Slashdot Mirror
Internet Giants To Honor the 'No' In 'No Tracking'
theodp writes "The WSJ reports that a coalition of Internet giants including Google has agreed to support a do-not-track button to be embedded in most Web browsers — a move that the industry had been resisting for more than a year. The new do-not-track button isn't going to stop all Web tracking. The companies have agreed to stop using the data about people's Web browsing habits to customize ads, and have agreed not to use the data for employment, credit, health-care or insurance purposes. But the data can still be used for some purposes such as 'market research' and 'product development' and can still be obtained by law enforcement officers. Meanwhile, after Google got caught last week bypassing privacy settings on Safari, and was accused of also circumventing IE's P3P Privacy Protection feature, CBS MoneyWatch contacted Mozilla to see if it had noticed Google bypassing Firefox's privacy controls. After reports that Google ponied up close to a billion dollars to Mozilla to beat out a Microsoft bid, this seems to be one of those have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife type questions that has no good answer. Anyway, according to a statement attributed to Alex Fowler, global privacy and public policy lead for Mozilla: 'Our testing did not reveal any instances of Google bypassing user privacy settings.'"
GreatBunzinni has been anonymously accusing almost 20 accounts of being employed by a PR firm to astroturf Slashdot, without any evidence. Using multiple puppet accounts, he mods up his anonymous posts while modding down the target accounts in order to censor their viewpoints off of Slashdot.
GreatBunzinni is actually a 32-year-old C++/Java programmer from Almada, Portugal named Rui Maciel, with a civil engineering degree from Instituto Superior Técnico and a hobby working with electronics. He runs Kubuntu and is active the KDE mailing list. He has accounts at OSNews, the Ubuntu forums, and of course Slashdot. While trolling Slashdot, he enjoys music by bands like Motorhead, Fu Manchu, Iron Maiden, but lately he's been on a big Jimi Hendrix kick, with some Bootsy Collins on the side. He's also a fan of strategy games like Vega Strike and Transport Tycoon.
Rui Maciel accidentally outed himself as the anonymous troll who has been posting his baseless accusations to every Slashdot story. He wrote the same post almost verbatim, first using his logged-in account and then in an anonymous post submitted days later. Note the use of the exact same terminology and phrasing in both posts.
Feel free to email Rui Maciel at greatbunzinni@gmail.com or rui.maciel@gmail.com, or IM him at greatbunzinni@jabber.org. You can also visit his developer blog at http://rui_maciel.users.sourceforge.net/. Check out his poorly written parsers or his crappy cube apps.
Here is a reply from one of the persons he constantly harrasses and accuses of being a shill:
Well, he's listed me as one of those "shill accounts", so he clearly has absolutely zero proof (although I can't prove that to you, obviously).
I've been posting on slashdot since my first time around at university, so that would be 1999-2000 or something? Maybe 2001 - it might have been in my second year when I got a computer of my own rather than the ones in the lab. My UID is whatever was assigned to me when I made the account, and this is the only account I have.
In other words, I've been around here for a very long time (obviously not as long as some of the 4 digit UIDs), so either Apple/MS/Sony/Facebook whoever has been paying for my to post for over ten years, or they approached me recently and started offering cash (yeah, how very likely, that they'd trust some random guy living in the UK to shill for them. No risk at all that I'd tell anyone about it! no sir!).
In other words, the guy is full of shit, and if he'd been around on slashdot long enough he'd recognise that I've been posting here for a decade.
Still, let the kids have their grand conspiracy ranting and raving. I just wish it didn't reflect so poorly on a site I that I've been a member of for so long. How far it has fallen. Hard to have a proper discussion these days without being modded down or accused of shilling if you dare to say anything that isn't in lockstep with the groupthink.
No, They provide the choice to the user.
Presenting a choice to the user is not the same as providing a choice to the user.
Presenting would imply that you see a dialog box at launch asking you to decide what you want, they show you, they present you, and they don't just stash it away in a preference window without even telling you it is now there. Sure, its not hard to find, but how is the (common) user supposed to know what new options made it into their browser since they first installed it, or even at the time they installed it?
This is an important enough setting to actually request the user a forced decision on first availability or first configuration (or at next update if the user never manually configured it in the past.)