I came across an interesting blog post that suggests the Web is splitting into two with an offshoot made up of a commercial dystopia that is increasingly viewed as the "normal web," leaving an insurmountable chasm developing between the two. Regular readers of SN will appreciate the points made, but do you agree with them, particularly where you'll eventually need to pick one side or the other?
https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html
There's an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.
A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia.
Then there's the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.
Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.
[...] Something strange is happening: it's not only a part of the web which is disappearing for me. As I'm blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I'm also disappearing for them. I don't see them and they don't see me!
Think about it! That whole "MBA, designers and marketers web" is now optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don't block analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel more disconnected from that part of the web.
[...] It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can't stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.
Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21, @04:30PM (2 children)
Phones
Not Phones
UX completely different.
The Great Unwashed on phones take what the vendors give to them, without lube.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Thursday December 21, @10:44PM (1 child)
There are ad-blockers for phones too, though.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday December 23, @07:16AM
Yep. I use Adblock, they ran a deal I think where I paid something like US$30 for a lifetime subscription across I think 6 or something devices. I have it installed on my iPhone and it works great. It uses a safari plugin and DNS blocking (vpn). I never see ads. I use uBlock on my desktop devices but could use Adblock. Best $30 I spent recently.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Thursday December 21, @04:33PM (3 children)
> When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.
That is simply not the case, depending on your level social-interaction.
If you are one of those attention-whores that needs to visit instagram, facebook and the like, then yes, maybe you'll have to do that. For everyone else, no.
I have not once lowered my ad-blocking controls in order to visit a site, I just find a different site.
I use pi-hole for whole network blocking and ublock origin on my browser - I have not seen an advert for many many years.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday December 21, @05:36PM (2 children)
Unfortunately I've had to do it. For example more and more sites use Google Captcha which I block on principle (along with the rest of the Google suite). This breaks loads of websites, including ones I need (e.g. to pay my bills or deal with my local authorities). In those situations I can't just switch to other sites, so I have to temporarily enable Google and Javascript.
Likewise I block cloudflare, which means anyone who has ever put their site behind cloudflare might as well have deleted their website off the internet. Surprisingly I found a lot of tech blogs use cloudflare, but even then, I can usually find other peoples sites that are not crapified in that way.
Javascript is another one. Forget about the days of following net standards when designing a website. Most of them are "Chrome only" now, and worse they don't even bother to degrade gracefully. Without JS enabled they just load a blank page. I would say a good 70% of the "normal" web will not function without JS enabled (and almost 100% of the links sent to me by friends and family).
Another interesting thing is that a lot of these "walled garden" services first promote their own garden, then (begrudgingly) their competitors gardens (lest they get into anti-trust lawsuits, or reciprocal responses). Anything outside of the walled gardens, if shown at all, is near the bottom.
I see this with search results. If I use Google the first 3 pages to a technical question is Stackoverflow, which I find both a relatively mediocre source of tech info, and one of those sites that does not work properly with JS disabled so I avoid it. I have to wade through three pages of stackoverflow results (some of which towards the end have no relevance at all to my query) before I get other similar websites, and then finally a decent source.
I don't know why Stackoverflow is basically the entire first couple of pages, but I don't think it can be natural. Feels more like it is being promoted. Search engines that use Google like a backend (e.g. DuckDuckGo) suffer the same issue, so it is not tied to whatever profile Google may have on me.
Search has pretty much become useless on the major search engines. The only decent one (of the big search engines) is Yandex, but that bugs me with their own captcha every few searches.
So yeah, I would say the WWW has already split, but it is uneven. For example, while I can't access the JS sites, users from that side could access my hypothetical HTML and JS free site. However, unless I send them the link myself they would probably never even know my site existed. It does not exist on social media, and if it appears in search results at all, it would probably be buried 10+ pages deep, along with the other sites that not part of the major providers interest.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday December 21, @05:55PM (1 child)
You can always use two different browsers, two different OSes, or even two different computers.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 5, Touché) by Unixnut on Thursday December 21, @11:45PM
And I do, although I have browsers in Docker containers for a bit of extra isolation but less overhead than different VM's.
Still it is a crutch for a problem that should not really exist. It just shows a degradation of the web when once before I could just use one browser for everything, bubt now I need multiple, depending on the site in question.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Thursday December 21, @04:36PM (10 children)
The people who run ad-blockers, disable analytics scripts, use Mastodon and Gemini and so on are a tiny, tiny minority. All normal people put up with the dystopia, often because they either don't know of other options, or (more likely), in their opinion, the other options are 'too difficult' and add friction to transactions, sometimes to the extent of blocking them completely.
Coupled with this is that centralisation is wonderful for surveillance and control by government services, including the police and security services.
To not follow the crowd is increasingly regarded as suspicious. 'Everybody' uses Facebook. 'Everybody' uses smartphone apps. To not do so marks you out as 'other', and part of a suspicious 'out-group'.
So the Internet as was - free, and open, including being open to abuse by individuals is indeed being closed down, and instead is open to abuse by corporates and governments. It is too profitable and to much enabling of control and power to be otherwise.
People who care about this are in a tiny minority. They do exist: for example Patrick Breyer [digitalcourage.social], Member of the European Parliament, and a member of the Pirate Party. Meaningful change will probably take generations of work. Note that power, in many forms, is antithetical to individual freedoms.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday December 21, @06:03PM (1 child)
Coupled with this is that centralisation is wonderful for surveillance and control by government services, including the police and security services.
Luckily I live in the US, not Iran or Russia, and am a law-abiding citizen. At least, I am since they legalized ganja here. It's not the government I fear, it's the corporations. My Grandpa fell four stories because Purina was too cheap and heartless to install doors on elevators and there was no OSHA to force them to in 1959.
I'd like to see a lot more government surveillance of billionaire corporations. You heard about the lead poisoning in apple sauce that put hundreds of kids in the hospital? Nobody will go to prison over that. The corporation should have the death penalty, all stock in it given to the applesauce victims and its CEO and board should spend a decade or two in a high security prison.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21, @06:31PM
So... victims should get nothing?
How about redistributing any and all assets even remotely linked to the individuals occupying the C-suite to the victims instead?
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday December 21, @06:21PM
Running adblockers is extremely widespread and been getting more and more common in recent years: https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users [backlinko.com]
compiling...
(Score: 4, Touché) by captain normal on Thursday December 21, @08:10PM (1 child)
If it's such a tiny minority, why is Alpha/goo so concerned about ad blockers?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday December 22, @01:54AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Opportunist on Friday December 22, @01:29AM (4 children)
Yes, and you better hope this doesn't change.
Let's face it, those corporations foot the bill for quite a few services that we need. They will not do that if they can't rape the privacy of these people. If we teach them how to avoid being consumer drones, the corporations will retaliate and tighten the noose because that's the business they're in.
Right now, it's simply not worth the effort for the 0.0001% that we are. We're a rounding error to them. If we teach the masses how to escape their corporate overlords, they will start to fight it, because at some point it will cut into their revenue.
As cold as it may sound, but these people have to suffer for us to have freedom.
(Score: 3, Touché) by NotSanguine on Friday December 22, @05:40AM
And little of value will be lost.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday December 22, @11:42AM (2 children)
> quite a few services that we nee
I use search and email quite a bit (although not necessarily from the megacorporations). What else?
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday December 22, @06:37PM (1 child)
The backbone providers for example. I sure as fuck don't want to foot the bill for that.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday January 04, @09:00AM
You do already.
You pay your ISP.
The ISP pays their upstream provider(s) for capacity in the same way.
Only the organisations at the very top peer with each other at zero or minimal cost. The infrastructure is not paid for by advertising, it's paid by all your payments to ISPs.
Advertising increases your payments to your ISP(s) because you are downloading unrequested data all the time. That increases the amount of capacity the ISP has to purchase from its upstream provider, so the ISP's costs go up, so your monthly ISP bill goes up. You are paying for the data capacity the advertisers use to send adverts you don't want. They are free-riding on your connection.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Thursday December 21, @04:42PM (2 children)
What needs to happen (and so, of course, will never happen) is to get EVERYONE to install ad-blocks, etc.
If no one can access 'their' site because of 'shite', then 'they' will be forced to stop using 'shite'.
Force 'them' to enforce the regular web and it will happen... so of course it will not happen.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Thursday December 21, @05:45PM (1 child)
Even if everyone were to install content blockers, more realistically, what would happen (in no particular order) is:
The world wide web, and the internet to the extent that it's physical infrastructure too has become centralized in the hands of oligopolist, has been a failed experiment.
Case in point: the whole adage of "The Internet Routes Around Damage" does not necessarily hold true anymore, if one of {Google | Microsoft | Amazon } suddenly evaporated (including the physical cables they own), see how much you'd still be able to do online.
Ain't no such thing that an MBA cannot fuck up, and neither the Internet nor the WWW is any different in this...
(*) I have stated this before and will do so again: (Online) Advertisement is theft! It steals your CPU cycles, your attention budget, your privacy, your security, your electricity, your bandwidth, all for the purpose of stealing your coin by getting you to spend it on something you don't need. If anything should be labelled as theft, it is advertisement. If the only way to fund your activities is through advertisement, then that is an inherent admission that what you are peddling is worthless because you know people won't straight up give you money for it; and you have to get it through the theft that is advertisement.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snospar on Thursday December 21, @06:53PM
Not sure I agree about the loss of {Google|Microsoft|Amazon} and the impact it would have on the "Internet". Those are all predominantly content providers or advertisers and whilst they have substantial networks within their control they don't tend to route general Internet traffic through them. In fact a lot of time and resources are spent engineering filters that ensure these peering companies don't get any traffic that they shouldn't - and believe me, the filters are on their side too they don't want people using their clean/fast internal networks as transit. The Internet is still built primarily from the interconnected networks of Service Providers. Your local connection will eventually join a national network and that national network (with suitable peering agreements) will join other international networks. Each of these networks has multiple links to many others and none of them rely on the generosity of {Google|Microsoft|Amazon}. Good Service Providers will peer directly with those guys to ensure content is close to their customers but again there is a lot of filtering here to ensure traffic flows correctly even during failures.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21, @04:44PM (3 children)
Only those who are incapable of using more than one browser.
On my desktop I run multiple instances of Firefox (run as different user accounts too- so if you pwn my "game firefox", you need to do a lot more before you get access to my "finance firefox"). I also have Chrome and Opera. I can use curl and w3m from time to time.
Also for my more general and lower security Firefox instances I run containers.
On my phone I have Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Firefox with ublock is the default browser. The other two are for different purposes.
All? Maybe you're browsing on an ancient phone or something? My desktop CPU usage is currently 3% - and that's with quite a fair bit of stuff (16GB of memory in use).
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Thursday December 21, @05:48PM (2 children)
Out of genuine interest: how did you implement those different instances of Firefox? You mention segregating them in different use profiles. Did you consider using the firefox profile manager (firefox --profileManager)? If so, why was that not sufficient?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21, @07:18PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by owl on Thursday December 21, @08:38PM
The GP already told you how in the part you quoted, they run them in as separate users.
I do something very similar, just not by the "separate users" path. I have this small Bash script that launches a separate new instance of firefox for those times some fool website needs too much JS turned on and I don't care to tweak uBlockOrigin to let it run:
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday December 21, @04:47PM (11 children)
The thing to remember is that we are all yokels. We were born yesterday. Social media has only been around for 25 years. The internet has only been around for about 35. Marketing is only about 125 years old. As individuals and as a society, we have not yet learned the techniques for dealing with this stuff.
But already we see projects like MySpaces and Geocities destroyed by enshittification. And we see other projects like E-Bay, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and the green site eclipsed by it. As these projects mature, they poison themselves with their own greed. They try to increase profits by becoming more extractive of their users, only to find their users abandoning them in droves for something less extractive.
Personally, I think that in time we will become much more sophisticated about this stuff. Users will learn how to avoid the more abusive projects. Projects will learn how to be extractive enough to stay afloat without becoming so extractive that they destroy themselves. But the process might take a few hundred years...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday December 21, @05:21PM (5 children)
In general I agree with you, and there's something very broken in our overall governmental process. We have all kinds of govt. agencies tasked with protecting people, but they're much too slow to see the harm being done, especially when all the mined data is then "stolen", and who knows where it goes then.
There are cases where people have fought and somewhat won. Some neighborhoods, towns, townships, etc., have enacted "no soliciting" rules and I've often seen signs to that effect. To some extent spam and robo-calling has been pushed back.
I wish we all knew what the legislators are hearing. I can't figure out why they're so slow to enact very strict and strong privacy laws, stopping all the spying, data-mining, sharing and selling, etc. Either they're extremely disconnected from reality, or they're being sold on or pressured into allowing it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 21, @06:11PM (4 children)
>Either they're extremely disconnected from reality, or they're being sold on or pressured into allowing it.
Why not both? While the elected candidates themselves have many concerns more personally important than understanding "newfangled" issues like the value of personal data, they're supposed to have staff who are "up on these things" and can make informed and rational recommendations. By the way, have you heard my rant about what a worthless, selfish, immature, pile of human garbage makes up the vast visible bulk of U.S. Congressional and Senate staffers? Yeah.
Transparency is always the answer, especially when it comes to the legislative decision making process. As you say:
>I wish we all knew what the legislators are hearing.
And seeing, and being given.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday December 21, @06:29PM (1 child)
I've been thinking about contacting a local / state legislator or several about this issue. I'll let you (all) know if and when I do and what they have to say about it.
I've contacted some in recent past about different issues. They all seemed competent and wanting to help. I think the biggest problem, for me, was the all-too-typical form thing: they want me to categorize my "issue" and enter it into a form. Well, I'm not sure what the category should be, and I'm not super interested in online forms. I see them as a way to push me aside and ignore me. But again, the staffers I had direct phone contact with did in some cases put in some time and effort. The process depends on me being my own strong energetic driven advocate, but at that point I was pretty drained of motivation. Unfortunately I live in a US state that is _very_ lawyer-centric and I don't have that kind of money.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 21, @07:41PM
If you have the inclination, I highly recommend doing exactly that.
I would expect the responses from higher levels to be very formulaic vague support of you and your cause, saying all the things you want to hear in an attempt to get your support in the coming election - however, even when they're shining you on like that, your voice and opinion are being heard infinitely louder than your neighbors who say nothing.
Getting your voice heard in the staffers' pool is still getting it closer to the decision makers. And if you can categorize your issue for a form, that's another way they measure public opinion - again, you'll be heard much more loudly there than random man on the street polling.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21, @06:34PM (1 child)
Have you seen the average age of congressional staffers? They're mostly kids fresh out of college or a cousin of some kind of money-lender to the congress critter who couldn't be trusted not to fuck up tying their own shoe laces (which is why they wear velcro shoes).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 21, @07:44PM
>By the way, have you heard my rant about what a worthless, selfish, immature, pile of human garbage makes up the vast visible bulk of U.S. Congressional and Senate staffers? Yeah.
I will say this for them: they do tend to be able to put on a professional face and at least project competence, at least the ones I have interacted with at the national level. However, behind that thin facade lies a spoiled brat frat boy almost every time I have seen "behind the mask" - which they tend not to be mature enough to stay masked at all times.
Realize this: the cream of that crop is what we get running for office.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Thursday December 21, @05:57PM (2 children)
While I wish I could share your optimism, I think you fail to realize that the Meme (to be interpreted in Richard Dawkins' way, not the cat-picture kind of way) that is Marketing also evolves. Once 'we' find a defense against it, those Marketing techniques that have found a way around the defense will be able to pass on their characteristics to the next stage. In other words: it's an infinite arms race of evolution.
The success of Google and Facebook seems to indicate otherwise. We have digital feudalism these days where people actively flock to the feudal lords (google, facebook, microsoft, apple, amazon) for 'protection', regardless of how much these lords abuse them... because they've been told that without those protective wings, out there, 'there be dragons'...
This line of thinking puts (e.g.) google's efforts w.r.t. finding and exposing vulnerabilities in a new light: if we can scare folks enough, if we can convince them that the internet is scary and they need protection, and if we can convince them that we, Google, can protect them, then we have them by the balls for eternity.
75 years from now, people will get friggin' eye implants that will project advertisements directly on their retina. There will literally be no way to turn that shit off. It will be 'normalized' by then.
"Ready Player One" was supposed to be a warning, but some folks (probably MBA's) looked at it and though "this should give me a good year-end bonus"...
Do I have to remind anyone about the Torment Nexus?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday December 21, @07:22PM (1 child)
Marketing is not inherently evil. Marketing is about getting people to want to buy something that they don't currently want to buy. About ten years back, I was surprised to discover that the videoconferencing company that I was working for spent a lot more on marketing than on technology. This surprised me until I realized that we already had the technology. It could be better, but it existed. Meanwhile, very few people were really interested in using it. They had always met in person, and that was good enough for them. Then sheltering in place happened and changed a lot of minds without any help from our crappy marketing team... But that's a different rant. The point is that there is a legitimate place for convincing people to do things differently. Marketing in its current form is pretty bad, because it has become completely disconnected from connecting people with better products and services. At present, the marketers don't even mention their products. They are too busy trying to associate their brand with a high status identity. But as new generations mature, who have been exposed to this from the cradle, and who have been prepared by their parents, and eventually the schools, this approach will stop working. And perhaps as marketing evolves, it will evolve from simple identity politics to actually making the case for its products. More evil is not the only direction marketing can evolve.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Dr Spin on Friday December 22, @12:41PM
Marketing is not inherently evil.
You would never guess just by looking at it!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 4, Informative) by darkfeline on Thursday December 21, @10:18PM
> Marketing is only about 125 years old
Marketing has been around since anyone had something new to sell. It just hadn't been "refined" with modern psychology and available tools.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Saturday December 23, @12:54PM
I'm afraid that's a lost race.
First of all, the market itself, when ran using money printed of thin air and permanently increasing debt, must go faster and faster. It can be seen even now if we compare commodity prices and exploitation of work. It means that the numbers must always grow.
When the web company learns how to stay afloat without getting too greedy, it's already too late - shareholders say that the gears must turn faster. And it happens until the collapse.
As a result, users are more exploited and they get used to it, thinking that's a new normal. They got used to enforcing licenses on their own creations ("cloud"), so I think many worse things can be forced and will work.
The "split" in many countries is a lie. It highly depends on mentality. In one country you will get the ecosystem growing or stable, having a nice share of users and active communities. In a neighboring country - ran by marketing companies only using 10 accounts to spread spam. And this has nothing in common with country's population.
(Score: 2) by Adam on Thursday December 21, @06:19PM (1 child)
DDG isn't helping me much. What is Gemini in this context? The crypto exchange?
(Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday December 21, @06:49PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) [wikipedia.org]
https://geminiprotocol.net/ [geminiprotocol.net]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday December 21, @08:24PM (5 children)
I am experimenting with another approach to street evasion of corps decadent technology in a cyberpunk paradigm: static SVG rendering.
Ideas so far:
1. Replace HTML with SVG. This is technically possible for all current postmodern browsers. Build everything for a page statically, on a dev system. Let the SVG file be a static product of compilation of page resources. Easy part for a programmer in any language. When a HTML is required (by framework for example), make the SVG a single element of it.
2. In SVG content, no scripting, no cookies, no evil links beyond site. No animations. This is policy rule. A single file loading is very fast on current transfer protocols. Browser resources consumption is thin (no complex and dynamic DOM processing, only static SVG processing).
3. Now, the most tricky part: when SVG content is final on dev, generated from text (with local font), collapse everything from text objects into vector path objects. This could be done manually via Inkscape algorithm, for example, but developing other software dedicated method for that is desirable.
This inflates the page size, but totally invalidates all text-focused bots from understanding it. Numbers in path objects may slightly variate randomly (they are float, after all) to prevent exact regular matching to original glyphs by the known font. This is a critical step.
For humans, nothing prevents the "reading", but for machines, now they need to render a full page and reinterpret it visually (OCR).
This could be done without technical barriers, but it hugely increases total costs of agencies for WEB/SVG space analysis in compare to scraped text analysis. Now you need the cloud to machine-read a single page.
4. At server side, a nginx module to render SVG on a server or proxy may be designed, to hide smelly HTML from the client side completely. This even could be ran on a local proxy.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22, @02:18AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday December 22, @04:21AM
For the purpose of timely conveying critical information out to public and bypass automated text analysis censorship, buttons are not necessary.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22, @05:54AM (1 child)
Have you looked at http://www.newschinamag.com/ [newschinamag.com] Sort of like NewsWeek or Time magazine, but about China.
While it looks like any other big news site, nearly all the text is images, not characters. No obvious way to copy/paste text from any of the stories. Haven't tried OCR, but that seems like one way to turn the pictures of letters back into characters.
Not sure how it's done, but the result sounds similar to your use of vector graphics as an intermediary(??)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 23, @05:12PM
Copy and paste of the text works for me on Chrome when I use the extension Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Friday December 22, @10:41AM
Err ... usage of svg is common on the commercial web: long, long sets of hexadecimal characters are ideal for built-in tracking. As for your notion that somehow computers would have it more difficult to OCR a page than to DOM analyze it: ha, ha and ha. (The reason pages are getting heavier and heavier has nothing to do with more advanced functionality, purposeful obfuscation or more extensive frameworks: it's because the current batch of contractors can't parse what their predecessors were up to, and nobody has time or brains enough to do documentation).
HTML and javascript can still be read and understood. In your scheme we'd end up with a bunch of point coordinates. You do have a particular, yet slightly painful, form of humor.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21, @10:20PM (1 child)
https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/a-handful-of-companies-rule-the-internet [substack.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22, @06:34PM
It's important to be mindful of our words and their impact on others.
Not responsible for it eventually turning on you.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RedGreen on Friday December 22, @06:21AM (2 children)
I have already made my choice many many years ago by never joining any of that toxic anti-social media garbage. Staying away from the god damn parasite corporations as much as is humanly possible and basically just saying no to any of the hype fed bullshit. I am firmly in the camp of as the title says they can take their clicks and using my data for profit and stick it.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday December 22, @06:42PM (1 child)
Aww, c'mon, there's so much FUN to be had with them. Plus, they can serve as a really awesome advertising vehicle.
Of course not with real information. But remember that your name carries some weight. My name for example is associated with the biggest and most important names in the business I'm in. I rub shoulders with Shamir and Schneier. No, not really of course, but Photoshop sure is a hell of a tool.
And anyone who asks will of course get the real answer. That this is mostly a sham and that no, I ain't the best friend of either of them.
But asshole companies that just go to the antisocial media and the like to find out about me without even bothering to talk to me get exactly what they deserve.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Saturday December 23, @01:00AM
"My name for example is associated with the biggest"
I have been online for close to forty years now and my name when searched turns up nothing, that is how much I go for being included in any of that garbage...
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen