Slashdot: The Guardian newspaper has teamed up with Mozilla to research the monitoring of online behavior through cookies and other web trackers. After downloading the Collusion add-on for Firefox, you can generate a visual representation of all the cookies that have been downloaded which are linked to the sites you have visited. This shows quite an interesting picture.
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lozz
10 years 5 weeks 6 days 5 hours ago
Coincidence?
I've bought the odd thing off Ebay over the years and suffered the usual subsequent spate of email offers from them, but it usually dies down after a while.
The funny thing is, that every time I go back there, incognito, with all my anonymising and tracker-blocking software blazing, they still seem to know that it's me and the email blitz resumes, immediately.
spanky
10 years 5 weeks 5 days 22 hours ago
It's quite spooky.
There are like million and one ways to ID a user online. Some of them are listed by https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Besides that there's your IP, either static or dynamic coming from a certain range (= your ISP which often can be seen with a Reverse DNS lookup).
It's a sticky mess and most people have no idea.
lozz
10 years 5 weeks 5 days 7 hours ago
Panopticlick
Yeah, I often get them to check out how I'm going, specially for comparison after I've tried something new.
http://browserspy.dk/ gives a pretty good check out, too.
lozz
10 years 5 weeks 4 days 20 hours ago
New site
Mate, I don't suppose you'd have the expertise, or any interest in setting up a new site, would you?
This one seems to be a bit defunct, lately, but no-one is speaking up much for true Software Freedom, any more.
I live in Australia, which is still a bit free, and I'd be happy to set up a server and some bandwidth if the right people knew how to administer it.
spanky
10 years 5 weeks 4 days 15 hours ago
Interest yes, expertise no
Perhaps this site just could use more visitors. However I believe there is a problem with automated bots voting too, some new items are propelled withing minutes to dizzying heights while other are destined to languish in the archive, seemingly unrelated to the topics. And yeah, not too many people around seem to be interested in or sometimes incredibly even aware of software freedom issues. Perhaps some marketing should be done in the forums of free distros. Not sure how too handle the bot issue...
lozz
10 years 5 weeks 4 days 12 hours ago
As you say
Yeah, this has been a very good site for the promotion of Free Software, but it seems to have fallen on hard times lately and the administration doesn't seem to be taking an active interest in stopping the rot.
There's a vicious circle of too few voters discouraging not enough potential contributors from posting new material.
As you say, there's two here who always seem capable of garnering any amount of voters, which you wouldn't mind, but they don't seem to take any interest in the welfare of this site.
Hard economic times have created a general lethargy in the Free Software Community, lately and there's not as much material available as there was.
We probably need another war to stir up some general interest. There's still plenty of bad guys out there sniping at Free Software.