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Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review)
Over at Technology Review, Cory Doctorow argues that browser-makers can reclaim user privacy by snuffing out cookie-based tracking. When advertisers say the idea can't work, he says, consider that the same tactic successfully stamped out pop-ups. "When Mozilla's Firefox turned on pop-up blocking by default, it began to be wildly successful. The other browser vendors had no choice but to follow suit. Today, pop-ups are all but gone."
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Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 20:16 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] A good start for thinking about this problem would be to make the subject and object of the sentence match up with the way that HTTP works. We say that "example.com tracks you" when it's really more like "your browser tells example.com about you" (more)
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 20:36 UTC (Thu) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]
Since when did anyone loose whatever information he supplied? Information doesn't necessarily have to be more useful to someone you supply it to than it is to you. But if it might be useful at all, to anyone out there, please, do share it to those who might use it. Uninformed decisions are being made all over the world as you read these words. Help spread information, even if only by contributing seemingly uninteresting data about mundane things for aggregation into useful statistics. For example, my water bill is most useful to me and my water supplier. Same goes for your water bill. But what if either of us ever wondered whether their water usage was unusually high, and if so, what utility was using more water than others could cope with? Then suddenly, a matrix of the water usage of various utilities and anonymous users becomes immensely useful. By Doctorow's logic, I should wonder whether my software is more useful to you, or the firms that might adopt and maintain it, than it is to me. I think I'll keep it to myself, just to be on the safe side. Privacy, whether of individuals, corporations or governments, is inherently harmful. It does nothing but restrict the flow of information.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 22:24 UTC (Thu) by jackb (subscriber, #41909) [Link] Privacy, whether of individuals, corporations or governments, is inherently harmful. It does nothing but restrict the flow of information. I must be misunderstanding what you wrote here because surely you're not saying that keeping certain personal information private, for example your name, phone number, address, workplace, bank, and vacation schedule, is inherently harmful. I'm sure that if you posted all that somebody would find it useful, though most likely at your expense.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 9, 2012 3:25 UTC (Sat) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]
The use of such information would at first mostly be useful to people I know;. For example my family and friends could use my vacation schedule (posted in the subthread below yours) to meet me abroad.
Only when a statistically significant portion of the general public has shared some information can the information become generally useful to the society. The worst thing about the current trend of aggregation of personal information for statistical analysis is that the information is collected by a company for future analysis by that same company. Analysis is hard. Just look at what Google and Facebook think about you. The only way to put such information to use is publishing it to the general community of statisticians, and any amateurs of the general public.
And yes, I do believe that the benefit of the availability of information generally outweighs the harm. So if in doubt, share.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 22:21 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] The use of such information would at first mostly be useful to people I know;. For example my family and friends could use my vacation schedule (posted in the subthread below yours) to meet me abroad.And burglars could use it to rob your house. I really don't think you want to provide information publically which can be used to determine the state of occupation of your primary residence. There are too many ways bad actors can use it.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 22:57 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Burglars have much easier ways to check if you're home than by trawling vacation schedules.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 12, 2012 7:14 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The advantage of scanning various not-at-home lists is that you can do it from one location and it is discreet and safe. Other methods either involve looking at a single unreliable data point (e.g. presence of internal lighting or time of day and 'just hope' people are at work) and hoping it is accurate (which it isn't, in either direction), or suspiciously wandering past the house repeatedly to verify its continued state of darkness. Sure, most burglars are doing the latter -- but why make their job much easier by telling them when you're not in?
-- N., not cut out to be any sort of thief so this may be nonsense
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 13, 2012 0:35 UTC (Wed) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
You're saying what every decent police officer would suggest to a citizen who asks about prevention against burglars.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 1:18 UTC (Fri) by sjj (subscriber, #2020) [Link]
Fine, privacy is harmful. Great. Please reply with details of the last time you had sex, including your and your partner's name, age, phone number and address.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 2:31 UTC (Fri) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link] I refuse to violate my partner's (r: ex) privacy, even if I think my privacy is not worth protecting. I realize that many people like keeping secrets, and I will not force my, evidently debatable, ideology upon them. I can, however, supply just over half of the information you requested. My full name is Bjartur Thorlacius*, my International telephone number is +3546182195. Either of these could have been used to look up the other as they are registered publicly and probably globally unique. My address is Lundur III. I haven't had sex for up under a year (minus two months, IIRC). As for my vacation schedule, I'll be visiting my family in France and Belgium for most of July, although I doubt that's useful to know for many but my family and traveling buddies that I might meet in Paris. Or an assassin in the continent of Europe that can't be bothered to fly or sail to get at me. Sure. You can actually phone me, and I could even arrange for a brief meeting in Paris if you suspect I'm making all of this up. I'll write a proper, albeit subjective, reply to the post above yours. *This thread can now be found by e.g. future potential employers, or in fact anyone I am introduced to, by keyword search. Make of that whatever you want.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 7:08 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I believe that piracy is not only desirable it is a core requirement for humans to have a functional society.
While it's not as critical as 'first tier immediate needs' such as 'Food, Water, Shelter' it is right up there. Probably second tier of requirements for human life/happiness.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 16:10 UTC (Fri) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]
I believe that not having cops around all the time is a prerequisite not only to prosperity and happiness, but also for a functional society. That doesn't automatically mean I'm right, though.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 20:08 UTC (Fri) by jackb (subscriber, #41909) [Link] I believe that not having cops around all the time is a prerequisite not only to prosperity and happiness, but also for a functional society. That doesn't automatically mean I'm right, though.If by "not having cops around all the time" you mean an environment free of institutionalized coercion I would agree with you.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 9, 2012 3:29 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I am perfectly capable of giving lots of good reasons why I am right, if you'd like.
For one, believe it or not there are actually bad people out there that will use information against you. They exist in business and in government.
It is that it's difficult to be politically proactive when you disagree with the people running your country and they can use information to track down your friends, family, and professional associates and make their life hard in order to get to you. Demanding auditing for taxes, arbitrary fines, police harassment, etc. I've seen these things used against people that want to 'rock the boat' politically.
But if you don't want to see what is obvious to most everybody else, there isn't anything I can help with.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 9, 2012 14:52 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] They can do it just fine right now. It's ridiculously easy to find stuff about people you don't like. And besides, it's better to fight against the people that would try to use private stuff to intimidate you. Personally, I'm a privacy pessimist ("You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it") and I think it's better to fight for transparency then for privacy.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 17:40 UTC (Fri) by Otus (guest, #67685) [Link]
Piracy or privacy?
Either I'm missing the point or that was a Freudian.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 10:26 UTC (Fri) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
Finally your sex life is not so interesting.
But since you are in such a liberal vain with private life, could you please disclose all your bank account coordinates, passwords etc. so that everybody on this list can have a look at transactions ?
Concerning your vacation time, I know some people (burglars) are interested.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 14:25 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]
>>realize that many people like keeping secrets, and I will not force my, evidently debatable, ideology upon them.
>could you please disclose all your bank account coordinates, passwords etc. so that everybody on this list can have a look at transactions ?
If any of those transactions involve natural persons, then allowing third parties to peruse the account history would be a violation of those natural persons' privacy.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 15:37 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
Actually I know a person who had for about one year posted his bank statements online. You could donate money to him, and it would show up on the public statement next months. Was his way to incentivize people to donate money to his project. Cool, but very weird and intrusive.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 14:36 UTC (Fri) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link] Haha.
I don't use password-authentication for banking, and I have not made my account accessible over residential IP-networks. I flat out can't be bothered to fetch said list from the nearest bank. I can assure they're even less interesting than my sex life, however. There are a few illegal purchases of alcoholic bevereges in there, but otherwise it's more or less for food.
They could just as well rob my house during work hours.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 10:59 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
What're the numbers and security codes of your credit cards? How about your bank account numbers? I also wouldn't mind knowing your passport number and country of issue. Perhaps you could also tell us your current occupation, current place of employment, and your current salary. Who you most recently voted for in national and regional elections could also prove handy. Finally, your date of birth, place of birth, and the stated religion on your birth certificate.
This is all your own personal information I believe, so you don't need to impose your ideology on anyone to provide it. I'm sure you agree that restricting the flow of such information is inherently harmful
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 15:02 UTC (Fri) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]
My national identification number is 2112952019. I was born on the 21st of December, 1995, in Reykjavík.
I have no credit cards. For security reasons, I won't disclose my bank account numbers. I will not disclose my LWN password, nor will I publish my secret SSH keys. Those are not personal information protected by privacy. They are cryptographical secrets. Authentication is useful.
I attend secondary (13th or 14th year) education at various schools of various state support. I'm employed as a programmer by Hraðskjár, and my current salary is approximately nil. Hraðskjár is a tiny startup conceived by a friend of my first cousin. My birth certificate states Christianity as my religion. I'm registered as a "protestant reformist" (or something like that).
I have not voted in national, nor in regional, elections. I most likely won't for the next four years (plus one month).
My "informationist" stance is about defaulting to sharing information, in the hope that it could be useful to someone. I contrast it with the stance of privacy advocates, who would rather default to not sharing any information in the fear that it might at some point be or become embarrassing, or enough excuse to get you jailed or executed. I believe privacy is flat out the wrong way to avoid unfair imprisonment, execution or punishment. Privacy may get you what you want temporarily, but it won't help anyone else get it. It is at best a short-term interim solution to something.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 19:09 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
But you're restricting the free flow of information.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 9, 2012 10:12 UTC (Sat) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
You've created an arbitrary distinction between "information protected by privacy" and a "secrets".
There is no actual difference. Secrets are in fact information, that people desire to keep private.
More significantly, what one desires to keep secret is subjective, so what might be a secret to one might not be a secret to others. Hence why bland generalisations that "privacy is harmful" and "information must be free" add nothing to the conversation
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 9, 2012 14:49 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Not really. There's a crucial difference: a secret becomes useless if published.
If you publish my Gmail password then it'll become useless - I'll just pick another one. You can use it to publish my mail archive, but it'll be very boring.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 10, 2012 7:45 UTC (Sun) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
I don't think "can be used to gain access to systems" is a good working definition of "useless".
I think you mean something like "changeable" or "able to be made secret again". If someone finds out you're bribing the police and publishes it, you obviously can't change that fact or somehow directly mitigate the damage. But some privacy issues are more like passwords, they cause damage only in the right situations, and the window can close.
So while there are differences, I don't think there are two neat categories like you suggest.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 13, 2012 0:49 UTC (Wed) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
It's also not always obvious what the potential damage is or can become at the time the "disclosure" happens (e.g. because information might not be harmful on itself, but when combined with other information it can become dangerous).
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 13, 2012 16:03 UTC (Wed) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]
Credentials are created only for authentication. Compromising them thus makes them useless for their original purpose.
My vacation schedule, on the other hand, does not become meaningless if published.
This is analogous to using the right to modify a book to erase the original author's name and place yours instead. It's a modification, so it arguably constitutes a derivative work, right?
There may be gray areas. But my point is that you should, if in doubt, make life easier for everyone and default to sharing. Someone might find the information useful.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 13, 2012 16:16 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> My vacation schedule, on the other hand, does not become meaningless if published.
That would depend on who you are. If you're a celebrity, for example, then it might not be much of a vacation if people know where and when to find you.
Views like yours seem to result from a complete lack of interest in your personal data. No one else cares about it, so you don't see any reason to keep it private. Or, put another way, your privacy is maintained automatically just because you aren't interesting enough for anyone to bother. Even so, you make exceptions for the private data you _do_ care about, like passwords; you should consider that much of this other information you're so free with can also be used to impersonate you. Enough of it can amount to a form of authentication credential. Those with higher profiles, or perhaps just a better appreciation of how that information can be misused, have reason to put more effort into protecting it.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 14, 2012 7:20 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
I think it is quite telling that your post this from Iceland.
Iceland is a quite nice society, but the total Icelandic population is less than that of many world cities, and people interactions are quite different in countries where truants have whole continents to escape in, and they don't risk that their victim knows someone who knows them.
The smallest the population, the harder it will be to keep any privacy, but conversely the easiest it will be for other social mechanisms to protect individuals. However improving communication means balance is not shifting to smaller communities but towards a huge world-size global entity (where privacy will matter even more than today if people are to live peacefully together)
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 22:02 UTC (Fri) by sjj (subscriber, #2020) [Link]
Now I'm sorry I trolled you. Well played. I still think you're wrong, but I appreciate your consistency.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 14, 2012 8:49 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]
I dunno if I can reconcile your viewpoint, but it seems to me that you forgot one aspect in this privacy versus open-access debate: reciprocity.
Personnally, I would also accept to share some information (water metering or financial for sure, maybe not the other kind as easily :-) but with a condition: only if those accessing this information do not do such access anonymously either and reciprocally accept that their access be adequately recorded for me to know [1].
I also think that privacy-everywhere (in the computer hacker sense) may be an impairement in the long run. (Note that some law enforcement professionals even see this as a problem.) But clearly, publishing personal information without asking for anything in return (especially the identity of those who access or use the information) does not sound sensible either to me.
NB: Investigation power organization in the legal system (of democratic countries) may certainly deserve more study from our open source security community.
[1] What about "cookie exchange"? At least we could gather very precise information about companies doing users tracking on the Internet...
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 20:36 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
other than trying to maintain a blacklist of sites to break cookies on, I don't see how you would implement what he's talking about.
how can your browser tell the difference between part of the page you are viewing including a segment that's hosted on a different, legitimate server, and a segment that's an advertising company?
and that's even assuming that the advertising companies wouldn't just work around the lack of cookies.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 21:24 UTC (Thu) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]
Well, you could employ heuristics similar to the heuristics of pop-up blockers. You could, for example, accept cookies only from responses to POSTs.
Then you could provide better UI for the standard application and session layer authentication mechanisms. Do browsers even provide UI for generating X.509 or Berkeley tcpcrypt certificates?
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 21:49 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
that would break many sites. not all server-side changes (and thus changes that are relevant to cookie changes) result from posts.
A large part of the REST fad is based on eliminating posts (and ideally cookies as well, but posts first)
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 2:50 UTC (Fri) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link] Not necessarily all
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 3:08 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
more precisely, a browser is allowed to re-send a GET at any time, that doesn't mean that it can't have an effect.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 6:51 UTC (Fri) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] A browser is also allowed to send a GET without user interaction - e.g. to prefetch a link that the browser's heuristics suggest will turn out interesting. A POST cannot be sent without user interaction.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 17:05 UTC (Fri) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link] You're thinking of the idempotent methods. In short, a Then there are
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 21:34 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
They could just ship AdBlock (and perhaps Ghostery) enabled by default.
But I'm not sure I like that, I kind of like the fact that millions of idiots who don't run those are willing to fund the web sites I visit, while I can reap benefits without suffering the ads and tracking.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 21:42 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
Also, Mozilla makes most of their money from Google, who may not be willing to pay as much money for search if Firefox blocks all their advertisements.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 21:48 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (editor, #43041) [Link]
I believe his thesis is that if browsers switch off the firehose of free information, the remaining information -- which is the data voluntarily offered by users -- will be of higher value, and be less expensive to index & analyze. I'm not interested in arguing his point for him; that's only my attempt at restating it.
Nate
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 21:48 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
besides, some people don't like the idea of some unaccountable organization blocking their access to sites (see all the problems that come from e-mail blacklist)
AdBlock does a pretty good job (I choose to run it), but just because I choose to run it right now doesn't mean I think it should be default.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 23:05 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
Well, unlike e-mail blocking, you generally notice if something is missing from the web page, unless it has no relationship with the rest of the page, which is pretty much the definition of an advertisement.
BTW, I just tried disabling AdBlock and got assaulted, on LWN, by a text ad on the left side, a banner on top, AND a Flash ad to the right!
Not sure how people can use browsers without AdBlock enabled, I think I would go insane within hours.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 23:08 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
If you were a subscriber you could disable the advertisements and continue to support this site :-)
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 23:19 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
Yeah, so first they bombard me with annoying stuff, then they try to extort money from me to stop the discomfort they intentionally caused me in the first place.
A great way to acquire happy customers, and an awesome generator of goodwill, if you ask me.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 23:22 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
they are trying to earn money to pay the bills so that this site can remain in existence.
This site had no advertisements for many years, but costs continue to climb.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 1:18 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
Your concern has been noted. Thank you for sharing.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 6:19 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Hint: if you're not paying, you're not a customer.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 11:14 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
If you find the site so obnoxious, and so lacking in value that paying for (some of) its content is "extortion", then you should probably leave.
However, your continued presence here suggests that you perceive some value. If you wish the site to remain and to keep producing content you value, subscribing is the best way to help keep it alive.
Now, if you have such a great sense of entitlement that you cannot understand the realities of operating such a site, and insist that you would never subscribe, nor would you allow ads, then you clearly aren't someone who is ever going to part with your money. In that case, any objection or opinion you have on the matter is really worthless.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 20:35 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
Did you ever occur to you that this site only exist due to the work of a lot of people on free software development ? That somehow free software are not bundled with ads to cater for the "the realities of doing such a development", and that developers could expect the same courtesy here without any feeling of entitlement, especially when they are subscribers ?
Jon is always claiming that ads bring very little money and yet is unwilling to part with this practice.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 21:02 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
every free software developer faces "the realities of doing such a development", some deal with it by having other jobs, some deal with it by running their own companies, some deal with it by getting hired to do the developement full time.
any project where they developers don't deal with "the realities of doing such a development" in some way will die when the savings accounts of the developers run out and all development stops.
Besides, and Android and iOS a lot of free software _does_ get bundled with ads to pay for it :-)
LWN advertisements may not bring in a lot of money, but they apparently bring in enough to be noticable or they would not be leaving them on. I'm sure that if someone were to offer to sponser LWN for enough money on the condition that advertisements went away, Jon would be willing to agree.
Ads Posted Jun 8, 2012 22:29 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] They actually bring in a bit more than they used to now that we have Linux New Media doing the sales for us. It's still a relatively small part of our total revenue picture, but it's definitely enough to make a difference.
Ads and the Linux New Media cookie explained Posted Jun 9, 2012 1:47 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] now that we have Linux New Media doing the sales for us. Oh, so that explains where the linuxnewmedia.com cookie is coming from. At least it isn't advertising for Microsoft. It scares me sometimes how pervasive banner ads (and the companies hosting them) try so hard to push their way onto my desktop (and into my life), but I guess that's just business. Oh well, welcome to the online world of We-Want-All-Your-Personal-Info... P.S. As I said in my comment linked above (from August 2008), and still feel this way, I do realize our editors have to make a living, and I applaud them for being creative in how to keep LWN afloat. I disabled ads some time ago, and now I'm feeling a little guilty for doing so. (I'll re-enable ads after posting this comment.)
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 9, 2012 10:45 UTC (Sat) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
Yes, it is quite obvious to me that this site exists because of free software, much like Groklaw exists because of legislation targeting Linux, Lifehacker exists because others write software, the Wall Street Journal exists because businesses are doing business, etc. etc. That reporters depend on the reported is true by definition, and so it's not that interesting. It also has very little to do with the quality of the reporting in question
This site really exists because someone takes to the time and energy to research, write, and edit the content. It's a valuable service and the quality of this site is in my opinion superior to any other site writing about Linux. To suggest that charging a subscription fee for such content is akin to extortion is just absurd.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 9, 2012 23:08 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
> To suggest that charging a subscription fee for such content is akin to extortion is just absurd.
This may explain why nobody made that claim.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 9, 2012 23:49 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
what do you call this statement
"Yeah, so first they bombard me with annoying stuff, then they try to extort money from me to stop the discomfort they intentionally caused me in the first place."
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 10:54 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
The OP is not complaining about having to pay to access content, but rather to have to pay not to receive ads (quite the opposite in fact).
When it is so easy to install ads filtering technology, attempt to extract money from users unable to do so can be aptly described as extortion.
And for those not blocking the ads out of respect of LWN, this is not economically viable: instead just buy an extra "starving hacker" LWN subscription, this will get more money to LWN while costing you less in the long run. Adding intermediary always increase cost.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 11:14 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
given that paid subscribers of LWN do not see advertisements, if he was willing to pay he wouldn't be worrying about the ads
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 12:18 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
This is untrue: at the lowest subscription levels, subscribers still see the ads.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 11:27 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>If you find the site so obnoxious
To be fair, LWN really does have particularly intrusive advertising - lots of big, colourful, animated Flash ads that make the site look kind of cheap and seedy in comparison to sites which understand the value of unobtrusive advertising.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 7, 2012 23:11 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
by the way, I routinely browse with both noscript and with cookies set to ask me before accepting cookies. I usually don't bother with adblock.
I find that there are quite a few times where a site doesn't work (in that I don't see an option to do something that I want to do) without enabling some of this. so many times it is going to be as invisible as blocked e-mail, unless you know that there should be something there for you to see.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 1:21 UTC (Fri) by sjj (subscriber, #2020) [Link]
Thank you for reminding me to turn of AdBlock on lwn.net.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 7:38 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> They could just ship AdBlock (and perhaps Ghostery) enabled by default.
> > But I'm not sure I like that, I kind of like the fact that millions of idiots who don't run those are willing to fund the web sites I visit, while I can reap benefits without suffering the ads and tracking.
AdBlock now has an option not to block unobtrusive advertising. To put it in the context of the article, let's see if that works as well as blocking pop-up windows.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 8, 2012 4:42 UTC (Fri) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
It feels like I watched this talk ages ago, but I have a suspicion that stuff just seems dated much faster these days.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 11:32 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Imagine if your browser loaded only cookies that it thought were useful to you, rather than dozens from ad networks you never intended to interact with.
Don't browsers already block third-party cookies by default? Chrome and Opera seem to anyway. Going beyond that would require the browser to somehow work out what cookies you want, and what you don't - an impossible problem in the general case since people have different requirements.
Ironically the only way I can think of for the browser to work that out would be to perform large-scale statistical analysis of browsing habits.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 11:35 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Don't browsers already block third-party cookies by default? Chrome and Opera seem to anyway
It looks like Firefox and IE don't, so that would be a good start.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 12:10 UTC (Mon) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
Firefox has that setting (disable 3rd party cookies), although it is disabled by default.
I can imagine the backslash of users that their site has been broken by Firefox if they enabled that...
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 12:08 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default (I just tested Chromium 18 on Debian).
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 13:14 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Hmm, I suppose that means I must have set that myself in the distant past and then had the setting automatically synchronise over.
In that case, I think a strong argument could be made that this setting should be on by default in all browsers. I don't know exactly what the downsides could be, but from my experience I have to conclude that it's not large.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 11, 2012 22:28 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
IIRC, the default changed in Chromium 19.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 15, 2012 11:18 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
I'd like to allow session cookies that make it convenient to do things like buy online, but refuse cookies that allow third-party tracking. I used to just have cookies turned off, but that became impractically annoying several years ago, with multiple 'do you want this cookie' questions for every site. And no-way to know what the hell they were all used for without being a proper web-developer geek. Does any browser make this easy for me?
I do geep goggle-analytics scripting turned off because that doesn't sound like like something I want to participate in (but I don't actually know what it does, really), and I've used adblock for years (the web without it is horrible!).
It's interesting that in the EU it has been decreed that explicit permission is required to place cookies, so every website is suddenly asking again. But I remain poorly informed about what refusing them will break and what accepting them reveals/implies. And I'm supposed to be a geek.
So I know what I want, but I don't know how to get it without spending more time than I am willing on working out how every website works.
How do we make sufficient information available to people for them to make intelligent decisions about what they are/are not revealing and trading-off for convenience? Something more sophisticated than 'accept/refuse all cookies with whitelist/blacklist' is needed IMHO.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 15, 2012 14:57 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Didn't the W3C sit down years ago and draft P3P? It sounds like what you want. Unfortunately, browser creators (except Microsoft) ignored it, and (more importantly), web sites themselves also ignore it.
However, I think your desired cookie policy is quite similar to mine. I have my browser configured to block all third-party cookies. First-party cookies are downgraded into session-only cookies except for a chosen white-list of sites.
Currently I use Google Chrome (well, actually Debian's chromium-browser package) and the Vanilla Cookie Manager extension to accomplish this. AFAIR it's possible to configure Firefox to do the same thing out of the box, though it requires some minor mucking around in about:config.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 15, 2012 15:09 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Firefox with cookie monster works for me.
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 15, 2012 18:16 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
It's not possible to tell from examining a cookie what the people who use the cookie are going to use it for.
You can make semi-educated guesses based on the cookie name, how long it is scheduled to last, etc.Bbut these are only guesses.
Similarly, you can make educated guesses about what third party cookies are desirable and what ones aren't based on the domain name of the third party, but again that's only a guess (and domain names are pretty cheap and hostnames within a domain are free)
Doctorow: The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (Technology Review) Posted Jun 19, 2012 18:18 UTC (Tue) by knobunc (subscriber, #4678) [Link]
Other good Firefox extensions have been mentioned, but another that is relevant to this discussion is RequestPolicy that allows you to control on a per-site basis what other sites to talk to. So if I am looking at a page served by lwn.net I have to give permission to the browser to request pages from google-analytics.com that lwn.net wants to have pulled in.
It is complementary with NoScript and CookieMonster.
Popups are gone? Posted Jun 21, 2012 16:20 UTC (Thu) by midg3t (guest, #30998) [Link] I guess I missed the part where pop-ups are gone. They no longer spawn a new window or tab, but they're still there hovering over the content using CSS and forcing me to find the particular method of closing this CSS overlay ad.
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