That's never going to happen, so people who think that a compromise might some day be reached, need to let go of that.
Some of the things on the list are extremely easy because the browser itself is ultimately in control. If you don't want animation, for example, then your browser can elect to not animate things. Same for playing sound, executing Javascript, 10kb limit, etc. You're going to get your wish on all of that stuff, assuming you haven't already gotten it already.
But tracking isn't going to go away. Your computer is initiating a conversation with someone else's computer, and there's only one thing you can do to prevent someone else's computer from remembering that it happened: have there be nothing to remember, because nothing happened. i.e. don't request the ad.
If you get the ad, then you get tracking, period. There is no possible compromise between the two sides on this, and everyone who thinks they can have ads but no tracking, is kidding themselves.
Either the ad industry is going to persuade us that tracking isn't all that bad, or the users are going to persuade the media that ads aren't all that necessary. No middle ground exists on this.
IMHO you're wrong. Battery failure is the biggest reason to "upgrade." Availability of software updates is a close second. CPU, screen res etc are already overkill even on a 4 year old phone. Many phone lives have been extended by replacing the battery, though the industry is "on" that "problem" now.
Common criminals have much more to gain from this idea than the NSA does.
It's embarrassing that people are only now beginning to pretend to care about communication security, thanks to NSA getting caught. (Have to say "pretend" because it's not like most people are really doing anything different. But at least they're talking about it. I guess that's something.)
But if we want to take all the threats that plaintext communications exposes us to (our own government, other governments, organized crime, insurance companies, nosey neighbors, political witchhunters, ad profilers, and yes: even the greatest enemy (our own fears, since even when you're not being watched, if you think you might be watched then you're still not free)) and put all that under the blanket label "NSA," that's fine. Just fucking fine.
It's bullshit, but it's ok. Whatever it takes to start going things right. If you wanna pretend the NSA is the threat that's ok because at least, they really are a threat. (Not sure they make the top-ten list, but hey, whatever.) Wear the label, NSA. Big Brother, be the proxy for all the little brothers. You'll do just fine, NSA.
The new IRS guidance could be a boon to providers of identity protection services such as Experian and Lifelock, though maybe not as much as one would expect... Fewer than 10% of those potentially affected by a breach opt for free identity protection services when they are offered.
That is the boon to those services. The whole point of asking Congress to subsidize a particular industry's customers, is to increase the number of customers.
If widget purchases are tax-deductible, then people will buy more widgets (and fewer gadgets). What's weird is that we still think of income tax as being merely a tax on income, rather than a system for encouraging certain spending and discouraging others. What I want to see, is Hollywood making entertainment tax-deductible. I can't believe they haven't bought that one yet.
I will grant that your reading comprehension is shockingly below average, but if you were as stupid as you say you are, you wouldn't be able to communicate it so directly. Show, don't tell.
Your only refuge would have been satire, but when satire lacks humor or insight, the hopeful smiles turn to disappointed sighs. That's not even good craft. C'mon, man!
Here's how I would fix your post, to make it better. I am not an expert writer by any stretch of the imagination; I merely assert that I am your better. So learn:
And yet I had 100 people blow.14 and 101 of them passed the field sobriety tests, so let's stop pretending you have any clue what you're talking about. Since we all know that everyone is identical, that means you're lying if you say your reactions are noticeably substandard at 0.04%.
And even if you were slower-than-sober at that point, so what? You know how everyone is always saying the roads never have any surprises ("Another day, another complete lack of people-who-don't-give-a-fuck-about-their-own-lives darting into the street on that charming block that has both a methadone clinic and healthcare-for-the-homeless clinic(*)") and no other drivers are bad ("I just want to say, yet again, nobody drifted into my lane why they were on their phone. Why do I even still bother to pay attention to all the other cars? Everyone is so well-behaved!")? That lack of there ever being any hazards is why slow reactions don't matter, you lying moron.
The reality is, we have stupid legislators because of people like you, who explicitly said they would not enact a BAC limit based on their personal experience due to the fact that they know different people have different performance at different BAC, and if I had paid attention to what I was ranting at, I would have at least lampshaded (**) that fact.
Don't you see how that would have been a better way to say the exact same shit-for-brain nonsense that you said? This isn't even fancy and I'm sure you could do just as well, if you tried. But you didn't. So the question is: dude, what went wrong?
(*) This is a real place on my commute to work every day. It's awesome but in my fantasy, that same magic stretch of street would also have a 1970s style porn theater, a plasma donation center, a casino, and a sausage factory with a secret tunnel to a nearby funeral parlor. "Hey, why is the sausage factory always receiving shipments of sandbags? Their sausages don't taste like sand at all."
(**) tvtropes link included out of spite. I hope I just made your life shorter.
After that, it's been steadily ratcheted down by neoprohibitionists
Please reach for Hanlon's Razor more often. You don't have to be a neoprohibitionist to lower the limit; simply being dumb is good enough. Combine a little dumbness with personal experience and you can form a strong opinion.
I am as far from a prohibitionist as you can get. I love beer. The house is full of beer and every time I drive out of state, I buy beer (oooh, Interstate Commerce!) just to try out products offered by different distributors. The closets are stuffed with aging barleywines.
And yet, I also know that I am definitely impaired before 0.08%. From my subjective point of view, the 0.08% standard is absurdly high. No, I wouldn't be swerving around at that point, but my reactions would be terrible and my judgement.. altered. If I were stupid and also in charge of setting policy, my personal experience would have me set the limit to 0.04%.
Luckily for society, I'm not in charge. But also, I'm not quite stupid enough to fail to realize that different people have different reactions. Again: what I'm saying is that stupidity would be enough, with prohibitionist agenda having jack shit to do with anything.
So you merely have to ask: do we have stupid people in legislatures?;-) Because if we do, then it's likely there's your true explanation.
Dad: "Hey VISA, I didn't authorize this. Charge back." There. Now it's someone else's problem.
Honest question: doesn't it work like this? If the app or the OS (whatever's in charge) is both storing the credentials and also not taking common-sense measures to authenticate people who try to use those credentials, I'd think chargebacks would be an extremely common occurrence. Isn't this happening? If not, why not?
Raids schmaids. In my experience, the most common case of data leaving the building are failing drives RMAed to manufacturer. I don't remember ever being raided but I have RMAed quite a few drives.
That is why everyone should always be encrypting. So that the drive (which is different from the boot SSD which has the key file pointed at by/etc/crypttab) is just noise. Worrying about the feds is like worrying that you're going to be killed by a terrorist, when you ought to be getting more exercise and driving more defensively. Prioritize your threats!
The Microsoft scenario isn't that they're going to hand your keys over to the feds. It's that a couple years from now we're going to be reading the news story that all Windows 10 users' keys were leaked in some unattributed breach.
I started replying but then I realized that it was all just jokes-but-serious that were outing me as a closet-anarchist, without my policy actually doing any good. I think this means you win, Obfuscant. Touche.
(For the amusement of the historians, I'll include my draft post below...)
...
Someone flying below 1000' AGL with a good camera can take a lot of incriminating pictures of your daughter by your swimming pool, especially if her boyfriend (or girlfriend) is there too.
Then my daughter and her girlfriend should stop murdering people at the pool ("Young lady, if I have to clean up all your messes, you'll never learn anything! You dispose of this drowning victim yourself! Oh, and you're grounded."), and do something less incriminating, such as having hott lesbian sexx. My daughter would know that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened over half a century ago so if a U2 could spot a silo at 70k then the horny 15-year-old next door can easily spot her at 1k with Wal-Mart grade equipment. It would never occur to my daughter that laws, rather than her discretion/countermeasures, would ever have a significant effect on her privacy.
(That's also why she'll encrypt her love-letter emails, too: because she knows that if she doesn't, they're possibly public just like her outdoor sex acts.)
I'm serious, but I also realize I'm totally dodging the issue and you deserve a better reply than that. Fortunately, you almost supplied the answer:
Does the FAA need to keep track of every local law...?
No, but turn that around, and I think you have the answer. If locals want to ignore the reality of both the FAA regs and their personal experiences that aircraft sometimes fly lower, then they're not really trying to do their jobs responsibly. If a government acts in bad faith like that, then yes, there will (and should) be conflicts. Obviously I don't really want pilots always worrying that they're going to be arrested every time they land, but everyone is always playing that game every day whenever they cross any jurisdictional boundary. If you didn't want to see a Taliban courtrooom then you shouldn't have flown to Afghanistan. (Or Los Angeles. Whatever.)
Hmm... let's pretend a local government has a safety agenda, rather than a faux (and futile) privacy agenda. They're not so much scared of voyeurs watching our hot nubian daughters having sex by the pool, but rather, they're scared of our daughters being shredded by the powerful cheaply-proliferating propellers, due to the pilot masturbating when they're supposed to be maintaining altitude or paying attention to the remaining LiPo voltage. This is a believable agenda, because one thing we are really good at, is getting scared. And probably even for good reason, since "drone" pilots tend to....
(At this point I realized that Shit Happens and our daughters are, in fact, going to be shredded if I run things, because I have so little faith in the laws (whether federal or local) really having an effect on what copter-operators end up doing. So don't vote for me. My opponent won't really keep you any safer, but at least he'll try to. His heart in the right place and mine's not.;-)
I don't have a problem with the FAA and local laws being so different and addressing different topics. Unless you live in a place like Texarcana, your neighbor peeking over your wall isn't a federal or interstate problem and the feds shouldn't be trying to protect privacy from peek-by-droners. Similarly, the local governments shouldn't be worrying about interference with interstate flights and all the other issues that the feds should be regulating.
What's wrong with two (or even three) sets of rules, each made by government entities tasked with addressing scopes of problems?
And if you have a silly situation where someone tries to make silly rules in the other entity's scope (e.g. cities trying to ban all flights over or within that city) just let the silly people lose. Yeah, there will be some complexity, and arguments about what belongs to who, but we've always had that going on. That's not an "aircraft thing," it's an "America thing" and we argue about where the lines are, all the time.
Good thinking. But re-read your post and you'll see that you have also inadvertently identified the thing that your bombing conspirators have in common, which makes them so easy to identify.
So now we really know what to do: stop letting people onto planes.
It is not incumbent on everyone else to understand someone's homemade gadgets and electronic paraphernalia.
But it is incumbent on people whose professional job is apparently to scream "it's a bomb, it's a bomb! Everybody, we all need to freak out and assault this person, now!!" to have some idea about when to freak out and throw all their reason out the window, vs not freak out.
You don't call TSA ahead of time about your items, do you? And yet they are every bit as bomb-like as this guy's sensors. Electronics aren't bombs. They just aren't. I don't care how many religious pamphlets you have read all your life saying that wires=bomb; that doesn't make it true.
Another way of looking at this, is if these people are this incredibly unqualified to screen, then false positives aren't the only thing that can go wrong. Your community isn't just occasionally burning innocent people to death, but you also probably still have witches that your bumbling witchfinders are failing to catch. What are we getting in exchange for paying them?
Say I have a KVM Linode, and then "WebBnB" wants an LXC container on my Linode, and they're running Apache in their container, and serving up several VirtualHost websites for their customers. WebBnB needs to charge their customers for the websites, so I can charge them, and Linode can charge me extra. And we all take a cut, thereby making WebBnB the stupidest and most expensive webhosting company ever, so the customers leave 'em and start doing business directly with Linode. Problem solved.
People are already empowered to prevent websites from remembering what they told those websites: don't talk to that website. We have neglected to use that power, and instead, we've chosen to use shitty web browsers for the last 20 years, where those web browsers' policy seems to be "meh, load whatever anyone suggests." I suppose some people would say since our browsers suck and most of us aren't programmers who can make their own browser, we're not really empowered, but I think we simply rejected the power.
And things are actually changing (for various reasons that we're all familiar with). You really ought to check out Privacy Badger. It's a start. There are a lot of related and similar plugins, and as we have started to care more about the issue, we have started to have these things. When we start to care a lot, then we'll really upgrade our tools and get what we want.
Mostly. We'll mostly get what we want, at least in terms of "third party" tracking. First party tracking has been possible since the dawn of time. You tell Ogg the caveman, "me hungry" too many times, and eventually he'll start to remember you're often hungry, and who knows: he might approach you with offers of trading his mammoth meat for your ropes and pre-napped obsidian or whatever. That's life.
And I find it pretty fucking outrageous that someone wants to point at gun at Ogg and tell him that he's not allowed to remember things that you told him. His mind is his right, outside of your (or anyone else's) purview. Same goes for my computer. If you choose to tell my agent things about you, my agent gets to remember what you said. "Do Not Track" is about thoughtcrime, and is arguably even more despicable than DMCA (where you're not allowed to program your own computer).
To recap:
1. We've got this on the browser side; we don't need a law.
2. The law would be unenforceable so it won't do any good (you can't verify that Ogg has forgotten whatever you told him).
3. The law would set precedent for more thoughtcrime laws, so it's bad. Also, having an unforceable law just encourages people to not do the things that really work; it reminds me of people who want Congress to stop the NSA from reading their plaintext emails, instead of them encrypting so that the NSA (and everyone else) can't read their emails. So it'd be harmful to privacy.
Everything points against supporting the kind of people who advocate this nonsense. It's another one of those things that is all disadvantages and doesn't even have any advantages, where some idiot could subjectively weigh it in a certain direction. I don't care what you multiple the zero on the "up" side by: it's not enough.
This isn't about a girl. Read the summary: "...streets known to have a prostitution problem." Legal/illegal aside, the premise is that the street has already been determined to have a problem, present perfect tense. Imagine your local street had a pot hole problem, whom you would call and what measures you would expect them to take. If your local government doesn't have authority over streets' behavior, then pray tell: who does?
Now, thanks to advances in police forensics, we have learned that some people drive on these streets, and in some cases we can identify these drivers or at least their associates. You've got a street coping with a problem, but insensitive commons-tramplers are using (relatively) heavy equipment upon it. What to do? I say there's no need to barbarously escalate. Just write 'em a letter, nicely asking them to transition toward a more tarmac-friendly lifestyle. My fellow Americans, we need more street-walkers and I think the leaders in visionary places like Los Angeles are just the policy-makers to help make that so.
That's so nice of you to want to protect us from spam. But you know what's even more annoying and threatening and expensive than spam?
..found its way into the budget bill.
Worse than spam, is stuff that "finds its way" into our laws without ever being attributed. The guilty parties are never punished or even informally shamed or identified so that anyone can ever vote approval or disapproval for that person in the next election.
Put an end to unattributed "malgislation" (eww, let's keep working on finding the right word) and then you'll really be heroes. I want every item in every bill to have a person's name on it. Let them continue to be as evil and un-American as they want with their laws, but let's stop allowing them to be irresponsibly anonymous when they do it.
The website isn't the leak. It just politely asks your browser to leak, and the browser naively complies. FWIW, people are sort of finally on this (e.g. PrivacyBadger) though we're still in the very early days of people-giving-a-fuck.
Slashdot Mirror
That's never going to happen, so people who think that a compromise might some day be reached, need to let go of that.
Some of the things on the list are extremely easy because the browser itself is ultimately in control. If you don't want animation, for example, then your browser can elect to not animate things. Same for playing sound, executing Javascript, 10kb limit, etc. You're going to get your wish on all of that stuff, assuming you haven't already gotten it already.
But tracking isn't going to go away. Your computer is initiating a conversation with someone else's computer, and there's only one thing you can do to prevent someone else's computer from remembering that it happened: have there be nothing to remember, because nothing happened. i.e. don't request the ad.
If you get the ad, then you get tracking, period. There is no possible compromise between the two sides on this, and everyone who thinks they can have ads but no tracking, is kidding themselves.
Either the ad industry is going to persuade us that tracking isn't all that bad, or the users are going to persuade the media that ads aren't all that necessary. No middle ground exists on this.
IMHO you're wrong. Battery failure is the biggest reason to "upgrade." Availability of software updates is a close second. CPU, screen res etc are already overkill even on a 4 year old phone. Many phone lives have been extended by replacing the battery, though the industry is "on" that "problem" now.
Cacheable pages might have ads, but they're not The Right ads.
When did they do that?
Found the Hydrogen Hydroxide industry shill.
Common criminals have much more to gain from this idea than the NSA does.
It's embarrassing that people are only now beginning to pretend to care about communication security, thanks to NSA getting caught. (Have to say "pretend" because it's not like most people are really doing anything different. But at least they're talking about it. I guess that's something.)
But if we want to take all the threats that plaintext communications exposes us to (our own government, other governments, organized crime, insurance companies, nosey neighbors, political witchhunters, ad profilers, and yes: even the greatest enemy (our own fears, since even when you're not being watched, if you think you might be watched then you're still not free)) and put all that under the blanket label "NSA," that's fine. Just fucking fine.
It's bullshit, but it's ok. Whatever it takes to start going things right. If you wanna pretend the NSA is the threat that's ok because at least, they really are a threat. (Not sure they make the top-ten list, but hey, whatever.) Wear the label, NSA. Big Brother, be the proxy for all the little brothers. You'll do just fine, NSA.
That is the boon to those services. The whole point of asking Congress to subsidize a particular industry's customers, is to increase the number of customers.
If widget purchases are tax-deductible, then people will buy more widgets (and fewer gadgets). What's weird is that we still think of income tax as being merely a tax on income, rather than a system for encouraging certain spending and discouraging others. What I want to see, is Hollywood making entertainment tax-deductible. I can't believe they haven't bought that one yet.
No, because this is obviously Interstate Commerce, of course.
I will grant that your reading comprehension is shockingly below average, but if you were as stupid as you say you are, you wouldn't be able to communicate it so directly. Show, don't tell.
Your only refuge would have been satire, but when satire lacks humor or insight, the hopeful smiles turn to disappointed sighs. That's not even good craft. C'mon, man!
Here's how I would fix your post, to make it better. I am not an expert writer by any stretch of the imagination; I merely assert that I am your better. So learn:
Don't you see how that would have been a better way to say the exact same shit-for-brain nonsense that you said? This isn't even fancy and I'm sure you could do just as well, if you tried. But you didn't. So the question is: dude, what went wrong?
(*) This is a real place on my commute to work every day. It's awesome but in my fantasy, that same magic stretch of street would also have a 1970s style porn theater, a plasma donation center, a casino, and a sausage factory with a secret tunnel to a nearby funeral parlor. "Hey, why is the sausage factory always receiving shipments of sandbags? Their sausages don't taste like sand at all."
(**) tvtropes link included out of spite. I hope I just made your life shorter.
Please reach for Hanlon's Razor more often. You don't have to be a neoprohibitionist to lower the limit; simply being dumb is good enough. Combine a little dumbness with personal experience and you can form a strong opinion.
I am as far from a prohibitionist as you can get. I love beer. The house is full of beer and every time I drive out of state, I buy beer (oooh, Interstate Commerce!) just to try out products offered by different distributors. The closets are stuffed with aging barleywines.
And yet, I also know that I am definitely impaired before 0.08%. From my subjective point of view, the 0.08% standard is absurdly high. No, I wouldn't be swerving around at that point, but my reactions would be terrible and my judgement .. altered. If I were stupid and also in charge of setting policy, my personal experience would have me set the limit to 0.04%.
Luckily for society, I'm not in charge. But also, I'm not quite stupid enough to fail to realize that different people have different reactions. Again: what I'm saying is that stupidity would be enough, with prohibitionist agenda having jack shit to do with anything.
So you merely have to ask: do we have stupid people in legislatures? ;-) Because if we do, then it's likely there's your true explanation.
Even so, whenever you're trying to get that point across, decorum requires that you begin with "I'm not a racist, but..."
Dad: "Hey VISA, I didn't authorize this. Charge back." There. Now it's someone else's problem.
Honest question: doesn't it work like this? If the app or the OS (whatever's in charge) is both storing the credentials and also not taking common-sense measures to authenticate people who try to use those credentials, I'd think chargebacks would be an extremely common occurrence. Isn't this happening? If not, why not?
Raids schmaids. In my experience, the most common case of data leaving the building are failing drives RMAed to manufacturer. I don't remember ever being raided but I have RMAed quite a few drives.
That is why everyone should always be encrypting. So that the drive (which is different from the boot SSD which has the key file pointed at by /etc/crypttab) is just noise. Worrying about the feds is like worrying that you're going to be killed by a terrorist, when you ought to be getting more exercise and driving more defensively. Prioritize your threats!
The Microsoft scenario isn't that they're going to hand your keys over to the feds. It's that a couple years from now we're going to be reading the news story that all Windows 10 users' keys were leaked in some unattributed breach.
I started replying but then I realized that it was all just jokes-but-serious that were outing me as a closet-anarchist, without my policy actually doing any good. I think this means you win, Obfuscant. Touche.
(For the amusement of the historians, I'll include my draft post below...)
...
Then my daughter and her girlfriend should stop murdering people at the pool ("Young lady, if I have to clean up all your messes, you'll never learn anything! You dispose of this drowning victim yourself! Oh, and you're grounded."), and do something less incriminating, such as having hott lesbian sexx. My daughter would know that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened over half a century ago so if a U2 could spot a silo at 70k then the horny 15-year-old next door can easily spot her at 1k with Wal-Mart grade equipment. It would never occur to my daughter that laws, rather than her discretion/countermeasures, would ever have a significant effect on her privacy.
(That's also why she'll encrypt her love-letter emails, too: because she knows that if she doesn't, they're possibly public just like her outdoor sex acts.)
I'm serious, but I also realize I'm totally dodging the issue and you deserve a better reply than that. Fortunately, you almost supplied the answer:
No, but turn that around, and I think you have the answer. If locals want to ignore the reality of both the FAA regs and their personal experiences that aircraft sometimes fly lower, then they're not really trying to do their jobs responsibly. If a government acts in bad faith like that, then yes, there will (and should) be conflicts. Obviously I don't really want pilots always worrying that they're going to be arrested every time they land, but everyone is always playing that game every day whenever they cross any jurisdictional boundary. If you didn't want to see a Taliban courtrooom then you shouldn't have flown to Afghanistan. (Or Los Angeles. Whatever.)
Hmm... let's pretend a local government has a safety agenda, rather than a faux (and futile) privacy agenda. They're not so much scared of voyeurs watching our hot nubian daughters having sex by the pool, but rather, they're scared of our daughters being shredded by the powerful cheaply-proliferating propellers, due to the pilot masturbating when they're supposed to be maintaining altitude or paying attention to the remaining LiPo voltage. This is a believable agenda, because one thing we are really good at, is getting scared. And probably even for good reason, since "drone" pilots tend to....
(At this point I realized that Shit Happens and our daughters are, in fact, going to be shredded if I run things, because I have so little faith in the laws (whether federal or local) really having an effect on what copter-operators end up doing. So don't vote for me. My opponent won't really keep you any safer, but at least he'll try to. His heart in the right place and mine's not. ;-)
I don't have a problem with the FAA and local laws being so different and addressing different topics. Unless you live in a place like Texarcana, your neighbor peeking over your wall isn't a federal or interstate problem and the feds shouldn't be trying to protect privacy from peek-by-droners. Similarly, the local governments shouldn't be worrying about interference with interstate flights and all the other issues that the feds should be regulating.
What's wrong with two (or even three) sets of rules, each made by government entities tasked with addressing scopes of problems?
And if you have a silly situation where someone tries to make silly rules in the other entity's scope (e.g. cities trying to ban all flights over or within that city) just let the silly people lose. Yeah, there will be some complexity, and arguments about what belongs to who, but we've always had that going on. That's not an "aircraft thing," it's an "America thing" and we argue about where the lines are, all the time.
Good thinking. But re-read your post and you'll see that you have also inadvertently identified the thing that your bombing conspirators have in common, which makes them so easy to identify.
So now we really know what to do: stop letting people onto planes.
But it is incumbent on people whose professional job is apparently to scream "it's a bomb, it's a bomb! Everybody, we all need to freak out and assault this person, now!!" to have some idea about when to freak out and throw all their reason out the window, vs not freak out.
You don't call TSA ahead of time about your items, do you? And yet they are every bit as bomb-like as this guy's sensors. Electronics aren't bombs. They just aren't. I don't care how many religious pamphlets you have read all your life saying that wires=bomb; that doesn't make it true.
Another way of looking at this, is if these people are this incredibly unqualified to screen, then false positives aren't the only thing that can go wrong. Your community isn't just occasionally burning innocent people to death, but you also probably still have witches that your bumbling witchfinders are failing to catch. What are we getting in exchange for paying them?
AFAICT "Category 275" isn't taken as a band name yet. Somebody: Rock that fucker!
This is Slashdot, so we need analogies.
Say I have a KVM Linode, and then "WebBnB" wants an LXC container on my Linode, and they're running Apache in their container, and serving up several VirtualHost websites for their customers. WebBnB needs to charge their customers for the websites, so I can charge them, and Linode can charge me extra. And we all take a cut, thereby making WebBnB the stupidest and most expensive webhosting company ever, so the customers leave 'em and start doing business directly with Linode. Problem solved.
People are already empowered to prevent websites from remembering what they told those websites: don't talk to that website. We have neglected to use that power, and instead, we've chosen to use shitty web browsers for the last 20 years, where those web browsers' policy seems to be "meh, load whatever anyone suggests." I suppose some people would say since our browsers suck and most of us aren't programmers who can make their own browser, we're not really empowered, but I think we simply rejected the power.
And things are actually changing (for various reasons that we're all familiar with). You really ought to check out Privacy Badger. It's a start. There are a lot of related and similar plugins, and as we have started to care more about the issue, we have started to have these things. When we start to care a lot, then we'll really upgrade our tools and get what we want.
Mostly. We'll mostly get what we want, at least in terms of "third party" tracking. First party tracking has been possible since the dawn of time. You tell Ogg the caveman, "me hungry" too many times, and eventually he'll start to remember you're often hungry, and who knows: he might approach you with offers of trading his mammoth meat for your ropes and pre-napped obsidian or whatever. That's life.
And I find it pretty fucking outrageous that someone wants to point at gun at Ogg and tell him that he's not allowed to remember things that you told him. His mind is his right, outside of your (or anyone else's) purview. Same goes for my computer. If you choose to tell my agent things about you, my agent gets to remember what you said. "Do Not Track" is about thoughtcrime, and is arguably even more despicable than DMCA (where you're not allowed to program your own computer).
To recap:
1. We've got this on the browser side; we don't need a law.
2. The law would be unenforceable so it won't do any good (you can't verify that Ogg has forgotten whatever you told him).
3. The law would set precedent for more thoughtcrime laws, so it's bad. Also, having an unforceable law just encourages people to not do the things that really work; it reminds me of people who want Congress to stop the NSA from reading their plaintext emails, instead of them encrypting so that the NSA (and everyone else) can't read their emails. So it'd be harmful to privacy.
Everything points against supporting the kind of people who advocate this nonsense. It's another one of those things that is all disadvantages and doesn't even have any advantages, where some idiot could subjectively weigh it in a certain direction. I don't care what you multiple the zero on the "up" side by: it's not enough.
This isn't about a girl. Read the summary: "...streets known to have a prostitution problem." Legal/illegal aside, the premise is that the street has already been determined to have a problem, present perfect tense. Imagine your local street had a pot hole problem, whom you would call and what measures you would expect them to take. If your local government doesn't have authority over streets' behavior, then pray tell: who does?
Now, thanks to advances in police forensics, we have learned that some people drive on these streets, and in some cases we can identify these drivers or at least their associates. You've got a street coping with a problem, but insensitive commons-tramplers are using (relatively) heavy equipment upon it. What to do? I say there's no need to barbarously escalate. Just write 'em a letter, nicely asking them to transition toward a more tarmac-friendly lifestyle. My fellow Americans, we need more street-walkers and I think the leaders in visionary places like Los Angeles are just the policy-makers to help make that so.
Whoosh, dude.
That's so nice of you to want to protect us from spam. But you know what's even more annoying and threatening and expensive than spam?
Worse than spam, is stuff that "finds its way" into our laws without ever being attributed. The guilty parties are never punished or even informally shamed or identified so that anyone can ever vote approval or disapproval for that person in the next election.
Put an end to unattributed "malgislation" (eww, let's keep working on finding the right word) and then you'll really be heroes. I want every item in every bill to have a person's name on it. Let them continue to be as evil and un-American as they want with their laws, but let's stop allowing them to be irresponsibly anonymous when they do it.
The website isn't the leak. It just politely asks your browser to leak, and the browser naively complies. FWIW, people are sort of finally on this (e.g. PrivacyBadger) though we're still in the very early days of people-giving-a-fuck.
Would you prefer if I were not concerned about your problems?