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Comment Re:Wow (Score 3, Insightful) 81

Man, when personal citizens' rights and powerful corporate interests align, amazing things can happen.

Now if we could only get powerful corporations to do the same thing on NSA overreach, CIA overreach, money in politiics, ...

If the majority of people would vote (at the ballot and with their wallets) for their own rational self-interests once in a while, and not what the silver-tongued TV sound bite sold to them, this would happen much more often. My cynical side tells me that few will ever appreciate the value of abstract principles in and of themselves, but the self-interest angle should be at least achievable.

Comment Re:Copyright violation? (Score 3, Insightful) 230

I think it is.

It is one thing to install software on your own computer that serves modified content. When you start serving the modified content to other people, I believe that creates the difference.

If comcast can inject ads, then there would be no problem with ISPs offering "Advertising Filtering" proxy servers for their customers and serving them sanitized content.

Comment Re:Horrible summary (Score 1) 276

It'd be good if culture could refocus on respecting the notion of growing up, wisdom, and respect for elders. (and get off my lawn, too)

Yes, it would, because the infantile mind doesn't recognize a power grab or the early steps of establishing a soft tyranny when they happen before its eyes.

I'd recommend a copy of Jeffrey Grupp's book The Telescreen if you want to know what's really been done to this culture.

Comment Re:They're not gamers. (Score 2) 276

It's just an oblique attack on men.

It is, actually, and it's a subtle one. In the face of all evidence, the dogma of political correctness dictates that men and women are exactly the same and should want the same things. Therefore, using this twisted excuse for logic, anything that is done primarily by men must be portrayed as inherently sexist and actively excluding of women. That's what happens when masses of soft-minded people use low-quality logic on "sacred" conclusions they refuse to question.

The idea that it's good enough to have open access for anyone who wants to do something (and when has a wider variety of games been more available than now?) and then those who are interested can participate is anathema to this mentality. There's nothing for them to do in that scenario, no soapbox to climb on, no social engineering to perform, no downtrodden victim to pretend to champion (while actually changing nothing).

You may find this an interesting article. They were going to metaphorically roast a Harvard professor for daring to suggest men and women have different interests and priorities. He hadn't actually done anything to discriminate against women and showed no hostility towards them. He just didn't hold the "correct" viewpoint.

Comment Re:They're not gamers. (Score 2) 276

My wife plays a lot of Hay Day. I don't see a lot of true, real life concerning issues there. I guess I don't smell the magic sauce that makes women playing games any different.

Identity politics has taught people to exaggerate these differences, that it's "normal" to worry about things like which demographic is doing what activity. It's just so damned useful for divide-and-conquer purposes for anything from voting to marketing. TFA is merely following what the rest of the media has done for a long time now.

If women want to play games, they will. If women don't, then they won't. To me it's as simple as that. The "magic sauce" is the bullshit concerns of politicians, media personalities, and marketers. It's not normal to share in them. One has to be conditioned to do that.

Comment Re:They're not gamers. (Score 1) 276

I respect and approve of your reluctance to be tracked.

I also suggest that clinging to that reluctance will block you from much of modern society. The isolation can be psychologically harmful over time.

That depends on whether you have a life in meatspace including meaningful quality time with loved ones.

If you do, you'll never miss the online tracking.

The principle here is that generally anything pathological, like the desire to track people without regard for their consent, requires some kind of unfulfilled need or other problem to provide fertile soil in which it can fester and grow. Otherwise it wouldn't be tolerated because what it offers in return is not tempting.

Comment Re:AdBlock = Inferior + 'Souled-Out' vs. hosts... (Score 1) 611

Incidentally I also use the Linux kernel feature called Transparent Hugepage Support. I set it to "Always" (as opposed to only when a program specifically wants it enabled). This is known to increase the memory footprint of applications, though by how much I couldn't tell you. The idea of this feature is: the operating system's memory allocator is gaining increased performance ("This feature can improve computing performance to certain applications by speeding up page faults during memory allocation, by reducing the number of tlb misses and by speeding up the pagetable walking") at the cost of higher memory usage.

Just thought I'd mention that since it may be relevant.

Comment Re:AdBlock = Inferior + 'Souled-Out' vs. hosts... (Score 1) 611

* Addons slowup slower usermode browsers layering on more - & bloat RAM consumption too + hugely excessive cpu use (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... [mozilla.org])

That this can happen, I do not dispute. But I believe the case for it is being severely overstated by people who *ahem* have a vested interest in promoting alternatives to browser add-ons.

I currently run Firefox with 24 addons installed and actively enabled. This is mostly for ad-blocking and privacy-enhancing, with a few miscellaneous add-ons like one that restores the old-style Stop button behavior (stops animated GIFs as well as page loads). Since you seem to appreciate bold: there is no slowdown or latency problem that I can subjectively notice. If my addons are "slowing down the browser" they're doing it below the threshold of what a human can detect. I consider that a good and reasonable trade-off to make on my own systems.

On memory... I have 26 tabs open with a wide variety of sites loaded, many of which are content-heavy. This browser instance has been running continuously for many days. KSysGuard gives a nice breakdown of the memory usage of my Firefox process and this is the summary:

-----

Summary

The process firefox (with pid 5618) is using approximately 993.9 MB of memory.
It is using 971.4 MB privately, 15.6 MB for pixmaps, and a further 26.5 MB that is, or could be, shared with other programs.
Dividing up the shared memory between all the processes sharing that memory we get a reduced shared memory usage of 7.0 MB. Adding that to the private and pixmap usage, we get the above mentioned total memory footprint of 993.9 MB.

-----

Another section mentions that the 15.6MB for pixmaps may be stored on the graphics card's memory. At any rate, this is nowhere near 4+ gigs. Nor have I ever, with any version of Firefox, experienced anything remotely like 4GB of memory usage. This is a 64-bit system running a 64-bit Firefox that I compiled from source (your article mentions the memory penalty for Adblock is higher on 64-bit systems, which makes sense when you understand what that means). This system has 8GB of RAM installed, so ~994MB is negligible to me. For a little perspective, currently about 6GB is being used for buffers and disk cache, since this is what Linux does with memory that would otherwise be empty and therefore doing nothing. If I run a Windows game via WINE then that comes down to 4-5GB for buffers/cache since about another 1-2 gigs of memory becomes used.

Incidentally, I don't run Windows so I don't use your hosts file tool (and even if I ran Windows I'd probably rather roll my own, nothing personal). But I do use a comprehensive /etc/hosts file. I believe that good security is done in overlapping, interlocking layers. "Security" does not mean just remote attackers, but also anything intrusive I don't want, like advertisers and their tracking. I use an /etc/hosts file AND Adblock Plus, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, and several others. What one of them alone does not catch, another one will.

Instead of viewing browser add-ons as an obstacle in your path to promoting your own solution, you could learn to work with them, use them effectively, and incorporate them into a multi-layered approach that includes all the work you've put into hosts files. Everyone would benefit that way, especially your users.

Comment Re:$230 (Score 2) 611

Don't get me wrong, DuckDuckGo sounds good. Sounds like they certainly don't actively track you. But I don't see them bragging that they "keep no data to hand over in the first place"

They don't use tracking cookies (their preferences cookies are not identifying, they're just a string of your options, if you've set them), so the most data that they can have for identifying you is the IP address. They've been SSL by default (redirecting from http to https and defaulting to https in search results where available, for example on Wikipedia) for a long time, so you don't suddenly jump into an unencrypted connection as soon as you leave.

It sounds much better than any other US-based search engine I'm aware of. But my own preference doesn't even log an IP address since 2009. You can also bookmark a URL generated with your preferences so there is no need to accept even preference cookies from them (and preferences include options like using POST instead of GET so search terms stay out of other sites' logs). And the aforementioned deal about being outside US jurisdiction is nice too.

DuckDuckGo also does not appear to offer to act as your Web proxy like Startpage will do. I rarely ever use this feature but it's nice that they would offer it. Startpage also offers the option to act as your proxy only for image/video searches, so other sites don't even get that data from you. This is what I like about them: they not only don't log and track you themselves, they also go out of their way to enhance your privacy against third-party sites.

I'm not knocking DuckDuckGo by any means; in my opinion it's good but Startpage/Ixquick is great. Yet, I think all of us benefit from having multiple privacy-conscious options available. Choice is a good thing.

Comment Re:heh (Score 1) 611

Local newspapers are the worst. My local newspaper give you ten free page views based on ip number and then locks you out.

Precisely because they are small and local, they probably wouldn't bother identifying TOR users. As a bonus you wouldn't be accessing this major multinational site where tens of thousands of others had the same idea and already got the exit node IPs banned.

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