On Dienstag, 26. November 2013 12:48:16 CEST, Caspar Schutijser wrote:
On Monday, 25 November 2013 19:30:51 CEST, Jan Kundrát wrote:
I have mixed feelings about this -- on one hand,
privacy-conscious users can set up an appropriate block list
themselves if they mind the additional tracking.
Well, I already do this indeed. But quite often, websites have
limited functionality if I disable JavaScript, and some websites
even manage it to be completely unusable without JavaScript enabled,
javascript != tracking
you'd need to use some adblocker or ghostery or incorporate this:
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
into your /etc/hosts - tracking is still often done by blind "gifs" or other
src embeds.
Without js, half the internet is no more usable nowadays (it's not like i'd
like that, but it's a fact)
Linking to a CDN for static contents saves the bandwidth in the long run
Although that might be true, I personally don't really care about
that.
I assume that Jan (also) meant to save *his* traffic/bandwidth.
On topic:
Nobody likes being tracked, but the first aspect of incorporating remote
sources is that you inherit their reputation (eg. sf.net had some bad articles
lately ;-)
So first the question is: "how much do I trust what i'm about to add?"
The second question is: "what do I gain?"
Eg. i agree that risking bad reputation for using a particular font is rather pointless
(users usually have their preferred mass text font anyway) while the ability to show
"project alive!" state will be a good sign to ppl. taking a look.
For the CDN, it kinda depends on the particular CDN.
The question for that is then:
"if i incorporate github, does that mean to incorporate github or do i eventually
inherit facebook, amazon & google by that as well?"
If the answer is "only github", the question becomes whether github has any
particular interest in tracking users of projects they host anyway.
Let's not forget that linking and embedding is kind of a core hypertext feature
- just that some NSA wannabes use it to gather data they can sell to amazon
does not mean that it's bad per se.
Cheers,
Thomas
PS, do not forget:
your ISP/DNS can see whatever pr0n you approach ;-P
PPS:
in general i tend to leave webpages that abuse js to drive all my cores to 100%
asap.
