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GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

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Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#191

Post by dang »

dominotw wrote: post #77
wlll wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel freer now companies are limited with what they can do with my data. I hope that preventing companies exploiting data will lead to more interesting business models than "provide distracting trinket and harvest data". I don't want to take part in a grand age of the Internet which basically amounts to people harvesting information about me so they can do anything from trying to sell me shit to attempting to corru…

Aren't you basically adimitting that you are 1. distracted by 'trinkets' 2. Expose your personal information in exchange for trinkets 3. Prone to buying 'shit' on the internet 4. naive to fall for fake news 5. Govt needs to step in and take charge to create "more interesting business models"

This comment breaks the HN guideline which asks:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

That's a form of crossing into incivility, and it leads to much worse (as seen below). Could you please not post like that here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#192

Post by dang »

wlll wrote: post #85
dominotw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you basically adimitting that you are 1. distracted by 'trinkets' 2. Expose your personal information in exchange for trinkets 3. Prone to buying 'shit' on the internet 4. naive to fall for fake news 5. Govt needs to step in and take charge to create "more interesting business models"

No, you fucking moron.

Please don't violate the site rules like this, regardless of how wrong and/or provocative another comment is. It just makes the thread even worse, and obviously we have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#193

Post by jpetso »

hk__2 wrote: post #20
sigmonsays wrote: post #8

i have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. A single png image of a entire web page is definitely under 5.2MB. Personally, I can't wait for a shift in business practices. Ads have ruined my confidence in privacy. Most sites share your data with over a dozen different ad tracking vendors. I've seen twice that for a specific class…

> I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst accessibility experience.

Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs? If companies will gleefully ignore Linux (and BSDs), browsers other than the ones that ship with a major OS, privacy concerns, free speech principles or shipping to remote areas, I can't really expect them to care much for marginalized groups such as people with accessibility issues.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#194

Post by earenndil »

hk__2 wrote: post #20
sigmonsays wrote: post #8

i have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. A single png image of a entire web page is definitely under 5.2MB. Personally, I can't wait for a shift in business practices. Ads have ruined my confidence in privacy. Most sites share your data with over a dozen different ad tracking vendors. I've seen twice that for a specific class…

> I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst accessibility experience.

What about something like a PDF?

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#195

Post by earenndil »

oblio wrote: post #53
_blz2 wrote: post #37

what is more scary to me is 2 different versions of the same website for 2 different locations!

google.com, google.fr, etc. :)

Nope, those are actually the same site now (used to be different). If you want to change your language, you have to do it from settings (although google.fr will give you a button to change your language to french).

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#196

Post by _phaq »

NullPrefix wrote: post #11
wlll wrote: post #6

The day I added an ad blocker (Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock origin) was the day my CPU fans stopped spinning almost constantly, my battery life improved, web pages loaded faster and were more responsive. My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be. I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.

>Ghostery You surely aren't using it anymore, are you? They are now owned by an ad company.

They used to be owned by Evidon Inc., later renamed to Ghostery Inc., which was a classic ad company (sold data gathered from the opt-in GhostRank feature to help other ad companies figure out how to not have their ads blocked).

Nowadays, the Ghostery extension is owned by Cliqz GmbH, which is still an ad company, but they specialize in privacy-conscious ads (mainly ad personalization based on evaluating browser history locally), have a privacy policy that has no holes as far as I can tell, have all of their client-side code open-sourced and they are even minority-owned by Mozilla, so Mozilla can at least check over what they're doing and would probably give up ownership should Cliqz infringe on privacy (even if you think Mozilla itself is the devil, they would still likely do that for PR reasons).

So, I do think it is nowadays fine to use Ghostery. I still don't quite understand why it's so popular, there's tons of other tools for the same purpose (for example Disconnect, Privacy Badger, Firefox's built-in Tracking Protection), but yeah.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#197

Post by Sylos »

distances wrote: post #60
simon_acca wrote: post #7

For all that cannot access both versions, keep in mind that the EU one is a vastly simpler UI, it almost looks like just a blog archive, while the US one is a more feature full typical newspaper homepage. Not saying that either one is better, just that it's not an apple to apple comparison.

I use uBlock to explicitly make some newspapers "article only", that is, remove all UI elements that are not the article. No ads, other article links, or navigation. Vastly improved reading experience.

Firefox has Reader Mode (little book icon to the right of the URL bar, appears on text-heavy sites) which should do this automatically.

I believe Safari has this, too. Might find an extension for other browsers.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#198

Post by hk__2 »

jpetso wrote: post #193
hk__2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst accessibility experience.

Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs? If companies will gleefully ignore Linux (and BSDs), browsers other than the ones that ship with a major OS, privacy concerns, free speech principles or shipping to remote areas, I can't really expect them to care much for marginalized groups such as people with ac…

> Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs?

How are "people on a smartphone" or "people with bad vision" small sets of users? Also, rendering the whole page in a PNG file takes more work than merely serving the page as is, which is the second reason nobody does it (the first one being "why would someone want such a shitty browsing experience?").

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#199

Post by hk__2 »

earenndil wrote: post #194
hk__2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst accessibility experience.

What about something like a PDF?

We already have HTML/CSS; we don’t need a non-responsive format like the PDF.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#200

Post by rayiner »

tptacek wrote: post #187
rayiner wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using the Internet since the mid 1990s. It peaked around 1998-2002. It took me awhile to realize what crap it had become. These days, I stick to native apps for Maps, FB, mail, etc., plus websites that look like they’re out of the 1990s (e.g. HN, Westlaw, Google). To the extent I read the news, I get it from subscriptions on my iPad. (Mostly I just wait for my wife to fill me in based on pod casts she liste…

Consuming written content on the Internet got materially worse (I might dispute how much worse, but it's a material difference). Consuming any other kind of content on the Internet has gotten so much better it's hard for me to imagine, in the late 1990s, predicting how good it is. I had a laptop hanging 1 hop off a default-free peering core router and never would expected this network to replace all of radio and tele…

Text is really important to me. Video is nice, but I kinda was okay with cable. If I could go back to cable in exchange for JS-less everything else, I’d do it. And really, I guess I should clarify I mean the “web,” not the Internet. Obviously having 100 mbps on your phone is better than 256 kbps into your house. And I know the apps I use (including Apple TV apps) leverage those improvements. But I don’t think video is an appropriate medium for the web, because it’s usually an impoverished way to communicate information. For example, I see lots of product reviews these days are posted as videos. I hit the back button soon as I see that.

As to content creation, I guess I don’t see the point. If you told me in 1998 that two decades from now I’d be using a word processor that wasn’t any more capable than Word 97, simply more resource intensive, I would’ve thought that to be a pretty bleak prognostication.

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