# What about mega often cookies popups while browsing the web?



## Spartrekus (Nov 5, 2018)

Hello,

The internet reminds me the Android phone. There are many many things that comes up your screen to make everything to click, such as Ads and many numerous things.

The net is already changing a lot. Website sites use numerous ads, the net HTML/CSS/... is being used for something that is not dedicated. The web browser does many things and has goals which aren't good for users.

The web browser on MS and Apple (really all of them, except opensource ones)  is slow, distracting, with ads, popups,... if being used with a MS Windows machine.

Have fun with Elinks, w3m, links... it is a possible solution, or get another web.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Nov 17, 2018)

Spartrekus said:


> The net is already changing a lot. Website sites use numerous ads, the net HTML/CSS/... is being used for something that is not dedicated. The web browser does many things and has goals which aren't good for users.
> *snip*
> Have fun with Elinks, w3m, links... it is a possible solution, or get another web.



We must be using a different Internet...browsers or browser extensions. 

I saw 2 ads on a particular website a couple years ago and it's not picky about who it sells ads to. That was the first and only time in years I have seen an ad and entering it into my adblocker made short work of it. I never see popups because those are Script generated and I don't allow it. It's what you make of it or allow them to make of it to be more precise. 

I would go as far to speculate that if you're seeing ads and popups you're probably vulnerable to some of the Intel exploits that might not be covered in your OS patching.


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## dieselriot (Nov 23, 2018)

I personally recommend AdNauseam for ad-blocking. Never see an ad again + make them pay for it. Can't get any better than that.

Trihexagonal Care to elaborate on how the Intel vulnerabilities could be exploited to pestering you with ads, and who would do that? Legit curious about your theory.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Nov 23, 2018)

dieselriot said:


> Trihexagonal Care to elaborate on how the Intel vulnerabilities could be exploited to pestering you with ads, and who would do that? Legit curious about your theory.




Some ads are script driven. That's one of delivery mechanisms of Spectre and Meltdown, I am aware of the issue with shared servers. So I don't have to repeat myself:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...holes-found-in-intel-chips.67170/#post-406869

I've been a member of the site I referenced several years. It's broken now for the most part, the forum being the only thing left that works and it's worthless. The guy who owns it never was particular about who he sold ad space to and that was the one thing he managed to get working again. Ads.

People have on more than one occasion said when they landed on the site they got a red Google warning page about malware reported to having been downloaded, presumably by drive-by, where you don't have to click anything. Just have scripting enabled for it.

I never saw the google pages or the ads. I turn all that off with scripting and it never worried me in the least. The ads I did see were just new enough they hadn't been entered in the adblocker I was using at the time. I use uBlock Origin with a Host file now.


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 23, 2018)

Ads on web sites have nothing to do with the internet. They have everything to do with marketing and design by the people who produce such web sites and it is to their detriment if they overload it with ads and popups. Just don't visit such sites. 

That said, the number of sites available on the 'net today would be far different if they weren't allowed to sell ad space. Just like radio and TV, they survive by selling ads unless you are willing to pay for such services. It's why I prefer to go to the theater for movies or pay for Netflix.

The web, today, is like radio was back when anyone could get a transmitter and get on the air before regulation. I have a feeling we will, one day, have a regulated internet where one must apply for a license to have a web site. In a way, buying a domain name is a license but there are free hosting services out there and $12 a year isn't much to pay for a domain name.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Nov 23, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Ads on web sites have nothing to do with the internet. They have everything to do with marketing and design by the people who produce such web sites and it is to their detriment if they overload it with ads and popups.



But just think of all those juicy clicks you're missing...

I saw a guy I know a few weeks ago for the first time in years and one of the first things he told me about was all the money he was making off the clicks he was getting, that it was a great way to make money and I should look into it. To just ask the person who lived in the apartment we were at. She knows.

She never logs out of Facebook and won't even change her password at my urging after it was hacked.

Edit: She finally did change her password when I mentioned the possibility of it having been changed the next time came back from the restroom. The prospect of having to ask me for it to log in must have been worse than the possibility of being pwned by someone else and what I had explained in detail could happen. 

Years ago informed her the details of a private conversation she had over a cordless phone I monitored on my bank of scanners so she took it to heart. Scanning recievers being my passion before becoming a computer user. Tough love at times being called for as a friend.


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## Spartrekus (Dec 3, 2018)

Internet is just today marketing and money.

It is not the same as original idea of the www. 

Everything is good to make money. Look android, there is almost a single app without ads 
Luckily that it is on an opensource kernel, what's the point to bring ads everywhere when user need just to use a software.


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## ShelLuser (Dec 3, 2018)

I have a rather biased opinion about all those cookie pop-ups: when politicians start interfering with things while it becomes obvious that they haven't got a single clue about the stuff they're talking about then you get this mess. Often enough politicians are excellent at devising new rules, but fail miserably when it comes to thinking about their consequences and/or enforcing them.

It should be noted though that the cookie law specifically allows cookies which are required for operating your website. Only if they can be used to track users then they fall under this (IMO rather dumb) law.

_However..._ That's also part of the problem. Because what's the definition for 'tracking'? Usually being able to check up on a users history. And _uh oh_: if I retrieve a cookie with the name uid, _cfduid, session-id or even a PHP session cookie then I can grab the domain name and thus know where you've been, thus "tracking".

I know that the intent is different, but that's not how the law works.

And so *nothing* changed with regards to tracking other than users now having to consent to this behavior because otherwise they can no longer visit the websites they want to. So instead of protecting the citizens from online tracking they basically provided an easy way to legalize all this obnoxious behavior. Thanks EU! Such an impressive feat indeed, I mean: these levels of stupidity incompetence (how else do you call achieving the exact _opposite_ of what you intended?) are IMO somewhat impressive on their own.

If only they spend all that wasted effort to educate people a little more. For example: want to do online shopping? Then why not open a private session / window (all major browsers support this), do your shopping & browsing and after closing the window no one will be the wiser, other than the shop(s) you visited.

Simple, effective, no more tracking.


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## ralphbsz (Dec 4, 2018)

Spartrekus said:


> Internet is just today marketing and money.


Well, and a whole lot of useful stuff too.  You can use maps to find out where you are, how to get where you want to go, what the house at your destination looks like, and how to get there most efficiently (avoiding traffic jams).  You can even look up ahead of time where the traffic accidents are right now, and get amazing detail about them.  You can use it to read and write mail much more easily than we used to.  Remember, 30 years ago few people were able to get an e-mail address without spending significant $$$, and then reading/sending mail was quite difficult, it involved installing and configuring mail software.  Today you create a free account, have a reasonable user interface, and you are on the road.  You can use it to read an enormous amount for free information, ranging from books (Goethe, Shakespeare) to source code.  You can get technical data for nearly everything; last night I was lookup up the sizes of steel I-beams (thinking about better retaining walls in our garden), and looking for cheap places to get aforementioned I-beams hot dip galvanized nearby.  When I'm working, I listen to an enormous amount if interesting music.  This afternoon, I heard about 10 different orchestras and bands play Leroy Anderson's "Christmas Festival": I'm going to be performing in it soon, so I wanted to hear how the best performers in the world play it.  And so on and so forth.

Now, who pays for all of that?  You don't, and I don't.  It is the fools companies that put ads on the the web sites.



> It is not the same as original idea of the www.


Can you explain what the original idea of the www was?  I don't think I can.  And I've met and chatted briefly with TimBL (we worked in the same industry before he became famous), and I was actually part of the group that installed the very first web server outside of Switzerland (Paul Kunz did that work, may he rest in peace).  I think our vision back then was to use the newfound connectivity (the term "internet" simply meant a network that connects other networks) to make more information accessible to people, and the web gave a better user interface than ftp and telnet.  But I'm not sure I got that really right.  Probably if you ask 10 people who were involved early on what the "original idea" was, you'll get 11 different answers.



> Look android, there is almost a single app without ads
> Luckily that it is on an opensource kernel, what's the point to bring ads everywhere when user need just to use a software.


Have you actually tried using Android to do something useful?  I have.  Downloaded the SDK, compiled it, and wrote a "hello world" app (it displayed a text string and a button, and shut down after you click on the button).  Took me several days.  Then I decided that writing mobile apps is not what I'm interested in, don't have enough patience.

You say "just use software".  That's completely ridiculous.  Not just technically wrong, also completely wrong-headed.  Do you even begin to understand how much work it is to implement something like a mapping program, which allows you to find out where you are, how to get to where you want to be, what the area looks like, and what the various traffic jams along the route are doing?  This is not "just software", it is a project that takes thousands or tens of thousands of people for multiple years.  Just acquiring and curating the necessary map data is enormously hard, not even talking about the real-time traffic data.  If you think software is so easy, then please design and verify the correctness of the algorithm to find the fastest path from point A to point B giving the road network and traffic information.  Then you just need to do a little bit of typing code in, and pronto, you'll be able to navigate.  Ha ha.  Sorry, but your lack of understanding of the real world is not just a slight misunderstanding, but off by many orders of magnitude, and full of glib ideology.  If you want maps, someone will pay for it, to the tune of dozens of million $.  Since you won't pay, it will be ads.

Some parts of the web are still run by volunteers and donors.  This web forum, and much of FreeBSD is an example for an ecosystem that is mostly ad-free.  But every time you look on stackoverflow for the answer to a programming or system administration question, you are supporting the ad-based infrastructure.  Who pays for stackoverflow?  You don't, I don't, it is whoever puts ads there.  We should be eternally grateful that those fools companies are dumb enough to put ads there (which I never look at, I don't even know who advertises there, my brain no longer sees ads).

Now, I'm not claiming that the internet and the web is all good and perfect.  There is much inefficiency and wasted effort.  There are crooks, thieves, and scammers.  I'm not sure whether Mark Zuckerberg is part of the "visionary and leader" side, or part of the "crook and scammer" side; and by that I don't just mean him personally, but his whole company, and the industry that acts as a reseller of privacy, making a small profit every time one user wants to penetrate the privacy of another user.  The internet is also full of things that are dubious, although we have to admit that the boundaries are hard to draw, one person's art form or livelihood may be another person's embarrassing amusement (such as pornography), and a third person's smut that should be banned.  All valid viewpoints, albeit contradictory.  A full ethical assessment of the internet and web industry will have to wait a few generations, for the history books.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 4, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> Now, who pays for all of that?  You don't, and I don't.  It is the fools companies that put ads on the the web sites.


A lot of people don't think of that but I agree with him that it's gotten as ridiculous as broadcast television.


> I think our vision back then was to use the newfound connectivity (the term "internet" simply meant a network that connects other networks) to make more information accessible to people, and the web gave a better user interface than ftp and telnet.  But I'm not sure I got that really right.  Probably if you ask 10 people who were involved early on what the "original idea" was, you'll get 11 different answers.


Well, that's exactly what I've always read the reason was.

And that's *Sir* TimBL to you


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