It's now customary, in order to comply with European regulations, to present users with a list of possible violent crimes against their person that they can opt out of before using a website. This ensures that non-consent to stabbing is always an active choice, so that users who want to be stabbed or otherwise maimed won't accidentally miss out on the opportunity.

Why is it a binary value? What about masochists, or people who lost a bet and want to be stabbed just a little? Or strangled?

It's amusing to see this message heavily upvoted on HN when most mentions of Firefox here are welcomed with an avalanche of perfect solution fallacies.

I'm dubious about people becoming militant about this when the software engineering industry gave Chrome a red carpet by using it and installing it on their relatives' computers while knowing very well it's adware and when switching to the alternative is incredibly cheap.

> IMO we need to start normalizing being militant about this stuff again, to aggressively and adversarially defend the freedom to use your computer the way you choose to use it

Yes. As a millennial the times of civil disobedience was better. Not only did we get a better internet for consumers, but better companies were rewarded and won. Rose tinted glasses? Possibly, but there’s another reason for disobedience: the other side does it, and they do it just for money.

Concretely, is there something like Adblock that can be done for cookies? I don’t think blocking is as effective as poisoned data though. They ask for data, they should get it. If you don’t get consent, poisoned data is merely malicious compliance.

It could even be standardized as an extension to DNT: “if asking for consent after a DNT header, a UA MAY generate arbitrary synthetic data”.

To be extremely pedantic, it's great satire precisely because it mirrors that shift. Owes a lot to the OG, A Modest Proposal.

Best time to do that would've been 19 days ago, but here we are. Buckle up.

> aggressively and adversarially defend the freedom to use your computer the way you choose to use it

Sadly even if you’re inclined to do this, it’s always a war of attrition, and corporations seem to realize they can just up the cost of your resistance in terms of time/frustration, and that’s enough for them to win in the long term. The history and trajectory of platforms, from browsers to AppStore’s to SaaS-all-the-things, is just tragic, with the amount of user control on a downward slide at each stage. The big question now is whether / how / to what extent AI is going to be corporate or democratized, but it’s hard to be optimistic.

Or, you know, if Clicking do-not-stab for 60 more years sounds like it sucks, you can try to become a shepherd or something. Works great for ~10 years, and then you can’t use cars, dishwashers or light switches without clicking do-not-stab, at which point they finally win and you say, you know what? I should be grateful they asked before they stabbed me, I practically owe it to them anyway, and I can’t wait to see all the love/cash rolling in after I’m a big shot shepherd influencer. Like and subscribe y’all and as always, hail corporate

I wonder if there is some way to DoS the tracking services by basically accepting third party cookies but then immediately discarding them so every page load generates a new cookie and presumably state stored on the other end to match it. Or are these tracking cookies typically self-contained so that no state is stored server-side?

I'm registering my elderly relatives for dmachoice.org, to prevent them from getting junk mail. These clowns create the problem and then have the audacity to charge you to be added to the opt out list. I was really skeptical about the GDPR when it was passed and I am now fully on board for an American version.

Yeah and the fuss about it being enabled by default is not really relevant. In the EU tracking must be opt-in anyway. So this is expected behaviour.

However the EU dropped the ball by not making it mandatory to respect this flag. If they had we wouldn't have had the huge cookiewall mess we have now.

> larger societal shift where the burden of safeguarding personal autonomy has shifted from institutions/regulators to individual users.

If anything the shift is going the other way, with some of the more busy-body jurisdictions trying to take things that are properly enforced by the user's user-agent and instead making them officially the responsibility of the other party.

On the internet, it started as the user's responsibility.

For netizens, the idea that the use should be able to opt out of logs about their interaction with the service the operator owns is novel (because they always had the option of not using the service if they found the pattern distasteful).

Yeah, why can't the EU just leave the stabtech industry stab in peace?...

I downvoted before I read the end of the comment and realized this was satire.

Good to know HN will be the same in 100 years. /s

I think you are factually wrong: Skype, Spotify, Revolut, Zendesk, Transferwise... There are quite many European unicorns too (less though than US and Chinese companies) which are operating as SaaS. Some of them got acquired or re-based to other countries though

I'm sold, the distinctions between "necessary", "targeting", "performance" and "functional" stabbings are such a minefield. Not to mention how I'm supposed to properly disclose the 846 different stabbing brokers I work with. How's a man supposed to make a living stabbing people with all of this red tape in the way?

By the way, studies show users only opt in to stabbing with our competitors banner 95% of the time, but they opt in with ours 98% of the time, thanks to our banner taking 50% longer to properly opt out of, so you should really go with us.

They don't hate you, but they're Out To Get You (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENBzEkoyvdakz4w5d/out-to-get...)

No, they love the money they can make about you. I don’t know anybody giving their money to these people. It is other shady companies buying the data about for, shady companies that have collected. All of this is offered to you free of charge.

That reminds me of the second half of this sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQjUh4nWwaM

looks like someone just discovered that capitalism is bad for people ^^ who would have thought it...

I wonder how many web developers actually honour Do Not Track. I do, in all the websites I've made for my employer too, but I think I'm only getting away with it because my employer doesn't know. I've even made it so that browsing with Do-Not-Track enabled also skips the cookie consent banner and just assume the user wants no cookies other than the strictly necessary ones (like their session/login cookie), and doesn't include Google Analytics, instead just upping a single view counter on the page, with no PII in there.

There was a much more elaborate standard called P3P recommend by w3c in 2002. It apparently defined a description of how business can use personal data.

But apparently it was considered too complex and "lacking enforcement".

Now maybe if it survived till GDPR it could have it's enforcement, but Mozilla yanked support before that...

Don't forget robots.txt

You can submit errata. Maybe it should be renamed to RFE.

A bit of lore that I learned in my networking class in college was that the RFC name was chosen as tongue in cheek in that by the time a proposal gets to the RFC stage, comments are very much not appreciated. You're supposed to comment well before that point.

No idea if that bit of lore is true but it is certainly the case that RFCs are usually the final word on the relevant standard. In fact, once they get their ID, RFCs cannot be modified or rescinded; only superseded by another RFC.

> The early RFCs were, in fact, requests for comments on ideas and proposals; the goal was to start conversations rather than to create an archival record of a standard or best practice. This goal changed over time, as the formality of the publication process evolved and the community consuming the material grew. Today, over 8500 RFCs have been published, ranging across best practice guidance, experimental protocols, informational material, and, of course, Internet standards.

> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8700.html

Nowadays you're supposed to comment before it gets to "Internet standard"

RFC's operate under the IETF. RFC's are developed under some specific group, and you can join that group, the business is generally conducted on email. There are (well, were back when I participated) in-person meetings, but attendance there was not mandatory.

"request for compliance" is the alternative interpretation.

Without legal backing, yes. If it had that it would have been a very different story.

The whole website is a treasure trove. There's a page with two C# puzzles and one with an HTML/JavaScript puzzle that I found very interesting. I'm still stuck on the second C# one!

I feel like that section ruins the joke.

I feel the need to comment on one sentence in it: “companies are god damn children and must be told no explicitly by every person individually.”

While it's true that children will often go out of their ways to test boundaries, I have no trouble giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying that children are innocently experimenting.

Companies, meanwhile, are doing this with fully deliberate malicious intent. They do this because capitalism rewards it. We need to say this, and keep saying it, until everyone gets it. Companies cannot be reared like children. Companies do not “mature” to become well-behaving, ethical citizens. With the profit motive in effect, companies have every incentive to work around every legislation and regulation and screw us at every opportunity they get. The profit motive must go.

I bailed before that so thanks for pointing it out. I couldn't agree more, both with the point implied by the RFC and with that directly stated below.

So the EU is bad because you can't learn to screw on a bottle cap that's different than before?

Good grief if you’re biggest complaint about why the EU is a nightmare to live in because sometimes you get nasty soda all over your fridge then I think you might need to touch some grass.

> The meme that goes around atm is that while Elon Musk created Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink the EU managed to get everybody to now have plastic bottles who do not close properly anymore: due to some regulation that mandates that bottle caps must hold to the bottle, weird only partially-functional mechanism have been created and it's a PITA to either drink from a plastic bottle or, worse, try to lay it horizontally in a fridge.

I haven't encountered that meme, but if it exists, it's like most memes seem to be: Wrong. The bottle caps work just fine.

I think the author's entire point is that self-regulation by the big boys is not working very well.

The actual author is one person, user '5225225'

Dude come on