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Funny how the tone suggests that this is something malicious being done to the guardian.
The collar doesn't match the cuffs in this article, methinks.
Even assuming The Guardian itself is not a knowing participant in such schemes, its sites could receive such traffic when fraudsters try to make the full behavior of their sources look more legitimate.
"""The Atlantic first identified "dark social" traffic back in 2012 to describe traffic coming messaging apps that had been stripped of referrer data because messaging and email use the secure "HTTPS" system rather than the open "HTTP" system used by web pages. Excuse me?! How does this trash get published?
pretty sure they dont know what HTTP is and what a header is.
How many factual errors in other articles that dont deal with the web?
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…
P.S. remember this: http://rational.pdimension.net/2011/10/11/do-not-use-the-gua...
This is backlash, enjoy it.
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 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/
Funny how the tone suggests that this is something malicious being done to the guardian.
It kind of is. The Guardian is funded by advertising and this limits their ad sales story. As the article points out, the main beneficiary of this is Google - who are essentially competing with the Guardian for ad sales. I don't always agree with the Graun, but I believe in plurality rather than a Google-dominated world. Throwaway because of inevitable downvotes from the privacy crowd.
Not entirely, no. It is funded by a trust, and part of the Guardian Media Group is an investment fund.
Maybe get the engineers to have a look instead.
But on the other hand, given how it was the Guardian that published all of the original Snowden articles and information, they of all newspapers should applaud this rapid increase in increased privacy from their readers.
I can't actually read the dates on the charts, but I assume the increase started shortly after the Snowden revelations, when more sites were enabling https by default and people became more privacy-aware.
So the Guardian's a bit inconsistent here, On the one side they go "Big Brother is watching you!", on the other (in this article) they go "We're Big Brother and we can't see you anymore!"