Complete bullshit. Even for fullscreen video, the website doesn't need to know my screen size. It should tell the browser "here are the resolutions I can offer you" and the browser picks one of those. All the website needs to know is if I prefer 1080p or 4K. And I might pick 1080p even if my screen is 4K because, say, the hotel wifi is slow.

Complete bullshit. None of these things break if I don't tell you my OS. I've got extensions in this browser that can fake my agent string and nothing breaks. Fonts? Are you kidding me? Be more specific, what exactly do you mean by that?

And there's no reason it needs to. What legit use case requires a website to know whether my GPU is an NVidia, AMD, Intel or whatever chip? A shitload of the capabilities are only needed for 3D scenes (like max texture size), which is 0.1% of the websites I visit - they can ask and I can whitelist just them. Why does it need my refresh rate?

Again: All of these things have a legit use case, sure. Often exactly one. That is rarely if ever used. There's absolutely no reason that EVERY WEBSITE can query information that only one website in a thousand actually needs.

You don't tell the baker, florist and car dealer your shoe size just because the shoe shop needs it to serve you, right?

Because I want to be irrelevant to the fucking ad industry. I don't want them to track me, profile me and try every trick in the book to manipulate me into buying shit I don't need.

Sure, the same way that putting a finger into another man's ass has a legit use case (prostate examination) - but that doesn't mean I want every man to do that to me all the time.

The point is that tech companies are exploiting the legit use cases by abusing them when you're not in that use case. Basically, they think they can finger up your ass whenever they want, because once a few years ago you consented to a doctor to give you an exam and maybe you will do that again in the future.

I don't mind it being capable of. I mind it doing all kinds of shit without telling me and without giving me a choice. For example, I absolutely do not want websites to access my microphone. Or even know that I have one. For the once-a-year case where I might actually use that, I can enable it.

The problem is the same problem that the cybersecurity field has been fighting for 40 years: Permit All being the default.

:frowns:

I thought Chrome devs went hard on fuzzing API's after the timing attacks went big ... circa 2020.

Back to the drawing board.

> Only the richest of us are worthy of privacy, right?

  I put GrapheneOS on a $179 Pixel I got off eBay. Works fine. Battery is at 97%.

You only buy new phones? Must be nice, moneybags.

It doesn't NEED to know any of these things. My browser knows the window (not screen) size and if your CSS is well-formed, it'll manage or maybe your page looks shit if you build it shit. It needs to know my OS only if I want a download link, not on every page I ever visit. It doesn't need graphics capabilities unless it wants to bypass the browser rendering engine, in which case it should ask for permission or fuck off.

The thing is that we give up too easily and the major browser manufacturers (one of which is an ad company themselves) are complicit.

I want "fuck the ad industry" mode, where the browser generates random but plausible values for every non-essential information a website requests. Different ones every 5 minutes.

I've often wondered if remote screening would put an end to this.

Imagine a paid service where the company serves as your window into the internet and composes your HTML and sends it to you as an image displayed by their app. You could magnify or smallify the image as needed, and the app would send mouse and keyboard events back to the company to be forwarded on your behalf.

It's not a fully formed idea, you would also need to package and send audio, deal with credit card payments, and so on, but for people with fast internet access this might be a doable solution.

(Of note: it's like a VPN, but the HTML compositing on the remote computer is an additional layer. A VPN service could randomize the output portal per session, but that's already a feature of VPNs.)

An advantage of this is that almost all the system configuration fingerprinting would be inaccessible to the wider world, if a breech happens none of your private files are available on the remote computer to be stolen, and a number of security guardrails could be implemented, such as ensuring that mouse events are short, keypress events contain only keypress information, only image information is displayed, and so on

A sophisticated client system might even incorporate multiple user identities per client user, keyed to a specific website. Your internet facing information could be different when visiting Amazon.com, as compared to WalMart.com.

VPNs aren't that expensive, and they're used by people who want the value of an extra level of security.

For most web browsing, this might be an extra level of anonymity for people who would value that extra level.

Ironically there are treatments that show efficacy but they range between not FDA approved and illegal.

You can go to Mexico or the Caribbean for some of them (or find underground psychiatrists).

Getting lots of regular sleep, exercise, and going ketogenic can dramatically slow progression but there is a tau prion aspect that is difficult to halt. Lots of Omega-3's can keep your astrocytes healthy.

Some evidence supports ultrasound treatment but it's probably the higher harmonics which are not well characterized or even understood outside a few labs (ASU, et. al.).

Use protection as the tau prions don't stay in the brain.

We deserve better psyops.

If the reporter had read Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent they could have done a better job but let's not give them any ideas.

BBC has always been in the business of narrative construction in service of the powerful to control the population.

And also Benny Hill.

The mid range of the standard distribution thinks particles are real physical objects.

One end of the curve thinks that sounds like nonsense - the other end knows they're mathematical abstractions with no intent to claim a physical description.

Some people are working on a physical model (bounded surface area / Pauli exclusion) but in the odd world of Mathematical Physics the physicists Interested in the physical are sneered at.

It's reminiscent of "that bitch is so ugly" heard from the mids about the prettiest girl in the room.

"You, boy, what's your business model?"

"We sue IBM hoping they'll pay us to go away."

(n.b. econ majors - this is not productivity)

This is essentially a high-stakes gamble. The payout is potentially millions, so they just try whatever. And I bet if it all turns against them and they're forced to pay legal costs etc. they'll just file for bancruptsy.

Perfect illustration of the thinking problem here. You don't even get WHAT the problem is.

Why is a driver able to fuck up a system? The OS should be the watchdog that says "WTF are you doing there?", not the obedient slave executing whatever.

A great illustration is W^X - first found not in Windows, but in OpenBSD. Because Windows happily goes "whatever you say, master", while the guys at OpenBSD said "no actual use case of non-broken, non-malicious software should ever behave like that, so we'll block it".

If you are responsible for a sensitive location, and a five-year old kid from the neighbourhood one day just wanders in and take a look around out of curiosity, pressing a few buttons to see what happens - you would definitely not keep your job by claiming that the little kid is actually the problem here.

I have a mug from a conference Startpage sponsored about a decade ago.

It's been in my Firefox at least since then. Did I add it manually?

I am actually surprised this is new!

I guess Mozilla was being paid to not do this? Ages ago we had Altavista, Excite, Yahoo, and even Google as options. I really had no idea how deep the anticompetitive tying had become.

BTW, if you want to search for anything counterculture Yandex Search will have it on the first page while the Western engines will gaslight you into believing you misremembered something.

Even 20 pages deep.

And you clowns don't think that your OS is a fragile pile of crap if it's that easy to fuck up?

Seriously? Do you even know what the job of an OS _is_ ?

Is this different than the brain state when watching a movie or play?

"Suspension of Disbelief" is an ancient concept.

Not to defend the technology but the summary sounds like confirmation of the null hypothesis.