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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'.
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.
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'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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey, you know the captchas with the little box of warped letters/numbers you're supposed to look at and type it correctly?
Is anyone else, uh, terrible at those? I've literally given up on visiting websites before because I couldn't get the stupid thing right after a dozen tries. Wtf.
I just visited a site and selected the option to reject cookies. After doing this, the dialogue box would not go away, while a loading screen appeared. It was loading my new cookie preferences. This loading screen got stuck at 80% and hung there for almost a full minute.
It's a specific company that creates a cookie consent manager that way, and a lot of websites use it. The progress bar is entirely faked; you're being made to wait for nothing.
It feels like I have to get 5 in a row and one mistake resets the counter. I've been stuck for minutes on end trying to get into a damn website I had to log on to. Whatever happened to that Cloudflare alternative that wouldn't bug the user?
Is there such a thing as an ad sequesterer? Not necessarily blocking it, but just shoving it in some other window I can’t see, and then letting it play through. Then YouTube gets its ad played, and I don’t have to see it—win/win.
You're looking for something like this. It still blocks the ad from your view but in the background it still loads/plays the ad, and sometimes even clicks it to spend their precious ad budget.
There are some sites so extremely annoying that I just get a mirror from archive.org or archive.is. I'm doing this with some news sites that will only allow me to browse them if I accept their cookies.
ever wonder why AI is so “good”? please identify all images which are ____. the captcha system may not know what the image is, but after thousands of responses, it has a pretty good idea of where it is, and what it is (since most users will answer correctly to prove they are human).
Honestly what AI outputs is what I think a majority of the people want anyways. They want an answer to something in most cases.
I do the same damn thing. When I want information distilled to me in a manner which is quick and easy to process, I use something like an LLM to reduce the complexity down.
I also use https://www.summarize.tech/ a LOT for YouTube videos to get to the part that matters, or just simply make it text-searchable.
what AI outputs is what I think a majority of the people want anyways. They want an answer to something in most cases.
When I ask a question I want a correct answer, not one that is merely statistically likely. Using an AI and not fact checking it means you will never know if the answer given to your question is true. The AI tells you what it thinks you want to hear, not what it knows is true, because it doesn't know anything, it's a pattern matcher.
But it's like asking your very smart child to find the information for you.
The child is still learning so it only takes information that it was exposed to and has access to and it never questions or critically analyses the data.
So all the information, disinformation, misinformation and non information that the childlike AI collects is fed back to you as a giant word salad and presented as actual information without any critical thought.
Actually i never help google to work for free.
Answer X-1 fields correctly and one totally not. Gotta do it twice at least, but be consistent.
For one captcha they know the answer, for one they don't. You're working by helping them identifying objects in that one. Don't 😈
The first one I ever saw was put animals in the direction of an arrow. It wasnt always clear if they are supposed to be in that direction now and when you took too much time you had to do it again
a lot of good adblockers, like what's built into brave as well as ublock origin and adguard for browsers and desktop have stuff in them to prevent detection by anti-adblock bullshit.
You need to have more than one of those three to successfully block all ads.
It's the cookie toggles pop up that annoys tf out of me. There's no reason for every site to need to ask you over and over and over about it. The browser should be taking care of that.
This is a real mess, i do this all day long, and in the images website if you see just a little bit of a image in one square you click it or not... Grrrrr 🤬
I usually connect to VPN in the browser. Firefox has some extensions (including ProtonVPN), Opera has something built-in (but it's ultra slow in free tier).
If you use only a pihole there should not popup any adblocker detected messages since you don't use one.
Edit: ok it seems certain websites do check if their ads get actually loaded. I recommend not using those sites or use ublock origin to block the anti adblock popup. And as far I can tell this is illegal in the EU. So I don't encounter this issues.
They most certainly do unfortunately, I speak from experience. Haven't delved into the specifics, but I suspect some websites check if a piece of JavaScript or other resource was loaded, if not a 'you are using an adblocker' message is shown. It is annoying, but as I can live without these websites they go onto my personal blacklist and I move on with my life. They need us harder than we do them.
This is the right answer. Most webpage servers, if they're set up to detect adblock, only detect at the client level on the browser. They don't check to see if their traffic is being routed through a pihole.
For ads problem ublock origins / Adguard / Blokada / PiHole does job done especially if you add HAGEZI Ultimate filters on it if you want clean webpage
For captcha problem i think theres script that can you inject to bypass it (i forgot the name of that script)