> A bit over a week spent trying to make it work, and it never did
I feel your pain. I remember trying to install DNSCrypt[1] on Linux and failing miserably. I was convinced it would work if only I found the right solution online, or if only the right amount of caffeine was in my bloodstream, or if by sheer effort of will I could get it working, but I still failed. I partially got it installed, error messages galore in my terminal, and all my /paths/ were wrong. It was a humbling experience. I quickly uninstalled it as I don't want partially working, broken soft running on my machine.
I guess for this situation a decent OpenVPN client would be ideal like Viscosity[2]
JS increases the finerprintability a huge amount. It's worth looking at ClientJS to see how many bits of identifying information can be hoovered up with JS.
> I wonder if we can come up with a widely adopt(able|ed) fingerprint that we can mask ourselves with, do any of these identifying bits actually make the web more usable for us?
JonDofox with JS turned off and uBlock origin installed. There's actually a small pool of users with this config but it needs to be bigger. As you said, as soon as we get consensus on what config to use, we can all switch to it en-masse.
I don't understand this obsession against ads on HN. The only countries that don't have ads in the streets are North Korea and before that the Soviet Union. It's a great way to let people know about your business and participate peacefully into the free exchange of goods and services with our other fellow human beings. And in computing it allows to offer amazing services to the poorest for free (google, facebook etc). In Peru for example where I used to live, students had to buy expensive books before or just couldn't find good source of education for free easily to help them with their studies, they now can and it really changed people's life (eg my wife's :)).
Edit: no need to downvote just because you disagree...
The problem I have with ads right now is that the ecosystem for web ads specifically is poisonous. People who have ad inventory don't manage it well or respect the product they are making in enough cases that it hurts the market as a whole. On the other side I can't name an ad network that does web advertising in a reputable way. Furthermore there are some bad actors who exploit technology to abuse advertising on top of the product owners and the ad networks. With traditional media advertising was always a weird market but there was a respect of the product/business ad inventory that caused a push back. There is also a lot of sponsored advertisements right now which is a decent go-between but also is managed poorly. It's very easy to burn both sides of the bridge.
Admittedly having worked in advertising to an extent it's always going to be a grey market, but web advertising just seems to be a bit darker. There isn't enough money going around to refuse dodgy actors on the mid-low scale and that hurts the whole market.
Internet ADs in real life would be like having cardboard banners appear in the middle of the street, and you would need to change car every 5 years as the banners get thicker and harder to penetrate.
I run an ad blocker because I mostly want to stop third parties tracking me around the web. Then, after I ran an ad-blocker for a while, I got used to the web feeling zippy.
Aside from privacy concerns, there are also security concerns. Ad networks have been used to distribute malware.
I had my kids to install ad-blockers on their phones because they share a pool of data. It's not that unusual for a page containing a few kilobytes of text and images to contain twice as much ad related bloat.
Because most ads are done poorly, are manipulative, and hide the "real" cost of a service. It's also based on an increasingly outdated economic system that needs to change.
Really? That's still how most people consume content (news, social media etc) on the internet. You'd be shocked to learn that most people in Latin America for example use the ad supported version of Spotify and those with no Spotify in their country use ad supported pirate sites.
We still can have those or equivalent services without advertisements. We only use them because it's the model we know, not because it's the most appropriate model.
How do you know it's not the most appropriate model? Do you think Facebook and Google wouldn't switch to another more appropriate model? Whatever that means.
Online advertising is is a collective delusion where ad networks collect more and more personalized metrics about a particular session-device pair, so that they can hoodwink their clients (i.e. people who want to advertise) into paying more for "targeted" ads, while the viewers of those ads are inevitably confronted by one of the following outcomes:
a. they ignore the ad
b. they ignore the ad and think negatively about the product
c. they mentally register the ad and it builds positive brand awareness but don't click through
d. they clickthrough if the offer/proposition was compelling enough anyway
In effect, online advertising is like being paid to be promoted on a dating site: if you're attractive or interesting enough on your own, you probably don't even need it but it may help you get matched with a different user than if you hadn't gotten promoted; and if you're not very compelling you're quite possibly flushing money down the drain while your competitors are eating your lunch. It fools the hopeless and the underdogs, while creeping users out, and ultimately affects the landscape little; it's the ultimate rent-seeking.
I agree, online ads are annoying for a number of reasons. I'm curious what pay model you're envisioning. Content providers paying Disqus? Disqus users? I can see the former possibly working, as Disqus is providing the service to them.
Frankly, I can't tell you the last time I found comments on an article to be valuable. I spent the last half hour trying to work out the model before realizing I wouldn't pay a dime for it.
But I'm also not the likely demographic, so I'm left with my foot in my mouth! I can say I would pay for HN if it came to that, weird as that would be, preferably in a flat fee because it's easier to budget. HN is the only similar service I use.
Most people worldwide don't even have a credit card to pay online. If anything you should celebrate the fact that you are so privileged that you would rather pay for something most could not even dream to afford.
The problem is that internet ads are very different to IRL advertising. They are executing code in your browser, and have been a source of countless exploits. Not to mention that they are incredibly bloated.
Reddit does this correctly -- they only self-host ads that they've vetted. I have no problem unblocking ads on reddit, but that's the only website I can think of which has non-scummy advertising practices.
Can't help but bring up the notion of envy these people (technocrats specifically) have for the biological miracle that is the human body. They can simulate the human brain all they want, but they'll never match it, as it's orders of magnitude more complex than any supercomputer they can dream of. And it has free will, which AI does not. AI is impotent at making free decisions because it's deliberately constrained by the programmers to think rigidly and inside their own custom black box. There's no room to roam unless we get to Mars where we can unleash AI and watch it make free decisions, which I suspect Musk is trying to do...Turning planets into giant labs where AI can be less constrained.
AI is impotent at making free decisions because it's deliberately constrained by the programmers to think rigidly and inside their own custom black box
That's a strange assertion to make. And false. AI cannot make what you would call "free decisions" because it lacks the level of complexity necessary to trick you into thinking it can, the way your brain tricks you into thinking you make "free decisions". The idea that we're intentionally crippling AI because we have no room for it both overstates our ability to create intelligence and understates the financial incentives for anyone who creates it.
mars where we can unleash AI and watch it make free decisions, which I suspect Musk is trying to do
So, the real reasons he's given for wanting to go to Mars.. I guess those are just a smoke screen?
> the way your brain tricks you into thinking you make "free decisions"
It's my own experience that I have Free Will[1] without my brain tricking me. The idea of free will is not without controversy, though, and we could argue at length of whether it's truly free in the classical sense, or a mix of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition.
The idea that AI won't have free will, while the biological system that is you somehow does is quite odd. There's nothing about being a carbon-based life form that makes the laws of physics any less deterministic.
I thought the U.S had better key disclosure law[1] than other countries? Personally I would rather not self-incriminate myself by revealing a key, no matter how draconian and lengthy the sentencing was. Why, you ask? Well I consider all my own personal data likened to an extension of my own mind, and revealing a key is like slicing a thin part of my brain and attempting to pick its contents. Never a gentlemanly thing to do in any circumstance.
In terms of being stopped and searched when traveling, I just carry a TailsOS bootable live USB. My laptop doesn't have a hard-drive and boots entirely from my TailsOS USB stick. I did not enable any persistent storage and any bookmarks I need to remember, I simply remember them by rote, like in that movie The Book of Eli[2]. My threat model is such that I don't want anybody knowing my business when traveling. The intrusiveness should only go so far as one question, like "Business or Pleasure?" and that's all.
If you need to cross a border, you will find that the border agents think they have the right to compel you to boot your laptop, including entering any secret or attaching any device required to do so. I doubt that they could ultimately stop you returning to your own country if you held out, but they could stop you leaving, and they could certainly make your life pretty miserable.
In my opinion you'd be much better with a laptop that booted to windows and looked like it had some simple things installed under a password you don't mind giving them. Then they'll probably never get around to asking you about the usb stick your tailsOS is installed on.
You can now get extremely large usb sticks in very small form factors. I have been toying with the idea of creating something that looks exactly (and nonsuspiciously) like a usb 'charging cable' but with built in memory. Ideally if it's plugged into power or a laptop, it just appears as a normal usb cable, but if the microusb end is not plugged in, it shows as a large memory stick you could also boot from.
There's nothing about TailsOS that could arouse suspicion if there's nothing persistent on it that could arouse suspicion, or draw more attention to you. TailsOS is strictly a utility like a wrench or a screwdriver. Providing you exit TailsOS properly and watch the screen as it's wiping the memory to ensure it has infact wiped. TailsOS can prove to be an innocuous O.S after you unload it from memory. They might ask questions, but they have nothing on you.
Bringing a Windows OS is stupid as Windows doesn't clean up properly after shutting down and leaves a forensic footprint which is difficult to cleanup unless you use something like Bleachbit[1] or CCleaner after using Windows. You typically want to offload cleaning up to the O.S level and avoid using such tools such as CCLeaner in the first place (Keep in mind, since this is Windows, there are issues with free space on the drive that leave deleted files remaining on the hard-disk, even after explicitly stating they should be deleted).
With TailsOS, In other words, you can browse freely and with peace of mind that you won't leave a forensic footprint behind, giving you an upper-hand over other passengers who have to self-censor their browsing for fear of scrutiny at a later date from border officers.
That isn't an issue with Windows but with all file systems. When you delete a file it does not remove the data it marks the area it resides as "free" allowing anything to be saved there.
Even tails if not immune to this unless you use some secure wipe tool. Even they flash drives have wear level management that loves data around to make the wear on each chip equal so you can't be sure its even gone.
Windows doesn't wipe the memory properly though, and the default browser (MS Edge for Win10, and plain old IE for older versions), are awful default browsers, forensically speaking.
I'll leave this link here for those who use Tails and need to wipe files and other data, either there and then, or after the fact of deletion (clearing files from free space):
Wow this is an innocent perspective. TailsOS would definitely raise suspicion even if you otherwise seemed as pure as the driven snow. Suspicion will prompt a deeper investigation, which is what you don't want.
> Bringing a Windows OS is stupid as Windows doesn't clean up properly after shutting down
I think you misunderstand my suggestion. You have a windows install that you don't actually use for anything. This is because a windows install is a normal thing for someone to have. You can keep your usb booted, forensic OS but make sure you're running it on something that they've seen a million times before, not some sort of l33t uber laptop without a harddrive.
Or just make GRUB invisibly boot to a default Windows install unless a key is pressed. They'll never see the other OS. A Tails install on a USB stick might raise questions if they bother to look at it.
Very interesting. You don't have any need for persistent storage that exceeds the amount of information that can be remembered? (E.g. work artifacts, photos, passwords)
I don't want to assume on spaceboy's behalf, but I think all you need is to remember a master password to some sort of (online) password manager. From there you could use cloud services (eg. Dropbox) to access such documents.
Securing cloud hosted documents is obviously another discussion.
http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/cpanel