informationisbeautiful.net/dat…
Data — Information is Beautiful
Dive into the data behind your favourite Information is Beautiful visualizations and infographics.David McCandless (Information is Beautiful)
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@tinker
The war started decades ago and the test case that still happens to this day?
The war against homeless people. A war that has been going on and brainwashing people to hate people like me.
It doesn't matter that I swore to defend the US Constitution. I've been out for 14 years and who's Constitution rights are violated hourly?
Breaking the Web’s Cookie Jar
The Firefox add-in Firesheep caused quite an uproar a few weeks ago, and justifiably so. Here’s how it works: * Connect to a public, unencrypted WiFi network.Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)
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@javier Websites that don't use cookies are not involved. Neither are websites that only use cookies that are _required_ for the website to function, e.g. session tokens.
It's only when you'd like to use cookies to track users and deliver personalized ads that you have to deal with this stuff.
It's a choice.
Most websites simply don't choose the privacy-friendly option.
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Oblomov, el Celio 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 e Fabrizio T. reshared this.
one of the big problems nobody talks about: tech is largely only explained by entities who have no incentive to explain it *well*.
Google, Meta, large ad networks are all like "stupid EU makes us do Cookie banner".
While the actual regulation is actually pretty good. The regulation is basically "don't fuck around with user data. But if you do, you at least need to tell the user".
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Eugene Alvin Villar 🇵🇭, Fabrizio T. e Oblomov reshared this.
@JdeBP They peddle this bullshit very deliberately. Far too many users believe it's the EU's fault, when it is the predatory tech industry.
Most people would expect someone like @codinghorror to know better.
So why didn't you know better, @codinghorror ?
@javier
Aral Balkan reshared this.
I love that you don't like it.
Stop tracking people. Problem solved.
Tracking is not necessary. It is immoral.
It is tracking that ruins the internet, not cookie notices.
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@luap42 the donottrack header is exactly that at the browser level; if it's set no need to ask the user about consent they're explicitly denying. For non-tracking, i.e., technically necessary (auth,user settings) cookies, that banner is not necessary
the browser setting exists, it's not honored by website operators, which choose to show banners instead, and is being torpedoed by google, who is earth's dominant ad network and browser supplier.
the EU (in that case) isn't at fault.
Oblomov reshared this.
@funkylab @luap42 Well, akschualllly the Do-Not-Track header has been deprecated because it was widely disrespected for being enabled by default in some cases, so websites argued that DNT doesn't really reflect the users' choices.
Therefore, DNT has been replaced by the Global-Privacy-Control header which is required to be disabled by default. @funkylab's screenshot shows the GPC setting.
@codinghorror Not sure how GPC is not precisely the “at the browser level” you are describing.
@codinghorror @pixelcode @funkylab @luap42
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Giulia 🐳, Dún Piteog, Aral Balkan, RevK, webhat, Robert Kingett e FediThing 🏳️🌈 reshared this.
German here: the gist of GDPR is: people must know when someone collects personal data.
You can perfectly live without a cookie banner if you don't set one for arbitrary visitors. That was the intended result. But reality instead invented this UX nightmare, because we can't have nice things.
For me it just shows how fucked up today's web actually is.
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@dalias in analogy:
EU made it illegal to “sucker punch people” ie collect personal data without consent. That’s not the same as legit personal data collection eg an online shop needs your delivery address to mail your order you just made to you.
Cookie banners are basically giving someone a quick “sorry” after punching them - it’s a loophole that shouldn’t exist. No sorry needed if you don’t punch anyone.
Oblomov reshared this.
@dalias yeah fair. I see some progress has been made on allowing ad free meta product usage (with payment).
But the banners I think are harder to enforce because it’s just so many companies, large and small.
yes indeed! before we joined Internet Safety Labs, the org published a spec for how that relationship between the visitor and the company should work, in an ideal world
not because anybody is going to follow that spec unless legally required to... just because sometimes you need to make your position clear
anyway: during our time at Google we were occasionally party to VP-level decision-making around privacy topics
we can attest, from our own direct knowledge, that tech companies habitually intentionally refuse to engage with public-policy debates so that they can later paint the laws and regulations that come out of those debates as uninformed by industry realities
@ireneista @dalias @leymoo
ah, the old "move fast, break things", just being sure to move fast enough to flee any prosecution.
i miss the days when "do cool shit, solve hard problems" was the focus. vast parts of the benefits of our 60s/70s space program wasn't as much the space part as all the stuff we learned and all the tech that was discovered and repurposed for earth.
going to be a while before the idea that research is a good thing without an immediate stock bump that quarter comes back.
that sort of bullshit was a lot of why we now work in civil society, instead.
the industry claims that self-regulation is the appropriate model, but then refuses to be held accountable by its own internal processes (which we were part of). therefore, change must be driven from outside the system rather than within.
Session cookies in themselves are fine - no PII involved and no third party tracking. If you only set one of those you don't need consent, the same way you don't need to consent to set a "no cookies consent" cookie
@pgcd @leymoo Nope, a session cookie is tracking. It enables processing data on you like "the same person who looked at products A, B, and C yesterday bought products C and D today". Likewise choosing what to show you based on that profiling. It might also reveal things about you to other ppl you share a computer with like "somebody using this computer was looking for information on contraceptives or HRT" etc.
Session cookies are unlawful tracking unless you consented to it by logging in to the site with the understanding and intent that you have a persistent profile and what that profile will be used for was made clear.
@dalias @pgcd @leymoo
under GDPR, session cookies as normally understood meet the definition of "strictly necessary" and do not require explicit consent
If your session cookie is persistent, it's not a session cookie anymore. Not persisting from one browser session to another is kind of a defining characteristic of a session cookie.
@lackthereof @pgcd @leymoo Maybe we're going by different definitions of "session". It sounds like you think it's a short-lived thing that disappears when you terminate the browser. Which, even if that were the definition, would still mean it... never disappears. Most of us have browser "sessions" 10+ years old. Mobile doesn't even have a sense of terminating the browser.
The definition I'm going by is an identifier, regardless of lifetime, that establishes distinct HTTP requests as originating from the same browser. There is no "strictly necessary" reason to do this unless the purpose of the site is maintaining a stateful interaction with the user. If the visitor is just reading your site, there is no legitimate business interest in knowing whether the load of page A and the load of page B came from the same person.
> But the banners I think are harder to enforce because it’s just so many companies, large and small.
Why not use the fines to fund more enforcement?
I have to agree with @dalias here. The law is not about cookies or cookie banners. The law is about tracking and handling personal data. You are even generally allowed to handle personal data if:
1. it is technically or legally necessary for your service
2. you _only_ use that data for the intended purpose
3. you delete it if you do not need it anymore.
For other things, you need consent. The banners are to get your consent to share your data with 90+ different third parties.
What if I told you that site owners could just show a Yes/No popup instead of sending visitors down a rat maze to subdue them into data collection?
This is 100% malicious compliance and if you can't see it, you're not looking closely enough in this matter.
Signed, someone whose sites don't have popups cus I'm not invested in collecting user data.
@dalias no, you need a legal basis according to the GDPR. Consent (which many people already pointed out the banner is not) is just one of them.
It’s just laziness of companies to choose the banner route.
@dalias Oh ffs, this isn't true and you should know better than perpetuating that lie.
I host multiple websites. None with cookie banners. This works even for news, e.g. @gamingonlinux -- and Liam isn't even hosting in the EU but AUS. But he, correctly, thinks that just not needing a cookie banner is exactly the right thing to do.
@dalias no, it's not required. None of the EU companies I've been at needed cookie banners, and neither do you.
There's one simple trick: just don't track users. It's even possible to run ads without tracking. Print media has done so for decades!
@dalias My main website is GDPR compliant and has no cookie banner. Instead, *if* I set a cookie that can be made to track someone, I ask *when* I set the cookie (ie when you log in).
Setting a cookie that doesn’t track a visitor does not require consent.
@dalias The reaction you're having is *exactly* what ad tech companies hope for.
Their malicious "compliance" is not required by the GDPR, but that's how they've chosen to strike back at users for daring to use legislation to try to protect their data.
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@codinghorror
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German court bans LinkedIn from ignoring "Do Not Track" signals
The Berlin Regional Court found LinkedIn's ignoring of "Do Not Track" signals and publishing of profiles without permission to be illegal. The ruling supported consumer control over personal data.Alex Ivanovs (Stack Diary)
@cvtsi2sd @frosch @dalias
This one?
mastodon.ie/@faduda/1145116765…
Gerard Cunningham ✒️ (@faduda@mastodon.ie)
A consent system relied upon by tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and X to serve targeted online advertising has been ruled to be incompatible with the GDPR. https://www.irishlegal.mastodon.ie
@dalias Indeed, but I would say it was 100% entirely predictable that this would be the outcome, and so on that basis the regulations were really badly thought out.
Personally, I think some rules on this are a tad far, it makes sense for a site to have logs and track sessions - if only to improve the site or understand traffic. The bad bit is the third parties and cross site targeted ads and profiles and shite we see in the advertising industry.
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Oblomov e Bluebabbler reshared this.
True, but my point remains. This shitty experience we're collectively having here this isn't "the EU forcing cookie notification on people", it's "the malicious compliance of companies that profit from user tracking."
Every company that shows you an cookie popup has made the choice to put a few fractions of pennies of possible future profit ahead of your experience.
Cookies, the GDPR, and the ePrivacy Directive - GDPR.eu
Cookies can give businesses insight into their users’ online activity. Unforunately they are subject to both the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, making compliance difficult.Richie Koch (GDPR.eu)
Oblomov reshared this.
@AeonCypher @mhoye Then they’re incompetent. I’ve built and operated dozens of websites, from personal blogs to websites serving billions of views for big pharma. None of them have a cookie notice (or at least had them when I left), because they’re not needed unless you actively and aggressively track people.
Did it require educating and fighting overly cautious legal departments? Absolutely. Was it relatively trivial? Also yes.
@teotwaki @mhoye I'm responsible for European compliance. You are completely, totally, factually incorrect.
If you use _any_ cookies whatsoever that is data from the user (including, for example, click behavior) you are required to give notice under GDPR, regardless of whether or not they are tracking you.
If you use any third party service that _may_ be tracking, then you are required to give a banner and forward that to the integrated system.
The reason a bunch of websites (e.g. gouv.fr sites) have options for things that don't exist on the site (like marketing cookies) is because it's plug and play with a ton of javascript frameworks -or- because of a third party integration (like datadog for site monitoring etc)
Increasingly GDPR cookie violations are being enforced, companies are scared, and people are reaching for the most expedient solution.
That claim that "they’re not needed unless you actively and aggressively track people" is just radically incorrect. You need permission for _any_ cookie that monitors and stores _any_ personal data (including user behavior) whatsoever.
@lispi314 @leymoo They may be well-intentioned* but they're not well-designed or doing everything right. They're tracking visitors without their consent.
* Normally I would not even call this well-intentioned, but as I said upthread, the fact that every web framework *automatically sets session cookies assuming you want to break the law and track users* even when the user has not indicated that they want to do something like log in or store a shopping cart, means a lot of people *don't even know they're doing it*. But this doesn't excuse it; it just makes them "well-intentioned".
Legally, banners are not lawfull here too. It's only companies which try to keep unlawfull process alive… But authorities refuse to really act against this, because lots of money/business/jobs in game.
Legally, consent accept CAN'T be browser side (not specific, positif and unambiguous action). But refuse can be, and is (developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do…)
But nobody give a shit of this.
Sec-GPC header
The HTTP Sec-GPC request header is part of the Global Privacy Control (GPC) mechanism to indicate whether the user consents to a website or service selling or sharing their personal information with third parties.developer.mozilla.org
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As for why this isn't a browser feature, it was and is! It is a *choice* by your industry to disregard this, by ignoring DNT and not implementing GPC in major browsers. Did your site honour DNT? Does it honour GPC in places where it is not legally obliged to?
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do…
globalprivacycontrol.org/
Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy
Exercise your privacy rights in one step via the “Global Privacy Control” (GPC) signal, a proposed specification backed by over a dozen organizations.globalprivacycontrol.org
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Oblomov reshared this.
"Encrypting everything just to protect that one lousy cookie header seems like a whole lot of overkill to me.
I’m not holding my breath for that to happen any time soon, though. "
Looks like you were wrong about both this and the GDPR cookies.
the responsibility is on site operators. @pluralistic has no cookie banners because he doesn't track. My Mastodon instance has no cookie banners because it doesn't track. And it uses cookies to remember logins.
I think it's lawyers and greed from C levels that ruined the web here, not politicians.
@aurelian ublock origin has specific rules to filter them out. It works wonderfully on the desktop and on mobile. (Firefox/Linux and Firefox/Android)
That is the browser-based solution you're asking for.
(Without it the web is indeed unusable but put the blame where it is due ffs.)
hey, EU doesn't force cookie banners on websites. Just... don't track your users with third party scripts and no consent mechanism is necessary then.
For context: I work as a website GDPR compliance auditor
if you only use cookies for loggin users in, you don't have to gather consent beforhand or have any dismissable popup.
The popup is a made-up requirement by the ad industry
@kuba The one mistake that the EU has in the regulation is to strictly outlaw dark patterns, but id I remember correctly they did push that the decline option has to be as easy as the accept option. Compliance is still somewhat iffy though.
Speaking of browser implementation, vendors could simply have used the already existing "Do Not Track" option to comply and made a little footer with an explanation on where to set it if people haven't opted out.
Except you want to sell visitor data...
complain to the site, it's not the EU's fault.
I'm still amazed that all the UI/UX people have allowed sites to continue to have this bad UX.
Oblomov reshared this.
@willegible
"Human nature" is not an argument. What are you talking about?
2. Tech companies instead of complying threaten to turn tables and take away services from citizens.
3. Citizens instead of getting angry at tech companies complain about institutions.
4. Citizens realise too late that they have no rights.
@willegible sites used to run ads without data collection. It's not that hard. Tech topic? Run ads for tech stuff. Creativity topic? Run ads for creative supplies.
This has worked for decades.
yup totally, another text of la made to let shittyfiers run business as usual.
how about do not track feature that is widely ignored but already implemented ? and yeah, if people making websites did not think it would be a good idea to give every people's privacy to analytics there would be no need for such cookie popups as it is already stated.
At least point the blame at the correct entity.
Also, I don't think you'd like the EU to force browsers to do stuff. In that case you'd probably be complaining about that instead.
Arguing that personal information must be collected because people prefer to pay less is shifting the blame to the victims.
Stricter enforcement is needed to make it less profitable to be assholes.
If it only it was possible for websites to exist without tracking the shit out of every user.
But no, these evil popups which the EU definitely said every site must have stand in the way of the newsletter sign-up popup, the three overlaid autoplaying videos, the half screen ads, and the push notifications popup that we're all just dying to see.
Wait no you can just not treat visitors like a commodity to be shopped around. Because that's gross.
Yes it should be a browser feature. But no, this blame is not with the EU. They just require consent if you do overt user tracking. Even if you would want advertising, this form is toxic as fuck and enough sites do the invasive tracking without advertising.
There is a related browser feature that helps here: the do not track header. If you honor that, you do not need to show a cookie banner when set.
I don't think is EU, it is just an implementation of a regulation:
we could blame the data capitalism for this path.
This banner is done to force/make easier to accept every tracker of the 1728 partners of the website but different strategies could be implemented to avoid this bad UX.
Ah, well, but then could be more difficult to track the user between sites...
NB. This posted example does not comply with the GDPR.
nah. The EU didn't "force the cookie notice" on anyone. It just requires that if you track people, you need their consent. If data brokers choose to make the most hideous dark patterned interfaces for that, then that's on them.
Tracking people without their consent is called stalking. You sure you want to defend that?
those points I can agree with, but it was the industry that decided something which is a privacy disaster was a cool and normal solution to this.
And any time people are asked, overwhelmingly they hate being tracked for targeted advertising, in the US or the EU.
And now ad revenue has gone off a cliff anyway thanks to AI scrapers, so I dunno, maybe it was an evolutionary dead end when every hot B2C start-up always settled on targeted advertising. So much for innovation, like.
My web sites don't have cookie popups because they don't track people.
They're not obligatory. Just respect people's privacy.
Sorry, but this is bullshit US propaganda. There is no obligation to have a cookie banner (my blog does not have one, for instance), even if you use cookies (a lot of important uses, such as logging in and out are excluded).
wait a sec... is this the right link?
A blog post from 2010 on how it's a bad idea to demand that every website uses https, but considering that a better authentication protocol won't come, demanding https is our best bet?
How's that relevant to cookie popups?
And how has noone in this thread noticed this before? Did they not read the blogpost?
The EU does not force cookie notifications. It forces CONSENT for cookies set SPONTANEOUSLY by websites.
Any cookies set by an action from the user (e.g. setting the language, logging in, ...) do not require consent.
It is the industry that forces that cookie notification bullshit because they can't stop themselves from tracking you.
I live in the EU. I see cookie notices many times every day. I still applaud the EU on this.
See mastodon.ar.al/@aral/115122589… Aral is correct, gdpr does not mandate cookie notices.
Look, Jeff Atwood, it is difficult to take you seriously when you write authoritatively on a subject you clearly don’t understand.GDPR doesn’t mandate cookie notices.
Cookie notices are *malicious compliance* by the surveillance-driven adtech industry.
If you’re not tracking people, you do not need a cookie notice, period.
If you’re only using first-party cookies for functional reasons, you do not need a cookie notice, period.
If you’re using third-party cookies to track people – i.e., if you’re sharing their data with others – then *you must have their consent to do so*. Because, otherwise, you are violating their privacy. Even then, the law doesn’t mandate a cookie notice.
How would you conform to EU law without a cookie notice if your aim wasn’t malicious compliance?
You would not track people by default and you would make it so they have to go your site’s settings to turn on third-party tracking if, for some inexplicable reason, they wanted that “feature”.
Boom!
No cookie notice necessary.
What’s that?
But that would destroy your business because your business is founded on the fundamental mechanic of violating people’s privacy?
Good.
Your business doesn’t deserve to exist.
Because the real bullshit here isn’t EU legislation that protects the human right to privacy, it’s the toxic Silicon Valley/Big Tech business model of farming people for data that violates everyone’s privacy and opens the door to technofascism.
infosec.exchange/@codinghorror…
GDPR never mandated cookie banners. GDPR mandates user consent. There was a browser feature for that: the DNT HTTP header. That header was deprecated because nobody respected it. It was just easier to enforce user consent through cookie banners and dark patterns.
Nothing here is EU's fault. You want a better option? Campaign for a legislation to enforce the website to respect DNT.
Or… Just don't track?
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It was a missed opportunity indeed. Instead of allowing non-essential tracking cookies if the user naïvely agrees to them, they should just have been banned outright. No banners needed.
As for technically required cookies like session ids no banner is necessary.
The EU didn't "force anything".
"If you want to track (or share information), you must seek consent"
Websites had various alternatives.
1. Don't do it. No consent needed.
2. Need? Then Ask.
Nowhere in the docs is mentioned that it should be borderline impossible to say no (or to use a banner)
This is on companies, not the EU. The alternative is they do it behind the scenes without your consent.
Of course bureaucracy made it possible to abuse loopholes. And here we are.
Dont try to track peoples privacy, then you have nothing to fear.
Track people for shitty ad targeting and whatnot, then you get regulated.
What actual reason do sites even have to share my data with 27854 gazillion "partners"?
Correct: None.
@dalias @lispi314 @leymoo A well-intentioned website does not need a cookie banner! I hate the banners as much as you do (ublock takes care of them though...) but the culprit is 100% the website operator doing obnoxious tracking and not the regulation.
If you want to criticize the EU, go ahead, there is lots to criticize, but here the blame is clearly on site owners.
I find it difficult to believe that the EU meant for those cookie banners to be the response to their requirements. It is nothing else than malicious compliance.
After doing some digging it seems that functional cookies do not require consent, but the tracking that is shared with third-parties does (that would be advertisers and social network trackers).
This has been a browser feature since 2002: w3.org/TR/P3P/
It has been implemented in IE, but Google sabotaged it by deliberately sending invalid syntax to bypass it.
Browsers tried again with the DNT spec. The tracking industry ignored it again.
It should have been solved with an easy opt-out, but there's a multi-trillion business that needs the opt out to be difficult as possible, and benefits from making people associate privacy with stupid annoyances.
I published my business’ site this Friday. No cookie consent necessary.
It’s all a matter of what cookies you (don’t) use.
Cookie Notices are *NOT* necessary by default.
We do review those, and, yes, there are websites that dont need cookie banners. Why? because they don't track their users. Simple as that.
the fact that most frameworks with a cookie opt-in popup will remember your decision ONLY if you click "accept all", but if you click "reject all" they popup again and again, is clearly indicative of the dark pattern the data collector wishes the user to fall into.
It's likely that they excuse this behavior by saying some variation of "but if the user rejects all cookies then we can't store the fact that they rejected all cookies, and we'll have to ask them again next time" which is bullshit because they're ABSOLUTELY storing OTHER basic information about that user, they just choose not to store this. The only lasting solution to eliminate opt-in popups is to not be tracking user information in the first place.
Resurfacing this post from 2010 (with a series of poor, flawed and very outdated opinions) is a mighty odd thing to do...
Not to mention that cookie banners are only required for 3rd party cookies (e.g: tracking / ad networks / etc...), which means you're sharing user data with other random / unknown entities. If you don't want to present a cookie banner, then don't share user data without their consent. Simple.
@davey_cakes Sorry, but that's just plain wrong. If the industry had just obeyed Do Not Track, you would not have to ask the users explicitly. This is an entirely home-made problem. And by home-made I mean by the content industry, aka You. Actually, browser still supports DNT. If you respect that, you will never have to ask.
(And. no, saying that "this is a drug" does not in fact exonerate you. It just makes you a drug dealer.)
That's shady AF.
the EU didn't force any cookie notification shit on anyone. It just said that you couldn't share personally identifying information about people without their permission.
It's EASY to run a website without sharing personally identifying information. All those websites with cookies popups? They're spying on you.
There is a browser feature for this. It’s called Do Not Track. You include “DNT: 1” in your request. It is handled invisibly.
Unfortunately many website operators maliciously turned this into an excuse to make the web worse and decided to ignore the header and nag everyone all the time.
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> it is difficult to take you seriously when you forced all this cookie notification bullshit on us.
There is nothing in the law that says you have to add a cookie wall for most websites - and the law says that in the cases where the sites must get your consent, that the cookie wall is not sufficient.
It is literally useless, other than making *YOU SPECIFICALLY* and people like you blame the EU for companies' evil behavior.
USA, it is difficult to take you seriously
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you fell for the american adtech propaganda. cookie notices, consent popups, banners are NOT required if you ONLY use cookies for necessary functional purposes such as storing someome's login session. cookie popups are an invention of the adtech industry, not the EU.
what's that, you're tracking your users beyond what's required to make the website function? figures.
the EU didn't force cookie consent pop-ups, it forced consent pop-ups *if the cookies are used for third party surveillance*.
The obnoxious behaviour isn't the pop-up it's the surveillance. The pop-up just makes the obnoxious behaviour visible. If website owners don't want to be seen to be obnoxious, they used to be able to choose to hide what they were up to, now they must choose not to be obnoxious.
That's a good thing.
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MyTerms
MyTerms is the nickname* for IEEE P7012, a draft standard for machine-readable personal privacy terms that is on track for publication in early 2026. MyTerms are contractual agreements about person…Doc Searls Weblog
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Tell me you don't know what you're talking about without telling me you don't know what you're talking about.
Also, tell me you're a spoiled brat who expects to leech off of your users without ... you get my point.
Nobody is forcing you to have cookie notifications. Not sharing data with 3rd parties does not mean you can't run ads and monetise. Will it be harder to do it ethically, fairly and legally? Sure. But only because the ad industry keeps telling you non-targeted, non-invasive ads are worthless. They're not, they're just even more spoiled brats than you.
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@mkoek @dalias frankly, yes. The law hasn’t changed anything of substance. Companies still use the same analytics tools. But now users are constantly nagged at, and companies have increased costs and slower go to market times as they need to faff with these things.
Perfect example of regulation that is completely misguided, and is a nuisance to almost everyone, bar a few people on Mastodon. Wrong approach.
@mkoek @dalias tell that to the thousands of startups desperately trying to balance with a billion other things they're trying to do. That's just not a practical suggestion when the third party analytics are much faster to set up, better understood, and generally superior too than some self-hosted thing cobbled together.
As mentioned, the reality we are in today with cookie popups everywhere was 100% predictable and the regulation was thus poorly considered.
“Information wants to be free; information [also] wants to be expensive.” -- Stewart Brand
As society, we've decided that some business models shouldn't exist.
You could make the same argument about root causes and money trying to find a way about many other business models society has deemed unwanted.
Of course it's a game of whack-a-mole, but that's true whether the business model is ad telemetry (aka surveillance capitalism), fake gucci bags or cooking meth.
Luckily, the tide is slowly and surely turning against telemetry driven content.
@mkoek @Setok When the behavior of some humans is actively hostile towards others I care about, I absolutely am going to work against that behavior, and encourage others to do so too.
Not doing that is how we got where we are. Letting bad people keep pushing norms and boundaries to do harmful things they wanted to make money doing.
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I Fight For The Users
If you haven’t been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don’t blame you. There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a busy time. But let’s pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)
Ick.
No it does not. The ad companies are creating this pain through malicious compliance.
If you can't see that then you should take a step back and look at the history of advertising on the internet and see how we got here in the first place.
In fairness, I was initially annoyed with the GDPR as well, until I realised what the industry has actually been doing.
As you've been told many times in this thread, nobody is forced to implement cookie popups. The choice to hand your users' data to 3rd parties simply triggers a requirement to get consent to do so. And if you collect personal data, likewise. Just like it's a conscious, and I'd argue malicious, choice to ignore "do-not-track", thus requiring you to inform the user they're being tracked.
Stop being an advertising and data broker industry apologist.
No, Jeff. You yourself said that people want "everything free", so the drug is not the information itself, but that it seems free (while it isn't).
You can easily solve this. I spent money on numerous apps for my phone which gave me the choice to either pay with money or with personal data. I picked money, other users didn't. But at least they were able to make an informed choice.
And the information necessary to do this is what you attacked.
@lproven @mkoek @Setok @dalias
Even being the "card-carrying Libertarian" that I am, I have long said that the most fundamental errors of Libertarian philosophy are to assume that
(1) reliable information is free
[It is not. It is expensive and difficult to obtain. There's no "want" about that; it's just reality.]
and
(2) people are rational.
[Like, do I really need to explain this? Especially in the context of current politics? 🙄 ]
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Oblomov reshared this.
I agree very strongly with both of these points, there is nuance here for sure, but these two points get to the heart of the matter. 💛
p.s. I am NOT and HAVE NEVER BEEN a libertarian, for the record, because..
that's funny because SO doesn't pay the content creators either 😀
and the main point left out on these discussions all the freaking time:
the reason the popups exist is because the cost of a thousand advertising "impressions" is roughly less than a cent for an unknown user, and around $12 for a user with a full profile, hence sites try to match you every visit.
Oblomov reshared this.
dunno, imho thats overstating it. People pay for pretty much everything, either directly, or indirectly via taxes. And many of the things that are now supposed to be "free" used to be paid for (newspapers, magazines etc.) without even thinking about it.
rather than a deep homo sapiens malfunction, the issue is more of a silly mix of adtech conditioning (here, free email for your data) and publishers not gettting their act together for the digital age.
Oblomov reshared this.
@JeffGrigg @lproven@vivaldi.net @codinghorror @mkoek @Setok @dalias Honestly, fully realising the consequences of 1 and 2 are one of the reasons I'm no longer a Libertarian - because the best way to address 1 and to a lesser extent 2 is through shared resources (public library, weather service, schools, etc) as infrastructure that we all pay for.
Suddenly having some kind of shared social obligation actually starts making sense.
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Oblomov reshared this.
@StryderNotavi @JeffGrigg @mkoek @Setok @dalias but being a libertarian has been bastardized into stupidity. Libertarians formed an entire state, Utah.
The Mormon community is a libertarian success story. Libertarianism isn’t about individualism as it’s made to sound today.
Political concepts mean nothing without consequences and conviction, doesn’t matter your beliefs.
Much like most other forms of politics and religion, most don’t fully understand outside their small world view.
Call it whatever, it’s still just theory but if people need a good working version of actual libertarianism start with closed communities like Mormons, Amish, Huttlers, and the actual theory is solid.
Just like small successful communities of socialists, communists, Catholics, Buddhist, etc…
I am not advocating for that, just pointing out that libertarianism is not the picture of tin foil Tim grumbling about taxes and more like closed communities we live amongst.
@mkoek @Setok @dalias
"Users want everything for free, forever, and content creators want to make money to feed themselves and their families"
Wait a minute. Who are the users and who are the content creators on Stack Overflow? All the content creators were users. The ones who decided to monetise that site were a third category, site owners. Their desire for income was legitimate, but don't pretend it was the downtrodden content creators crying for money for their children.
@davey_cakes I came into this sub-thread after you wrote "free content (ad subsidized) is a hell of a drug." I cannot seem to read from this that bought content is a drug, so you said yourself it being free turns it into a drug.
Again: You do not have to put up a warning unless you want to sell people's information *despite* them already having told you (DNT) they don't want you to—which is shady AF. So you're blaming the EU for the mess you got yourself in by acting shady.
Meh.
@dalias @lackthereof @pgcd @leymoo
That's what advertising is for. Is it no longer possible to do advertising without surveillance?
Reverting to advertisements based on the content of a page, rather than who is viewing it, would also make it easier to break Google's stranglehold on the web.
And maybe it's time to stop promising everything can be free forever. That's the first lie that enshittification is built on.
@mkoek @Setok @dalias People would be willing to pay for content, if there was a frictionless micropayment method. But no, the idea of "paying" online is to register an account, enter credit card details and subscribe for year.
Once up a time people shouted at street corners "content" and by giving a few pennies you would get the daily paper of content. Peak UX.
@mkoek @Setok @dalias false dichotomy: there is more than the 2 extremes “free” and “personalised adds” …
There’s still the “passive advertising” choice where
advertisers/ad platforms study which sites their target audience frequently stop, and post non-tracking ad’s there.
As frustrating as cookie banners are, they are a EU symptom for a (mostly) US cause.
These are not the indignations you’re looking for …
Fun fact about this: This relates to the nature vs nurture argument.
Nurture accounts for a lot and there's considerable archeological evidence for egalitarian societies.
"Real world human behavior" is either a uselessly constrained set designating exclusively the state of current societies, or a uselessly broad term that can encompass basically any possible society.
@claudius to be honest, I think the third time still won't be the charm.
But we need the commons to be much more competitive with big tech before we can ban internet advertising.
@dennmans DNT and GPC: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global…
What makes you think "third time's the charm"?
We either abolish ad-tech (and actually enforce it!) or we find technological guarantees of some kind.
Saying "please" will not be enough, we have seen it time and again that this particular line of business can not be trusted to follow specs or even the law. #AdTech
@dennmans To clarify: I'm not asking to ban all kinds of advertisement. I'm asking to specifically outlaw tracking, microtargeting and whatever the fuck data brokers do.
It will be hard to ban ads, because on the less intrusive side of things, it becomes a bit blurry what an ad even is. And, frankly, I don't mind ads themselves all that much. I don't even run an adblocker (but I do use Privacy Badger, I'm not a monster).
Have you ever been exposed to addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firef… ?
The point is to standardise the consent tracking and respecting the user's cookie (= privacy) settings.
If you dislike the resulting user experience so much, perhaps a better use of your time would be to use your platform to drive the tech industry towards respecting people's digital privacy by default?
Or is that not your goal here?
Consent-O-Matic – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-GB)
Download Consent-O-Matic for Firefox. Automatic handling of GDPR consent formsaddons.mozilla.org
Jeff, I think you should take some time to actually read up on this stuff, because this is an embarrassingly wrong take.
The EU mandated informed consent for tracking and marketing cookies. You're linking to a post about *login* cookies, which are completely irrelevant and would not be covered.
This is not what the law asks for. Essential cookies, like those to authenticate a user do not require consent at all.
Even though an alternative authentication method existed, like your 2010 article calls for, tracking cookies are lucrative for sites (like nytimes and their 340 'vendors') and would exist in some way or form.
Also, I would consider what I do in any given site private and deserving encryption, regardless of the authentication method
Cookies, the GDPR, and the ePrivacy Directive - GDPR.eu
Cookies can give businesses insight into their users’ online activity. Unforunately they are subject to both the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, making compliance difficult.Richie Koch (GDPR.eu)
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Jeff Atwood e Oblomov reshared this.
Designing For Evil
Have you ever used Craigslist? It’s an almost entirely free, mostly anonymous classified advertising service which evolved from an early internet phenomenon into a service so powerful it is often accused of single-handedly destroying the newspaper bu…Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)
then the plan needs to be reconsidered based on how it was interpreted. Regulate the way these consent forms should look, how much space they can occupy, how much functionality should be still available to a user who ignores the thing, etc. Something akin to tobacco packaging laws.
The long-term solution would be to abolish support for third-party cookies in browsers, but that's hard considering all of them are either owned or heavily influenced by an interested party, Google.
“White House staff apparently had to get creative with some of the items Trump wanted hung around the fireplace, as they blocked hidden doors built into the room.”
They also block the viewports in those doors that allow staffers to keep an eye on what is happening in there. Interesting, no?
huffpost.com/entry/donald-trum…
Look What Donald Trump Has Done To The Oval Office
Trump has taken an unusually personal interest in redecorating the iconic seat of the American presidency.Sara Boboltz (HuffPost)
conspirator0.com/p/a-picture-i…
A picture isn't always worth a thousand words
Grok's capacity to detect AI-generated images leaves something to be desiredConspirador Norteño
Weird that I can't think of this off the top of my head but... who on the fedi is based in the PNW and is an implementer of / contributor to Fediverse software?
(small projects fine! tinkerers too! technical role or not! just trying to consider who I might be able to wrangle together to talk about stuff because I feel professionally isolated sometimes)
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Justin e GhostOnTheHalfShell reshared this.
We have a good group of Linux and Foss enthusiasts on our Matrix chat.
seattlematrix.org/ has more info and links to various Foss items the group host for others. 😀
@bedirthan No idea how this notification slipped 😅 Yes, I'm based out of Seattle! More than happy to join any efforts to get open social web-interested folks in a room to chat.
I've been considering starting a monthly group to meet up at a bar or something with no pressure as far as presentations, agendas, etc. - just networking and sharing ideas?
This is the fascist state. Do you accept this? Support this? Stay quiet? Or resist?
#Together è un horror indipendente scritto e diretto dal semisconosciuto #MichaelShanks che sta facendo molto parlare di sé
Il tema alla base del film è quello delll'unione in una relazione tra due persone, esplorando questo tema quasi ancestrale con il più cronenberghiano dei modi: estremizzando l'archetipo della fisicità del corpo come un agglomerato di "carne" (in questo senso alcune parti mi hanno ricordato le creature di #robbottin in #lacosa di #johncarpenter),
#recensioni #cinema 1/5
L'immagine è un poster per il film "Together," scritto e diretto da Michael Shank. Il poster presenta due attori, Dave Franco e Alison Brie, in primo piano. Franco è a sinistra, con un'espressione preoccupata, mentre Brie è a destra, con un'espressione di paura. Entrambi hanno i capelli castani e indossano magliette bianche. Le loro mani sono intrecciate, suggerendo un legame intimo. Il titolo del film, "TOGETHER," è scritto in caratteri grandi e bianchi al centro del poster. In alto, c'è la scritta "THE BEST HORROR MOVIE OF THE YEAR" e "INSESSION FILM." In basso, si legge "NEON" e "R," indicando la distribuzione e la classificazione del film.
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il regista ci mostra una coppia di giovani innamorati in una casa che ad un certo punto, sotto strane influenze malefiche e riti tribali innominabili (molto vaghi a dire il vero), pian piano cominceranno loro malgrado un viaggio di "fusione" (nel vero senza della parola) dei loro corpi, in un crescendo di sofferenza, stupore, ma anche con molti momenti di comicità dissacrante fino ad un (purtroppo) deludente finale
2/5
Il film si poggia quasi integralmente sull'empatia dei due attori (#davefranco ed #alisonbrie quest'ultima molto più convincente del primo) che hanno interpretato con molta bravura e affiatamento un ruolo certamente non banale
E' stato da molti acclamato come "horror dell'anno", ma sebbene sia molto contento che si facciano ancora film indipendenti del genere (ma sono sempre meno, purtroppo), credo sia decisamente eccessivo come apprezzamento: il film si lascia vedere, anche con momenti di
3/5
ilarità e spaeamento stimolanti, e pur non essendo eccezionale o particolarmente originale, tuttavia è sicuramente interessante. Uno dei limiti del lavoro di #shanks, IMHO, è quello di aver giocato in modo troppo asimmetrico con la componente horror pura, relegandola ad una dimensione troppo inconsistente, e quindi ben presto le ripetute situazioni comiche (fino al debolissimo finale) sfociano quasi in macabre comedy che tende a sovrastare il mistero
4/5
dell'indagine sull'unione, e questo depotenzia l'impianto di un film che invece poteva dire la sua in modo meno sbrigativo
Certamente alcune scene sono molto iconiche, e penso che questo sia uno dei motivi per cui il film sta avendo così tanto riscontro, ma a parte ciò è un film che prova veramente a discostarsi dal solito horror e pertanto ne consiglio vivamente la visione
5/5 END
Democracy Atlas rule 4: Leadership lives in everyone
Cambodia demonstrates the value of leaders from all backgroundsMichael Angeloni (If you can keep it)
So tonight, I was looking for something in a drawer, and I stumble upon my Samsung NC10 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_…), a netbook that I bought while studying.
I totally forgot what I was looking for, and instead, I decided to check this old piece of equipment, that is now 16 or 17 years old!
It was installed with some old and unmaintained #Fedora with a dual boot #haikuos installation.
I wiped the disk, and installed #mxlinux . I had to manually create the partitions because the installer would fail to automatically partition the disk.
After that step, the installation went smoothly. Did a system update after first boot, and oh boy, did the two DKMS packages took ages to compile. So after the update was done, and before rebooting, I uninstalled broadcom-sta-dkms and rtl8812au-dkms, because there is no hardware requiring these modules in the netbook.
So this little netbook is still functional, but I must admit, I don’t really know what to do with it:
* the screen resolution of 1024x600 is really on the low end,
* the 2 cores, 32 bits, Atom CPU is really not that fast.
#retrocomputing #netbook #linux #NostalgiaNerd
Ho cambiato il "display name"
Poliversity - Università ricerca e giornalismo reshared this.
Mezzo secolo di fotografie. Il circolo Fotocine Garfagnana festeggia i 50 anni di attività
Oggi pomeriggio appuntamento in Sala Suffredini, sarà presentato il libro edito da Mpf .
From Surveillance to Robot Guards: How AI Could Reshape Prison Life
AI in Prison? Robot Guards? How the Criminal Justice System Is Adopting Tech
Critics worry about opaque data collection, privacy violations and the technology’s bias spreading in jails and prisons.Rebecca McCray (The Marshall Project)
UN condemns ‘endless’ Gaza horrors as Israel kills 31 more people
US to refuse visas to Palestinian Authority members seeking to attend UNGA.AFP (DAWN.COM)
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Io amo interagire. Ma amo molto meno quando da una mia frase si estrapola un discorso (presunto) attribuendole significati che non ha e si entra a gamba tesa facendo discorsi che non c'entrano nulla, a mio parere per soddisfare un qualche bisogno onanistico.
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Ora preghiamo, con gioia.
Smurfs Log
* Cheech and Chong (Me and mum, planning to go for a ride…)
#Alzheimers #Caregiving #Dementia #Photography
(Look it up on your favorite player, or use this #EVIL link)
youtube.com/watch?v=mZoIjNDkPC…
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Happy anniversary to us.
Federal judge halts Trump effort to expand speedy deportations of detained migrants
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/federal-judge-halts-trump-effort-to-expand-speedy-deportations-of-detained-migrants?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Headlines @headlines-PBSNewsHour
Federal judge halts Trump effort to expand speedy deportations of detained migrants
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out speedy deportations of undocumented migrants detained in the interior of the United States.PBS News
Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to Price Anything
Link: wsj.com/business/retail/trump-…
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…
He must resign.”
That’s how U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Ranking Member #Bernie #Sanders (I-Vt.) began a New York Times op-ed on Saturday,
amid mounting calls for Kennedy to leave the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS),
by choice or force,
following the ouster of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez
nytimes.com/2025/08/30/opinion…
Trump’s Pentagon Pick Accuses Online Astrologer Of Stalking Him, And It Just Gets Messier From There
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anthony-tata-amy-tripp-defense-astrology-stalking-affair_n_68b35202e4b0733c061ab135?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Entertainment @entertainment-huffingtonpost
Trump’s Pentagon Pick Accuses Online Astrologer Of Stalking Him, And It Just Gets Messier From There
“I should never have gotten into this relationship," said astrology influencer Amy Tripp, aka Starheal.Pocharapon Neammanee (HuffPost)
DXVK 2.7.1 Brings Improvements for Team Fortress 2, Crysis 3, and Other Games - 9to5Linux
DXVK 2.7.1 Vulkan-based implementation of D3D9, D3D10, and D3D11 for Linux / Wine is now available for download with various improvements.Marius Nestor (9to5Linux)
Day 2 with NetBSD is proving challenging, but now that the basic pieces are in place, I've been able to get the core applications I need and added some functionality.
I've got office software, e-mail, text editing, a music player (and volume control!), and I can restart/shutdown from within Xfce. It's been a busy day of getting things sorted, but I feel like it'll be easier from this point.
Calcio in tv: in campo Juve e Toro
https://www.lastampa.it/sport/calcio/2025/08/31/news/calcio_in_tv_in_campo_juve_e_toro-15289179/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Pubblicato su La Stampa Sport @la-stampa-sport-LaStampa
Calcio in tv: in campo Juve e Toro
Le partite di domenica 31 agosto, quattro i match di serie ADaniele Cavalla (La Stampa)
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Asher Wynne, Trendy Toots, GhostOnTheHalfShell, Alexander Goeres 𒀯, Oblomov e Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Uno dei miei rimpianti è di non essere mai entrato in un centro sociale. Non ho la più pallida idea di come fosse lì dentro.
Però ho letto e sentito cose, e un centro sociale me l'immagino come un ritrovo di gente un po' strana, con idee un po' strane, e la voglia di starsene lontana da un mondo di squali.
Persone strane, sì, ma che se si facesse come dicono loro alla fine in questo mondo staremmo tutti un po' meglio.
'Sto Fediverso gli assomiglia un po', mi sa.
Max su Poliverso 🇪🇺🇮🇹 reshared this.
Well it appears that the 1630 fund has given the Omidyar Network money.
You don’t say?
RE: threads.com/@juanch0panza/post…
Juan Delgado (@juanch0panza) on Threads
Reading more into the recent spat between Taylor Lorenz and claims about funding ties to the Sixteen Thirty Fund via Omidyar Network. Taylor insists no money from Sixteen Thirty reaches her or the Reporters in Residence program.Threads
The video showcases a detailed process of flushing a transmission. It begins with a close-up view of a transmission pan placed on a workbench, with a gear shift lever positioned next to it. A hand is seen operating the gear shift, moving it through various positions. Water is being poured into the transmission pan from a red hose, creating a foamy mixture as it fills. The background features a textured wall with a light source casting a blue and yellow hue, and a workbench with tools and a control panel. The hand continues to manipulate the gear shift while water flows into the pan, indicating a thorough cleaning process. The video concludes with the transmission pan filled with water, and the gear shift lever in a neutral position, highlighting the completion of the flushing process.
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in reply to Information Is Beautiful • • •dxzdb
in reply to Information Is Beautiful • • •@VisualStuart ⚠️ 🚨website sinkhole - you may never escape looking at all the great infographics! 😲💀😱😵
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