Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

uk.businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 70 posts

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#51

Post by mtbcoder »

underlines wrote: post #32

For me as a Web Analytic Consultant this sounds so wrong: We track campaigns through campaign-parameters but apps are a blind spot of course, that's nothing new. Relying on the referrer is stupid, most apps don't provide a referrer because they are Apps and not websites! Browsers provide a referrer if you are coming from another site. An App isn't a website, so there's no referrer. Of course there's no referrer, it's…

Bot traffic is more likely a bigger culprit for "dark traffic" than people becoming aware of privacy tools.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25346235

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#52

Post by danmaz74 »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
danmaz74 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that there are scores of people here who are actively trying to get the Guardian out of business, because they regard anything related to advertising as evil. Will we be more or less free without the Guardian and similar independent sources of information?

You could of course simply pay for your online news(paper), the same way you used to pay for your paper based one. Online newspaper is a bit strange, something like a 'plastic glass'. I'm all for it, but most business models revolve around advertising somehow.

Yes, but advertising plays a big role on paid newspapers too. They would be just too expensive without ads. Moreover, before the free newspapers on the internet, the only mainstream free way to get news was from TV, which is much more superficial and easier to control by governments. I think we are much more free and more informed thanks to ad-supported online news sources. That's why I find all this hate for that business model wrong.

Final remark: A website like Hacker News would not be possible if all the content was behind a paywall. Would that really be a better internet?

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#53

Post by ninjaplease »

seren wrote: post #2

Interesting, I had never made the relation between referer and advertising, which seems pretty obvious in retrospect. This parts makes me a bit uneasy. > The frustration here is that search, apps and HTTPS traffic all represent different types of readers arriving at The Guardian for different reasons — and not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content. I am not sure I woul…

You get it anyway. Are you kidding me? Were you born yesterday?

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#54

Post by aw3c2 »

atmosx wrote: post #45
cantlin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like that list hasn't been updated since our domain switch. If you really want to block our internal analytics (which are in practice fairly harmless) replace "hits.guardian.co.uk" with "hits.theguardian.com".

I admire the fact that you offer this kind of info :-) thanks mate, always admired the Guardian for his articles, authors & general stance towards privacy.

Considering them telling almost 20 other domains about your visit, I would not call that stance on privacy a strong one: 2o7.net, ajax.googleapis.com, chartbeat.com, chartbeat.net, dqwufkbc3sdtr.cloudfront.net, facebook-web-clients.appspot.com, google.com, googleadservices.com, googletagservices.com, imrworldwide.com, mathtag.com, ophan.co.uk, optimizely.com, outbrain.com, scorecardresearch.com, twitter.com, wunderloop.net, www.googleapis.com

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#55

Post by joosters »

cantlin wrote: post #14
randunel wrote: post #3

I built my personal extension which blocks all the traffic from Dan Pollock's list [1], then blocks all the traffic from major service providers (google analytics, etc) and social networks (fb, tw, google, etc) when not on their website. Referral and user agent headers removed, I haven't found the need to remove other headers. Currently working on preventing (and manually allowing) all xhr/script/image requests 2 sec…

Looks like that list hasn't been updated since our domain switch. If you really want to block our internal analytics (which are in practice fairly harmless) replace "hits.guardian.co.uk" with "hits.theguardian.com".

I wonder why companies who host their own analytics choose to use a separate request to track users?

Surely it is better just to get the data from your own content web server logs ? Wouldn't you get the same information while saving on the extra HTTP request? It would make the site loading times slightly faster as well.

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#56

Post by ninjaplease »

spindritf wrote: post #17

It's pretty crazy that browsers send referral in the first place. Getting rid of it, accidentally or not, is not a bug. I use refcontrol[1] to spoof the referral. I'm always visiting from the front page of the website even though I'm almost never visiting from the front page. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

Not that crazy. It has valid use detecting/preventing hotlinking/bandwidth leeching. Plus otherwise how would you find out what search terms were driving traffic?

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#57

Post by ninjaplease »

zecg wrote: post #15

That's what you get from forcing your app on facebook. P.S. remember this: http://rational.pdimension.net/2011/10/11/do-not-use-the-gua... This is backlash, enjoy it.

Ugh, you dolts are like Stallman, other than never having produced anything of value that is.

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#58

Post by aw3c2 »

danmaz74 wrote: post #52
jacquesm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could of course simply pay for your online news(paper), the same way you used to pay for your paper based one. Online newspaper is a bit strange, something like a 'plastic glass'. I'm all for it, but most business models revolve around advertising somehow.

Yes, but advertising plays a big role on paid newspapers too. They would be just too expensive without ads. Moreover, before the free newspapers on the internet, the only mainstream free way to get news was from TV, which is much more superficial and easier to control by governments. I think we are much more free and more informed thanks to ad-supported online news sources. That's why I find all this hate for that bu…

I am find with ads, I am not fine with tracking and data mining on cost of my privacy.

The internet is built on free stuff. It got big on free content. HN is free content. Look at all those comments that people leave for free. The belief that things must cost money is a fallacy!

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#59

Post by jacquesm »

danmaz74 wrote: post #52
jacquesm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could of course simply pay for your online news(paper), the same way you used to pay for your paper based one. Online newspaper is a bit strange, something like a 'plastic glass'. I'm all for it, but most business models revolve around advertising somehow.

Yes, but advertising plays a big role on paid newspapers too. They would be just too expensive without ads. Moreover, before the free newspapers on the internet, the only mainstream free way to get news was from TV, which is much more superficial and easier to control by governments. I think we are much more free and more informed thanks to ad-supported online news sources. That's why I find all this hate for that bu…

That's the beauty of hackernews, it doesn't need a paywall or advertising. The presence of the users is the payment.

Re: The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

#60

Post by danmaz74 »

jacquesm wrote: post #59
danmaz74 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but advertising plays a big role on paid newspapers too. They would be just too expensive without ads. Moreover, before the free newspapers on the internet, the only mainstream free way to get news was from TV, which is much more superficial and easier to control by governments. I think we are much more free and more informed thanks to ad-supported online news sources. That's why I find all this hate for that bu…

That's the beauty of hackernews, it doesn't need a paywall or advertising. The presence of the users is the payment.

But hackernews links to free information sources. No free information sources => no hackernews...
Post reply on HN