Every big web site in 2024 looks like the sites people warned you not to visit in the 90s
Don’t invent the torment nexus.
Good news! We’ve invented the torment nexus
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Captcha buster is taking care of the captchas now at least. A robot that proves I’m not a robot. Is this the singularity yet?
No, but it’s definitely a boring dystopia.
Singularity was more than 70 years ago.
Go on.
What’s this?
In europe we have a “reject all” button for cookies and it’s fantastic
We do? Since when? I see that on maybe 1 out of 10 pages.
Be fair, it’s not always working but more often then not IMO.
I’d love somewhere to reporh those assholish designed (so illegal in the EU) ones, like the French CNIL or something?
The consent-o-matic add on allows you to autofil the cookie response and when it doesn’t work you can report it. The ad on is also funded by the EU somehow, can’t remember exactly how. If the add on doesn’t work it means their site is not asking the question correctly.
Thanks I’d look it up, guess CNIL might be a start.
Except on news websites that only give you the choice between “subscribe for X€” and “read for free (accept all)”. So annoying. Still no idea why that’s legal.
That’s not at all legal under GDPR. Nor is having deny all be harder than accept. As is tradition however companies don’t give half a shit until fines start happening.
Because newspapers are not forced to give out their news for free. But they have to give you an alternative to selling your data; taking money from you in this case.
Which is illegal under GDPR btw. See instagram being sued for „pay or get tracked“ on their app.
Still no idea why that’s legal.
It is not
We also have this glorious extension which just fucks them all off:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/istilldontcareaboutcookies/
Use I STILL don’t care about cookies. That one is owned by Avast nowadays and accepts all cookies which is clearly not what people want.
thanks, changed it.
I personally use the community version as well because I don’t trust avast but is there any evidence they are actually doing this?
To my understanding, by using this you accept (all) the cookies… I would like a extension that tries to minimize cookie exposure!
Thanks!! Going to try it!
In most cases, it just blocks or hides cookie related pop-ups. When it’s needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you (sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what’s easier to do). It doesn’t delete cookies.
You’re sort of right. Cookie deletion should be available in browser settings right?
In some browsers, such as duck duck go, that’s indeed available and customizable per site. There is also Auto Cookie Delete extension on Firefox and Chrome that you can use.
Ghostery will automatically decline all tracking pop ups, block cookies, website trackers, etc.
I’ve been using it for a while and love it.
Thanks!! Going to try it!
IIRC that add-on was bought by Avast and the new add-on is ‘I still don’t care about cookies’
Holy fuck, that is so disgusting. I was gonna ask why that’s even legal but I’ve learned not to ask such stupid, logical questions. Thanks for the tip!
thanks, changed it.
Or you can enable “Annoyances” filters in uBlock Origin for the same effect
I used to use Ghostery but removed it and now just use these two filters in uBlock. They’re not perfect but certainly better than not using them at all.
Also interesting; I didn’t realise I hadn’t turned those on. thanks!
There seems to be a lot of options. Which ones do I pick? :/
Just turn it all on until something breaks!
I can’t tell: are you joking or serious?
Serious ;)
No, we don’t. I had to do this manually, more than once.
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Yep, you can “reject all” if you’re lucky. Then you just have to go through the list anyway and untick all “legitimate interest” to spy on you.
See I want to be able to set that once, in my browser, and then have all of these things fuck off.
Since I started using a VPN, I’ve started seeing that option more. Even still, lots of sites aren’t compliant.
There is no such thing as an unintrusive advertisement.
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http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
(recommend not actually clicking any links)
I didn’t mind the static ones (within reason), websites need to pay their rent. And not everything can sell something.
But even those have tracking and gross injection code now.
Even emails have tracking pixels at this point. Like, I route all of my email through a client that blocks all outside media without asking lol
In the long ago if a site needed advertising it was a small banner at the top of the page, and often hosted by the site itself with gasp an actual relationship with the advertisers or sponsors.
All that just to find that the page doesn’t have the info you needed anyway.
But made its best to make you stay on the page over the 12 second watermark or some SEO bullshit.
I hate when I look up som simple info for a game and you get to a page that just has all this generated text telling you how you want to know that simple info and how they are going to tell you that simple info on that site and how this game makes you do that simple thing and some background about what that game is
Aargh triggering shit yeah it’s horrendous what funneling everyone on the internet through a single (or so) “research portal”
That’s okay, we can just use the cached version, right? Right???
Internet in 2024 (for me):
- Service unavailable in your country (VPN)
- Confirm you’re a human (VPN)
- Blank page (noscript)
- Obscure error (fingerprint / cookie blocking)
- Page not found (https required)
The percentage of websites that “just work” with privacy measures in place is depressingly small.
you have to put in extra work just to make your website not work with privacy measures. like you have to put in the work to use some bloated javascript framework that doesn’t work with noscript instead of just sticking with plain html and css, which would work. on top of that, i’ve encountered way too many big websites that don’t even have a noscript tag so all you see is a ghost layout or a blank page.
That’s something I would disagree with though. “Sticking with plain HTML and CSS” is way more work, and often has significantly less functionality, than building a website with a framework.
you can build it with a framework, but maybe build it on the server side instead. I’ve seen many nice sites that hardly use any javascript and instead of a bunch of api calls, the server just returns new html to render.
I don’t mind frameworks, but some features that seem super useful to devs, like google analytics, and various diagnostic/logging tools, social media integrations, I would prefer to “opt in” when I decide they are necessary.
honest question, what is the point of having noscript on at all times?
Not the person you’re asking and I’m running uMatrix instead of noscript to block scripts. But I do it to get more granular control over what my browser loads and runs. Why run scripts if a website works perfectly fine without them? These days I ain’t trusting shit out there on the web.
Tldr: I prefer to opt-in.
Technically it’s uBO, but I use the extreme setting that blocks all scripts by default. Truthfully I wasn’t aware just how many scripts get loaded especially on ecommerce and social media sites, there are too many heavy frameworks being used. Much of it is unnecessary bloat, slowing down my browser, and no small amount of it is devoted to tracking and data collection.
In general, I find less than half of loaded scripts are required to make a page functional. It’s a process requiring trial-and-error, but I have a good set of base rules in place for trusted sites and scripts.
For me, it’s about not giving websites free reign over my browser and by extension my computer and personal data, but having some measure of control over them.
And occasionally there are suspicious sites where I truly don’t want any scripts to run. I don’t even have to worry about them.
Are there even some left? Good old text+image-websites with pure information. Ahh the good old times.
But why #5? What do have against https?
I require https, but not every website is secure, and sometimes the certificate has a problem or is expired.
How is this a shitpost? It’s just true.
To be fair I havent gotten one of those types of captchas in a while. And now there’s typically a reject all non essential cookies button somewhere.
Edit: I will clarify. It’s not that I don’t get captchas, it’s that I don’t get the “which picture in the grid contains…” captchas. I keep getting some stupid puzzle piece captcha. Idk.
The thing your missing is, when you click only allow non essential, that means it’s still 700 companies tracking you because of the great term “legitimate interest”. That’s the one you need to deactivate and this usually one by one as shown in this post.
So yeah, you’re essentially allowing all the stuff the way you’re doing it
Well its allow only essential / reject all non essential cookies.
Idk I used to have to go through one by one and do this. Now there’s typically somewhere around 4 subcategories. Essential / strictly necessary cookies say always active and there’s nothing you can do to change anything in that category and everything else has been lumped into other categories you can reject by hand or hit the reject button. all those companies fall under marketing. I guess maybe if I turn off the marketing / targeting category, there’s some within that don’t turn off, but much of the time they don’t even give me the option to check who’s participating.
Maybe I have trained myself not to go to those places. If I have, it wasn’t on purpose. Occasionally, i get interested in a subject and randomly search, but i dont do most social media so idk. Maybe I don’t even realize hit the back button anymore when i see it menus that make me do this. To me this post seems like something that I would encounter maybe a year ago , if not more. Not something I see on the regular now. (Edit: suppose since about a year or two after the EU passed their laws)
Might be because you trained yourself to avoid those sites that need them. I stopped using some SaaS because logging in was just too hard.
You will often get these captchas if you use a popular VPN.
I keep getting some stupid drag this puzzle piece, in a straight line, into place. I’ve gotten 1 grid like that and a word captcha in the past 6 months.
I don’t with proton vpn plus at the moment tho I have ublock origgin blocking third party dcripts and noscript blocking most scripts all tpgether on my pc soo half the website that migh show them probably don’t even work
Same (proton and ublocker), but I have also found that some web pages cares what browser you use if you are on proton. If I use chrome then they may just do the verification when you wait 3 seconds but with Firefox and proton (not without proton) do I get a lot of captcha sometimes even after each other just to make triple sure I am not a bot… or even get blocked entirely…
It’s VPN’s that’ll trigger the captchas. I never get them unless I forget to turn my VPN off after “hanging out with my peers”, and then a BUNCH of sites will captcha me
Most of all, I was sick of the captcha from cloudflare.
On some sites, there was endless checking and it was impossible to view the content of the site.Yeah, too many sites I’ve done 3+ captchas and still won’t let me in, and not even the ones where 1 cell has either a shadow or a sliver of a bike tire. And reports that bots are now better at passing these than people. I won’t use a site with a pick-the-squares captcha anymore.
Click a slider is the most I’ll do. If anyone needs me I’ll be over here hanging out with the bots that are too shitty to pass a captcha.
They think u a bot
I had to disable user agents or else I could simply not look at any website “protected” by cloudflare
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That is not funny anymore, but sad that every single site has atleast one of this things, average is 2-3.
All I get is a white page with a search bar and a link and description of example .com
It’s a mock search engine results page.
Click on the link with the text “then it shows me something” to continue.
Amusingly I can only get it to give me the “you left the tab” prompt and asking to leave my email. I’m assuming there’s more to it than just that?
I even put my email in and haven’t received anything 😔
That’s great. (Disable adblock)
This is so lit
The cookies being pre selected is illegal in the EU. Although I’ve seen sites that don’t care and still enable them by default
The ones I’ve seen disable the ‘consent’ bits by default, but then there’s ‘vendor preferences’ where ‘legitimate interest’ is automatically ON in 58 places (I’m not exaggerating; I have counted it) and you have to manually off all of them.
When you click the question mark at ‘legitimate interest’, all it says is some vendors are not asking for your consent to use your data but collect it based on their legitimate interest.
It’s infinitely vague and it has the vibe of ‘I’m not going to ask for it, I will just take it and I will use it for whatever I want anyway’.
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Here in Spain they started making the option to either subscribe… Or accept the ads/tracking…
Same in germany. That makes the whole thing even more useless, as everyone just is a subscription-based shit now…
Yeah I see it seems it applies other places.
I would be ok with it honestly if they like allowed to select sites but they did this “content pass”, https://www.contentpass.net/en , which englobe a lot of sites and lot of them I don’t want them to see a single penny from me because they are shit. If they fix that and I can pick and change it along the way am all in on it.
Just use reader mode, it bypasses all that shit.
Oh I am sure there are ways to bypass it. Just saying what they do.
Italy too.
Same with a lot of news outlets in Germany. Although it’s not that difficult for me to use only sites that allow disallowing every cookie or just bypass the cookie popup
We’re going to move very quickly to a DRM supported web model. There won’t be captchas, but you will require a locked down device (with no ad blocker) to access the content
That’s why everything is an App now, and every website tells you “it’s better in the app”. In the app they have full controll over your device and can access much more data points, while the website is controlled on the users site and might have AdBlockers and other security features enabled, potentially hurting their ad revenue and data they can sell. From a developers perspective it’s a nightmare to develop and maintain website, android and Mac os app side by side. Just having one good responsive website is cheaper, easier to maintain and gives you less headache with app store restrictions, reviews, device incompatibility etc.
It definitely doesn’t take care of everything, but there are apps that run all the internet traffic on your phone through an adblocker. Most of the ones on Android setup a local VPN (a VPN running on the same device that’s connecting to it) and run their adblocker through that.
Hear me out: part of me welcomes that.
Currently, most websites are awful to browse, and a few are not. If we switch to a world where most are inaccessible to me, and a few are nice, then I’ll spend less time being frustrated by cookie popups and the like.
Like, if a site’s going to be terrible, I almost prefer it just not let me in at all.
As an example, I used to click the occasional Twitter link. Now that I can’t see comments, I refuse, and life is a bit improved.
I tried to read comments on a TwiXXer link the other day and was unsuccessful. I thought I was just misclicking or something. You’re telling me it’s on purpose?
That’s stupid as fuck.
You need an account and to be logged in to see comments now.
One less reason to click on Twitter links
I’m with you. I’ve started using firefox with no extensions, not even ad-blocker. Whenever I am annoyed by a website autoplaying sound in a popup or asking me to sign up for their newsletter or whatever, I look at the URL and think: this website is dead to me now.
F U C K. T H A T
I think this might be why my parents got ‘left behind’ by technology. It’s not that they couldn’t figure out how to use new stuff but that the last generation of it was shit enough for them to turn their back on technology as a whole. Once you’ve missed a chapter or two it’s hard to get back into the story. I can see myself going the same way tbh!
The more I have to deal with ads, cookies, ads, authentication, ads, data harvesting, ads, password hell, ads, free news article limits, and let’s not forget ads, the more I want to go live in a cabin in the woods.
Of course, those are hardly affordable anymore.
Yeah I see that, too. I’m looking forward to having to have a whole physical computer dedicated for the sole purpose of browsing the Shit Web™ because online services requires a specific browser and OS profile. Not. But the good thing about all that nullshit is that more and more alternatives will come along from people like us who are fed up. So that dedicated computer might not have to be used all that much.
It’s not worth it if I no longer control my own hardware
I use the addon ‘consent o-matic’ it automatically rejects all the cookies and it almost always works. Great addon to add to your (Firefox) browser.
Omg thank you i always only find addons that auto accept cookies but non that auto reject… Finally i can rest
Ghostery does this too if you’ve already got that
I use “I don’t care about cookies” but it’s detected and blocked by cnn. Does ghostery work?
Basically we are going to need more and more addon’s and functionality to mitigate this shit. Ignore all cookies, delete all cookies. Basically code for many specific websites to make them usable again.
Install it and try.
So I have UBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, “I don’t care about cookies” and Facebook container. Is ghostery meant as a replacement for all of them? PS: Apparently yes. How good it is nobody knows!
I’ve tried it, it works for me on firefox running on windows.
I’d have to check later, not on my PC right now.
I just ran into that the other day. I solved it by installing noscript, setting a permissive default (I don’t want to make my life harder) and blocking scripts on CNN. It works well.
Thanks! But ghostery works pretty well so far and replaces 3 previous addons.
Great!
I encountered the mother of all captchas the other day: it had me picking a three-dimensional room diagram among six of them, matching it to a 2d top-down view of the room. It was way more time consuming than a typical captcha, and I had to do the same task five or six times.
I think we’ll see harder and harder captchas as AI models get better and better. Eventually it won’t be a realistic option since it just costs humans time and the convenience of whatever service they’re trying to use.
I’d wager AI models have an easier time solving those captchas than humans.
I’d also wager captchas’ only real purpose is to train AI models
Aka “How badly do you want to use this website?”
In 2 years that shit’s gonna be differential calculus, or a riddle.
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No stepmother porn today, I guess.
quality meme, shitty reality
We need to develop more alternatives like federated social media or even completely make web services p2p. And then have them somewhat democratically controlled, or easily able to migrate to alternatives without cost of loosing network effects.
Especially something like amazon / ebay / paypal / ali would be awesome to replace with a “public utility” federated version. They tax so much of the sales and it all goes to psycho billionaires.
Old web revival. Personal sites. Protocol based chat.
Web services are already peer to peer, you mean “decentralized”.
Not sure I understand, peer to peer is always decentralized, i.e. no central server. But the main feature would have to be that you can switch or fork a web application / service - but take your networks with you like a federated service. Not sure how that can work tbh.
I2P is a “peer-to-peer” internet, so to speak. Not much going on there, but it exists. If you’re old enough, think of it as a separate internet that exists in a Kazaa/eMule-esque network.
Oh I still mourn eMule haha. I always thought it was better than torrent, but torrent won for some reason - presumably because it needed more websites and servers to function and that created a market and a marketing gain. I guess I should check out I2P.
