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Replacing Gravatar and Other External Dependencies

posted by on Monday January 30 2017, @06:53PM   
from the blogging-off-the-grid dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After reading the story about Disqus stopping the free version, I remembered this article in which artist behind Pepper and Carrot comic, David Revoy, narrates how he dropped Gravatar, and other external dependencies, like fonts or icons. He even created an avatar generator based around cats. Social networks are still there, but only can track you if you click, the images are locally hosted. You may have heard about this artist, as he was involved in some Blender projects, Krita videos and general promotion of FLOSS for artistic purposes.

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Original Submission

• If only more people used RequestPolicy If only more people used RequestPolicy (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @07:27PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @07:27PM (#460756)

  It blocks 3rd party content. We got to kill this spynet.

  Revoy is a good artist, check out his stuff.

  Starting Score:	0		points
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• Re:If only more people used RequestPolicy Re:If only more people used RequestPolicy (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @08:07PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @08:07PM (#460769)

  Sadly, if we all did that, the scumbags will just start embedding spyware in the same domain by setting up virtual proxies similar to how clodflare functions now.

  Parent

  • Re:If only more people used RequestPolicy (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @08:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @08:11PM (#460772)

    Netflix just added a new animated show about this, I'll let someone guess what the show is ;)

    Parent

• Re:If only more people used RequestPolicy (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:38AM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:38AM (#461114) Homepage

  I use AdBlock, with a lightweight self-created filter set, and gravatar was one of the first things I added to the block list. I missed it not one iota. Most third-party junk providers get into my list very quickly.
  
  Nothing annoys me more than a website which I wish to use the full functionality of, but which pulls in javascript from 12 different domains. Any one of those gets DNS poisoned, and I'd be running code from malicious sources in a probably leaky sandbox. One careless backward incompatibility introduced by the JS providers on an update, and the webpage stops working. It's all too fragile for words, and is alas considered the standard way of doing things nowadays. There are no engineers involved in the modern web.

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  Parent