We're still at the point where we're halfway down the lion's throat. You say there's no good way to do page hit counting on a distributed set of servers. How did things get here? There are a million good ways to do page hit counting on a distributed set of servers except... for some reason... it was easier to off-load this chore onto the user's client applications. Why is that? Why would we want to waste the time and effort sending cookies and pings and referrals across an unpredictable international network when, in many cases, it could be done more quickly, reliably, and securely on the local server farm LAN or VPN?
Now, if you're talking about hit tracking (IP addresses), then I must admit that I don't know how much access a page has to the data of the client without relying on a server. If a page cannot log an IP address except to depend upon the server then it is important to note that there are very good reasons why users on a system do not have access to all of the information that root does. If that data was meant to be accessible by users' individual pages then the authors of web servers would have included a mechanism to pass that data from the server to the hosted pages. Unless it is to circumvent very important system security policies with respect to information I see little to no reason for tracking mechanisms to be embedded in client applications.
There's a real reason behind all of this and the fact that it's so carefully hushed makes it all that much more suspicious. This isn't tin foil. This is the parent checking the kids' room when everything suddenly goes quiet.
I would agree if you could demonstrate the usefulness of AJAX outside of a web browser. AJAX may, in itself, be a fantastic design. The question still remains, though,"What are we really trying to accomplish and should we be doing this with a web browser at all?"
Lately the following has become increasingly obvious: We're adding new features to keep and track users on the web to generate databases and clicks for (artificial) revenue to show numbers to the investors so that we can get more capital to add new features to keep and track users on the web to generate databases and clicks for (artificial) revenue to show numbers to the investors so that we can get more capital to add new features...
Can you see why I, as a user, am no longer impressed with port 80? I'm not really fond of pyramid schemes.
Hmmmm... started using Slackware around '95, went through a few kernel revisions, then put computers on the back-burner for a while to investigate post-puberty options. So how old did that make him during his long time NT testing years? How do I sign my kids up for that sort of opportunity at age 11-13? Maybe there's a reason why "Microsoft had ignored every single one of my elaborate suggestions and wishlist reports in 4.0".
I'm sure he makes many important contributions but, wow, people tell me that I'm arrogant if I make an elaborate suggestion at 30.
The point is not whether or not atheists have the right to be married. The point is: Why is the government at all interested in whether or not they're married?
The answer has something to do with taxation which may or may not be legal depending upon how vehemently you feel like arguing it and what you feel the rightful powers of the government are.
It's truly amazing. The government blatantly ignores any restriction on its power except when it comes to this super-important separation of Church and State... and then everyone gets all up in arms. If it's the religious right running the executive branch then it's definitely the religiophobes who are dominating the judicial branch.
I would like to see a web-browser with the bare-bones approach of lynx but support for the more advanced layout styles.
Something I've often wondered: We have javascript controls (allow pages to do this, do that, do the other, yes/no). Are those really the only things that javascript can do which I might want to have control over? Or are they just a few features which were put in the preferences to make me feel like I have any control at all?
With every new release which incorporates new features I grow increasingly curious as to what all of the web sites are doing with all of the data. Not just as a "collecting/sharing/selling data", but exactly who is buying the data and exactly what are they doing with it?
I'm pretty certain that the American public would be disappointed if they knew--but, as usual, they wouldn't be able to do a darn thing about it. It's almost impossible to maintain a quality standard of living without simply accepting that these clowns get to do whatever they want when it comes to the internet.
And allow websites to download the entire contents of the history folder. Why have cookie controls at all if the devs are just going to shoe-in another workaround? We should allow every website to read every other website's cookies. Why are we beating around the bush?
Precisely why we should not be adding new features to allow the same thing to happen. Instead the devs should be looking back and securing the existing protocols.
I hate to bring politics into this but this is the exact same pattern with our legal system: Why go back and refine the old when we can just keep writing new?
Can you imagine applying that meme to your code base for any major application? Why, it would end up looking like a collection of bandaids with a million loopholes in each one. Ask Microsoft how well that works out for security and reliability.
People of questionable ethics employ questionable techniques to gather questionable information... and somehow you think that giving them yet another questionable technique is a good thing?
At which point I still wonder why devs are saddling user apps with the things which only matter to the marketing departments.
Is Firefox writing an application for me to browse the web or are they writing an application to help marketing departments profile me? Let's just get the intent of the application clear.
they won't tell me where they're going unless I go to the effort of creating a redirect script and linking through that -- and while I'm curious, I don't care enough to go to that effort.
Why are developers saddling users for features which website owners are too lazy to implement themselves?
I don't need to know exactly what is going on to get the feeling that it isn't right. It's the same thing as parents checking on their kids when everything suddenly gets quiet.
I know that this will be extraordinarily out of the box type thinking which was discarded back around '95 when the intarweb was used to create a huge marketing bubble...
Use your imagination and come up with something which doesn't involve HTTP and port 80. I know, it's tough because there's so little out there. Looking at the internet today one would think that HTTP and port 80 were the whole reason behind designing desktop computers.
And, again... what functionality does this new ping give to _ME_, the user who bought this hardware and is paying the electric bill to run this browser? If I were to talk with the author of the code for this little snippet what explanation would he be able to give to justify that _I_, the user, want this?
I'm happy to see that someone is willing to step up and point this out. Dealing with the people who insist that being more free than absolute detention camps equates to acceptable government has always been a difficult discussion.
Could we refine this to be more broadly applicable and publicly known?
I just want to ask: What functionality does this give to me, as a user, that couldn't be entirely implemented on the server side without requiring anything to happen behind my back?
I use the web to view content. Ceding the argument of complex layouts (graphics, frames, fonts, etc.) there is no content that I've viewed in the last 8 years which requires any functionality on my browser's part beyond what I could get from lynx. What does this ping bring to me, as a user, and why should I care to have it at all?
AJAX doesn't impress me either. Webapps, while nice for jobs and web-coders (everyone needs to make a living somehow), should die. There's a better and more secure way to do everything which any web-app does.
You would think so. Starting with cookies, though, there's always been a major component of web design and development which hinges on deliberately obfuscating important events from the user.
I don't want to get too heavy into tin-foilery over this. It would be difficult to support a claim that these pings and cookies are used for anything but the most innocuous of data mining and profiling pursuits. Here is where a natural danger sense comes into play, though: if people are being so careful not to draw attention to the extra activities of the software then just what are they hiding?
Look at this entire room full of laws we have to torment spammers. Every single one of these laws was finely crafted using taxpayer money and the infrastructure of updating all registries, databases, and lawbooks to reflect them is also at taxpayer expense.
Now. If we could just catch more than one spammer/year (not counting the 68 year old grandmother caught for sending out e-mail advertising her cross-stitch mittens) we might be able to make use of them.
Re:Balkanization
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Demise of C++?
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Very nice. :) I admire your good luck.
We're still at the point where we're halfway down the lion's throat. You say there's no good way to do page hit counting on a distributed set of servers. How did things get here? There are a million good ways to do page hit counting on a distributed set of servers except... for some reason... it was easier to off-load this chore onto the user's client applications. Why is that? Why would we want to waste the time and effort sending cookies and pings and referrals across an unpredictable international network when, in many cases, it could be done more quickly, reliably, and securely on the local server farm LAN or VPN?
Now, if you're talking about hit tracking (IP addresses), then I must admit that I don't know how much access a page has to the data of the client without relying on a server. If a page cannot log an IP address except to depend upon the server then it is important to note that there are very good reasons why users on a system do not have access to all of the information that root does. If that data was meant to be accessible by users' individual pages then the authors of web servers would have included a mechanism to pass that data from the server to the hosted pages. Unless it is to circumvent very important system security policies with respect to information I see little to no reason for tracking mechanisms to be embedded in client applications.
There's a real reason behind all of this and the fact that it's so carefully hushed makes it all that much more suspicious. This isn't tin foil. This is the parent checking the kids' room when everything suddenly goes quiet.
I would agree if you could demonstrate the usefulness of AJAX outside of a web browser. AJAX may, in itself, be a fantastic design. The question still remains, though,"What are we really trying to accomplish and should we be doing this with a web browser at all?"
Lately the following has become increasingly obvious: We're adding new features to keep and track users on the web to generate databases and clicks for (artificial) revenue to show numbers to the investors so that we can get more capital to add new features to keep and track users on the web to generate databases and clicks for (artificial) revenue to show numbers to the investors so that we can get more capital to add new features...
Can you see why I, as a user, am no longer impressed with port 80? I'm not really fond of pyramid schemes.
Hmmmm... started using Slackware around '95, went through a few kernel revisions, then put computers on the back-burner for a while to investigate post-puberty options. So how old did that make him during his long time NT testing years? How do I sign my kids up for that sort of opportunity at age 11-13? Maybe there's a reason why "Microsoft had ignored every single one of my elaborate suggestions and wishlist reports in 4.0".
I'm sure he makes many important contributions but, wow, people tell me that I'm arrogant if I make an elaborate suggestion at 30.
The point is not whether or not atheists have the right to be married. The point is: Why is the government at all interested in whether or not they're married?
The answer has something to do with taxation which may or may not be legal depending upon how vehemently you feel like arguing it and what you feel the rightful powers of the government are.
It's truly amazing. The government blatantly ignores any restriction on its power except when it comes to this super-important separation of Church and State... and then everyone gets all up in arms. If it's the religious right running the executive branch then it's definitely the religiophobes who are dominating the judicial branch.
I would like to see a web-browser with the bare-bones approach of lynx but support for the more advanced layout styles.
Something I've often wondered: We have javascript controls (allow pages to do this, do that, do the other, yes/no). Are those really the only things that javascript can do which I might want to have control over? Or are they just a few features which were put in the preferences to make me feel like I have any control at all?
With every new release which incorporates new features I grow increasingly curious as to what all of the web sites are doing with all of the data. Not just as a "collecting/sharing/selling data", but exactly who is buying the data and exactly what are they doing with it?
I'm pretty certain that the American public would be disappointed if they knew--but, as usual, they wouldn't be able to do a darn thing about it. It's almost impossible to maintain a quality standard of living without simply accepting that these clowns get to do whatever they want when it comes to the internet.
And allow websites to download the entire contents of the history folder. Why have cookie controls at all if the devs are just going to shoe-in another workaround? We should allow every website to read every other website's cookies. Why are we beating around the bush?
Precisely why we should not be adding new features to allow the same thing to happen. Instead the devs should be looking back and securing the existing protocols.
I hate to bring politics into this but this is the exact same pattern with our legal system: Why go back and refine the old when we can just keep writing new?
Can you imagine applying that meme to your code base for any major application? Why, it would end up looking like a collection of bandaids with a million loopholes in each one. Ask Microsoft how well that works out for security and reliability.
People of questionable ethics employ questionable techniques to gather questionable information... and somehow you think that giving them yet another questionable technique is a good thing?
I see. As long as we're halfway down the lion's throat we might as well go all the way.
If anything you've illustrated why we should be critically looking at web designers and developers and asking,"Just what are you up to?"
At which point I still wonder why devs are saddling user apps with the things which only matter to the marketing departments.
Is Firefox writing an application for me to browse the web or are they writing an application to help marketing departments profile me? Let's just get the intent of the application clear.
I don't need to know exactly what is going on to get the feeling that it isn't right. It's the same thing as parents checking on their kids when everything suddenly gets quiet.
I know that this will be extraordinarily out of the box type thinking which was discarded back around '95 when the intarweb was used to create a huge marketing bubble...
Use your imagination and come up with something which doesn't involve HTTP and port 80. I know, it's tough because there's so little out there. Looking at the internet today one would think that HTTP and port 80 were the whole reason behind designing desktop computers.
And, again... what functionality does this new ping give to _ME_, the user who bought this hardware and is paying the electric bill to run this browser? If I were to talk with the author of the code for this little snippet what explanation would he be able to give to justify that _I_, the user, want this?
Everything has suddenly become really really dark. Did you just turn the monitor off?
I'm happy to see that someone is willing to step up and point this out. Dealing with the people who insist that being more free than absolute detention camps equates to acceptable government has always been a difficult discussion.
Could we refine this to be more broadly applicable and publicly known?
I just want to ask: What functionality does this give to me, as a user, that couldn't be entirely implemented on the server side without requiring anything to happen behind my back?
I use the web to view content. Ceding the argument of complex layouts (graphics, frames, fonts, etc.) there is no content that I've viewed in the last 8 years which requires any functionality on my browser's part beyond what I could get from lynx. What does this ping bring to me, as a user, and why should I care to have it at all?
AJAX doesn't impress me either. Webapps, while nice for jobs and web-coders (everyone needs to make a living somehow), should die. There's a better and more secure way to do everything which any web-app does.
And we should compromise our security (arguably) and our knowledge of what the system is doing (certainly) for their profit margin why?
You would think so. Starting with cookies, though, there's always been a major component of web design and development which hinges on deliberately obfuscating important events from the user.
I don't want to get too heavy into tin-foilery over this. It would be difficult to support a claim that these pings and cookies are used for anything but the most innocuous of data mining and profiling pursuits. Here is where a natural danger sense comes into play, though: if people are being so careful not to draw attention to the extra activities of the software then just what are they hiding?
Why are websites making use of this crap anyway?
All of the things you cite are true. None of those things are actually applicable to the case at hand.
Please tell me that you're not surprised.
The parent was echoing the thoughts of many people in priveleged positions.
Increasingly, every year, it seems the world is run by tee-totallers.
Look at this entire room full of laws we have to torment spammers. Every single one of these laws was finely crafted using taxpayer money and the infrastructure of updating all registries, databases, and lawbooks to reflect them is also at taxpayer expense.
Now. If we could just catch more than one spammer/year (not counting the 68 year old grandmother caught for sending out e-mail advertising her cross-stitch mittens) we might be able to make use of them.
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