes (including shift) instead of 1 for plus.
Google also has removed my ability to block certain URLs from your search results. Now I cannot avoid the re-linker web sites, and occasionally get suckered into clicking one. That is really irritating.
In spite of this, Google still provides the best search I've seen. I recently compared Google and Bing in an obscure search. Google had 45 hits, Bing 15.
Im thinking about writing a FireFox extension that substitutes the word Google with Panopticon on all of their web properties as a reminder to use their tools less frequently.
I panopticoned multiple times, but never figured out the reference you made. Care to elaborate?
>The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not.
Is there a browser plugin or something that can keep google in check? Like separating youtube, gmail and the search into different "sandboxes"? Maybe blocking some of the annoying popups that constantly demand your info? I'm not familiar with such a thing, but it could be kinda nice to have it.
Even if you run YouTube, Gmail and search in different incognito windows so that they don't share cookies, they could still figure out that all these requests were coming from the same browser (via browser fingerprinting) at the same IP address.
You couldn't reverse the hash to determine the fingerprint, but if fingerprints matched, you'd have identical hashes. Splitting out different data records might help create probabalistic matches (e.g., n of m hashes match for an identity probability of p).
Tor would of course address IP issues. Privoxy could handle browser fingerprinting.
Personaly one that has been grinding my gears recently is avast on a pc which constantly keeps popping up a link to read about FB privacy, I don't do Facebook and with that my privacy is alrady covered. yet this pop's up many a time, I use 3G internet upon that PC so suspect every time I get a new IP (often) then the advertising popup for the self promoting article gets flagged up again.
In an age of computers able to remember what we forget or wish to forget it is somewhat annoying to be asked the same question over and over again in the hope you will eventualy say yes too there satisfaction and voiding the upmteen no responses you have said. Yet once you say yes you aint asked again if you would like to say no instead, funny that.
But this is the case with software you can't download, hack about and compile to taste. With that I support this mentality as it will only push people into learning something new. That said if I ever have a problem with a company like google can I ask them umpteen times the same question until I get the answer I want? Only fair in implied contract law perhaps :).
With that the days of software acting like a small kid constantly asking for a bike at for Christmas will be with us for a while longer until the yes and no response have equal value too them. Until then, is it yes yet? is it yes yet? is it yes yet?.....
I was all enthusiastic about G+ for about 5 minutes - until they wouldn't allow my wife to sign up without giving them her phone number, and proving that it was hers by accepting a call from them . Just who the fuck do they think they are?? There is no way I could suggest my friends and family sign up to such an intrusive service, so I quickly deleted my own account. It's an absolutely stunning achievement to create…
Amen, google has turned into a genuine identity thieve. a few months ago, i think it was primarily driven by the whole prism thing, i decided to create a bogus google account, using a disposable phone number. Now I have a three google accounts: personal (for email), work (email, google apps, drive, adwords, etc), and my bogus account (a 70+ year old lady using google search, youtube and the rest of the google crapwar…
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It has been so long; I almost forgot the phrase "Eternal September." Keeping an eye on your internet privacy is a pain in the ass: I use DDG when I can, block most scripts and trackers, and keep an eye on my cookies, but it breaks some websites in non-obvious ways, and I'll have to do something else to deal with browser fingerprinting. As long as most people are easily productized, it just doesn't matter.
My browsing habits are pretty much along the same lines, but I expect it will become much harder to do so in the following years. Between the feature creep and the monetization of idiocy, I expect we will lose even more diversity than we already have; on the software side, privacy-enabling features will just slowly disappear, as a smaller and smaller proportion of people will have the technical prowess to even care a…
As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.