Microsoft Adds 'Do Not Track' Option For IE9 179
devbox writes "Microsoft says it will offer a privacy setting in the next version of Internet Explorer that will make it easy for users to keep their browsing habits from being tracked by advertising networks and other third-party websites. 'By designing these sorts of enhancements with privacy in mind at the design phase, we're able to deliver a functionality that provides consumers additional levels of control over what they want to engage in and how they choose to do so,' Microsoft Chief Privacy Strategist Peter Cullen blogged. Previously, Mozilla stopped working on a similar feature for Firefox after pressure from advertisers and other OSS projects as it would hurt their revenue sources from advertisers."
You forgot the parenthetic on that... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You forgot the parenthetic on that... (Score:4, Insightful)
It may not have been distortion, but if so please provide source.
Re:You forgot the parenthetic on that... (Score:5, Informative)
Odd, when every malformed URL has went to MS since time immemorial. And odd, that if you read their privacy statement, TOS, and EULA, you will find they claim to have the right to do exactly these things.
Do you suspect they actually dont do those things, but just like mentioning (errr... burying) them in their various docs about their products and services?
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First thing blocked: google analytics
Re:You forgot the parenthetic on that... (Score:5, Interesting)
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server-side tracking (Score:2)
Re:server-side tracking (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:server-side tracking (Score:5, Insightful)
Beside, while maybe not relevant for the whole world, I'm currently living in Asia and every country I've been has heavy proxies for surfing. Squid everywhere, you basically cannot get your own ip. And because Asia as a region has billions of users and so few ip's, tracking by ip just doesn't work on individual basis.
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The problem is that this solution is stupid. A "do not track" flag for browsers makes exactly as much sense as a "do not hack" flag for computers:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1898834&cid=34472828 [slashdot.org]
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You can go on and on about it, but what you're saying is like fire department is completely useless because they can only stop 99% of fires.
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My IP is transient, so I turn off my modem when I'm not using it.
Sorry, what's a modem?
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All you can do with that is track who(for a given value of who) came to your site and when. I don't really have a problem with people hosting a website knowing that I visited it. It's all this cross tracking garbage where someone like Google knows every website I've visited that bothers me.
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If it's good enough for the RIAA/MPAA to sue people and get away with it, it's surely good enough for ad tracking.
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The server doesn't need to query anything. Enough info comes in by default to at very least track a household's web browsing in almost real time. Look into it in more detail.
What the hell are you talking about? Care to name some specifics, outside a possible temporary IP address that might mean something, that server side is able to track if client is blocking all client related info?
Yeap, I can imagine a number of things in here. E.g. sessionID, which can be passed as an HTTP POST/GET argument, or in the body of XML Ajax requests (as xml content). Granted, this info doesn't usualy survive between two different session, but it is not necessary to be so.
But let me ask you: with the cloud, who needs cookies anymore? Just login into your WindowsLive account and they don't need cookies to track you: what an incentive (by deception) for you - the consumer - to go for IE9. More than that: w
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Yes, there are other ways. But I'm a little bit surprised you are actually blaming them to offer users extra privacy...
Don't take me wrong. I'm far from blaming them for this, but I was taught/conditioned by MS to be excesively paranoid when it comes with their motives. (not hateful, just paranoid)
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As a user of some Windows Live services, I can tell you that it to irritation defaults out to asking you to log in again - in stark contrast to the autologin of Facebook, and stealth "login" of Google (eg. tracking).
Good to hear it... Keep an eye on it, though, wouldn't hurt ;) "it doesn't matter if you are paranoid or not, they are after you anyway" ;).
And, mods, +1 informative please. I admit myself as coward enough not to even try Windows Live.
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Re:server-side tracking (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you quite understand how it works - the idea is not only to keep them from reading stuff off your machine but also some level of anonymization on the net.
Right now the big practice is to put tracking cookies on your computer. Seriously, let your parents browse the web unfiltered and unrestricted for about a month, then do a good Antivirus scan and if you come back with any less than 100 tracking cookies I'll be surprised.
So thats one issue they are trying to tackle. The other one is as you said, what happens when my information is being tracked on the server? That's where anonymizing protocols come in handy. You are never the same person twice when visiting the web site, you always appear to be a new client. As such, they'll never have previous records on your computer.
Couple that with an increase usage of HTTPS possibly built into the browser, and no third party adserver can "snoop" what goes on between you and the server. Brilliant.
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Re:server-side tracking (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is do people really want the lack of personalization that anonymity implies.
Turn on anonymity and get google in a random language, based on the country of the proxy server you are connecting to google from, or get search results that are skewed based on what you have searched for and to a lesser extent, what has been searched for from your ipaddress. If a slashdot searches on google for boa, one of the top results is an IDE for python. I suspect that for a user that spends most of their time searching for the interests of seven year olds they could get a harry potter link in the top ten.
For a website that makes no personalization, and is just looking to scrape data to sell to advertisers, sure, there is basically no reason not to use anonymization software.
The reason that google gets so much information is that their services work better if you give them a fair amount of information, The fact that they do this quietly without you having to click a million checkboxes is viewed as a good thing by people that are stressed for time.
The viability of anonymization is very dependent on what the user is doing, and which sites they are using. The problems for people promoting anonymity also include: anonymizing tends to be slower than regular browsing (tor, for example); Anonymization tends to be work; Most people, most of the time, don't care about their surfing habits.
Another problem is the lack of awareness that the net is not all love and happiness. For example, most reporters, including several linux focused reporters, first reported that the solution to firesheep was to use WEP, without understanding that as soon as the packet goes out on the net it is at least as vulnerable as an unprotected wireless lan, and possibly more so, as wireless networks are somewhat more unstable due to electrical interference an dpor signal quality on a lot of wireless networks.
I just don't see how anonymous browsing gets traction, unless there is civil unrest NATO countries, or some other compelling external event to make people care about their privacy.
I don't mean to be a downer, but I have watched a lot of not too difficult things never catch on. (https on all authenticated connections, pgp, tor, personalized certificates, and more)
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Google already does that kind of thing. I was based in Shanghai for four weeks in the summer, and even though I'd explicitly go to google.co.uk, I'd get results from their .hk domain, or results in Chinese. I started having to go through a proxy I managed to set up on our network in California, which at least gave me something approximating English.
Incidentally, Google's doing a lot of annoying things at the moment... like disabling 100 results per search by default.
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The reason that google gets so much information is that their services work better if you give them a fair amount of information
No the reason they get so much information is that they have gone out of their way to figure out a huge number of different ways to get as much of that information as possible. As an incentive, they also make some of their services work better with it.
I just don't see how anonymous browsing gets traction, unless there is civil unrest NATO countries, or some other compelling external event to make people care about their privacy.
This is your better point. It's not that most people like the personalization that much, it's just that they can't be ars
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and no third party adserver can "snoop" what goes on between you and the server. Brilliant.
Except if you are tricked to loging on your WindowsLive account. Or Facebook. Or whatever "cloud".
While "inside the cloud", you won't see the trackers - but not because they don't exists.
Wanna bet that MS will offer you the option of "login in the cloud when computer starts"? (if they are not doing it already by default, with a very hard to find way to opt-out).
Wow, pretty impressed. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a more than a little impressed that MS is going ahead with this. Hopefully this is all the excuse they need over at Mozilla to reconsider their decision.
Re:Wow, pretty impressed. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Microsoft realized how dependent OSS projects are on advertising, and tried to find a good way to hurt them? Though rather pointless, as the people who visit sites like Slashdot aren't going to be running IE anyway.
But your employer may be more comfortable with a company that sells a product and not the user.*
It's an attitude that can filter down to others.
* - "With business users, IE6 share has dropped even more substantially as IE8 has the largest usage share of any browser in businesses with 34.1% usage
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as the people who visit sites like Slashdot arn't going to be running IE anyway.
I'll admit that I'm using Konqueror at the moment, but when I happen to be booted up into Windows, I use IE8 for /.. It's pretty zippy and I became irritated with Firefox as it gets ever larger. I only use it for web-development now as the combo of Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar are unrivalled.
Re:Wow, pretty impressed. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a more than a little impressed that MS is going ahead with this. Hopefully this is all the excuse they need over at Mozilla to reconsider their decision.
While I like this move, I don't think MS is being truly altruistic about this. They're looking at their bottom line. MS is not an advertiser, and they don't operate open source projects that are dependent on advertising. So, they have very little to lose by implementing this. On the other side, their rivals have a lot to lose. Look at their main rivals - open source in general (in the form of OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox, and MySQL to name a few), Google (an advertiser), and Apple. Allowing their browser to block advertising directly affects the viability of open source projects and affects the bottom line of Google. It doesn't hurt Apple, but they'll just need to find another way to stick it to Apple when they can.
I just find it a little bit ironic that open source communities are advocating for advertising while mega-corp Microsoft is now in favor of allowing users to block it. It seems a little weird on the surface, but it makes financial sense. I doubt Mozilla will reconsider because they rely more on advertising revenue than Microsoft does. I could see Opera or Apple implementing this though, for the same reasons. I highly doubt Mozilla or Google would add this into their browsers, although the presence of AdBlock makes the point sort of moot for Mozilla. I would be pretty shocked if a version of Chrome showed up with this feature though.
Re:Wow, pretty impressed. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the strategy worked ideally, it would demolish Google's revenues because they're unable to collect information about users and their ads aren't being seen by as many eyeballs. That's Google's bread and butter business right there. The reason for the existence of both Android and Chrome OS is to prevent this kind of lockout from happening. Android isn't completely under Google's control so it is possible to lock them out (See the Android phone that uses Bing for search and stories about Verizon possibly considering replacing the Android Marketplace with their own store.) if various third parties wanted to, but Chrome OS seems to be under Google's control to a larger extent at this point.
Google is smart and they realize that their position is open to attack, which is part of the reason they've been expanding into so many other areas and will continue to look for new ways to expose customers to their ads or gather information about users that can be used for targeted advertisements.
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Um... Microsoft is actually an advertiser (well, ad provider). They're much less famous for it than Google, but they nonetheless have search-related and context-related ads on web pages.
There's a feature in IE8 (and IE9 beta) called "InPrivate Filtering" (It's under the "Safety" icon/menu). IPF causes the browser to block third-party content that shows up on more than a few websites - such as scripts that track you by cookies, or advertisers where the client pulls data from a third-party server. It's disabl
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Um... Microsoft is actually an advertiser (well, ad provider).
I understand that, but it's not their bread and butter. This is the Microsoft breakdown for 2010, in revenue, in billions, by division. Advertising is included in online services:
Windows/Windows Live - 18.4
Server/Tools - 14.8
Online Services - 2.1
Business - 18.6
Devices/Entertainment - 8.0
Out of the 2.1 billion made from online services, 1.9 billion of that was from advertising. So, out of Microsoft's 2010 revenue of 62.4 billion, 1.9 billion, or 3%, came from advertising. Compare that with Google's incom
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Not everyone is all or nothing about ads.
I see a checkbox to disable ads on this site, but I don't click it.
On common sites I visit that I feel are worth visiting, I don't block their ads either.
All random sites, ads blocked unless I find them to be unobtrusive or worthy of my support.
I'm OK with advertising. It has to overcome a few barriers but it's not something that is altogether horrible everywhere. What really matters is whether I am in control or not.
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I'm happy to see this too and also hope that FF and others follow this cue. But I don't think it's for the reasons others are mentioning here. To me, this is a case of MS hoping to head off Government intervention in this area. Even the folks on Capitol Hill have come to realize that tracking in its current form is a problem. There was a bureaucrat the other day talking about needing to address the "Flash cookie problem" and saying they're working with Adobe on it. This is just like the major sport bike mak
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Being an old paranoid fart, I guess it means they have long stopped using that method to track people.
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This article is clearly not about the techniques you're thinking of, which are relatively difficult, even less reliable, relatively uncommon, and mostly outside the purview of browser makers.
So... deep breaths. Deep breaths.
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That said, this might raise the cost of marketing so I'm all for it even thought it means siding with Microsoft.
The problem with that line of logic is that marketing, like every other expense of a business, is baked into the product or service that we, the consumers, purchase. If marketing costs go up, depending on the company, it could either decrease the amount of advertising they do, or, more likely, increase the cost of the products we buy. I dunno about you, but I still buy stuff pretty frequently, and those products tend to advertise. Even if I buy a Pepsi on an impulse buy, or because I'm having a gathering, t
That's a position? (Score:4, Funny)
How many companies even HAVE a Chief Privacy Strategist? Where do you go to school for that? I can only imagine a Computer Science Degree with a high focus on networking and security - but even those don't always focus on the issues of PRIVACY on the internet.
Can I get a job at Apple as their Chief Privacy Strategist? I know I could totally just point the Safari team at HTTPS Everywhere, tell them to get crackin', get a better "Secure viewing" mode in that browser. Then walk away with my 6 figure paycheck and get a mention on Slashdot!
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How many companies even HAVE a Chief Privacy Strategist?
And how in the world were they able to score Optimus Prime for the job?
MBA (Score:2)
Some details about the guy in his hiring announcement:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/jun03/06-23cullenpr.mspx [microsoft.com]
His background is in the Canadian banking industry...
"Cullen holds an MBA from Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. He is a founding member of two networks of chief privacy officers and is an active public speaker. "
Re: Peter Cullen! (Score:2)
"He is a founding member of two networks of chief privacy officers"
After all, he protects the Allspark right?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Transformers_(film) [wikimedia.org]
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Peter_Cullen [wikimedia.org]
Bonus - they're both Canadian.
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How many companies even HAVE a Chief Privacy Strategist?
On the same line: how many companies use evanghelist warriors [linuxtoday.com] either? (just look in slightly other directions for increased employment chances, without diminishing too much the chances to have a six figures salary/year).
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I'm not sure whether you think it's cool they have it or are mocking it, but I'm quite impressed.
It's a little bit of both. When you go to school you have a general idea of what position you want to be in, whether it be software design, server maintenance, Database Admin, Management, that kind stuff. I've never heard of a position specifically on the topic of privacy though - it sounds a bit like one made up in order to have him sound important when someone else with another title has already had that work load.
For example, all matters of Network browsing at our company are dealt with by a Network admi
MS Stands Up For Users?! (Score:5, Informative)
In all seriousness, IT'S ABOUT GODDAMN TIME. Someone needs to stand up to the constant intrusion into our personal habits, and if Microsoft is going to be the first to do so, more power to them. If they do as good of a job on IE9 as they have on Windows 7, it will end up being an awesome browser, anyway.
5 years ago, I would have never believed that those words would have come out of my mouth. Of course, back then, WinXP was their offering, and I was a student intern writing Linux kernel code for credit. Everything changes...
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A little humility can go a long way... even for huge corporations.
They didn't have any real competition back then. Now they have to TRY to keep people, instead of having them by default. We can thank Google and Mozilla for that (among others).
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Sure you can complain about IE6 not meeting the HTML and CSS standards, but you'd be wrong. Because there were no standards, MS tried to push web into new era (and succeeded! - think AJAX), but W3C was slow to publish standards.
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IE6 was fine when it was released. Nothing wrong with it now except that it is based on 10 year old tech and standards. MS did not update it. That's the real problem. They had a lot of opportunity. Even when they did update it they did all the wrong things and for all this time the Windows default browser has been holding back the web in all kinds of ways and still is.
Go here: http://www.caniuse.com/ [caniuse.com]
Scroll down and see how IE stacks up. Then think about the installed base of IE 6/7/8 users.
It will be anothe
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Of course they are, it's in their interests to do so. They don't make their money from advertising, they make it from Windows - and if this helps sell Windows licenses it's good for the bottom line. Even if this doesn't help sell Windows directly, increasing the number of IE9 users helps decrease the number of people who can easily switch to a different OS, since it's the only major browser that's Windows-only.
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first to do so? What can this do that a Firefox add-in cannot?
I don't think an add-in is needed. Firefox help teaches you how to set up a whitelist for cookies:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Blocking%20cookies#w_block-cookies-for-all-sites [mozilla.com]
Maybe the IE feature blocks other history tracking devices, such as flash cookies also, but there is nothing in the article that indicates this.
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Be the default. 95+ percent of internet browsers use the browser in its default state.
Defaults matter.
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"Microsoft officials said the core of the opt-in feature..."
(emphasis is mine)
Defaults, yuep.
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Also, this just in, there are predictions for snowfall in Hell, this evening...
[...]
Everything changes...
Hope the change worked well for you.
Because, a heads up message to you, we are moving into the cloud: we won't need cookies to track the users anymore.
Yours: S. Ballmer
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More Theater (Score:2, Insightful)
This is pointless for systems designed to collect fingerprints of your systems in ways that "iesnare" does. Each time you visit a site your computer gets "processed" and that information is stored on a remote server and shared to all in network servers. There is zero need to store it on your computer because your computers fingerprint will remain static enough to track you anyways. There are so many ways to track and catalog machines its not even funny. This is PURE THEATER designed to do nothing more t
This doesn't address the problem (Score:3)
This proposal seems to be all about cookies. This doesn't address the real problems of computer fingerprinting and flash objects.
Ideally, it would be impossible for a web server to leave any persistent data on your machine, and impossible to determine anything about your machine other than your IP address and possibly your browser version.
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Unfortunately that's more what I was thinking was the MS motivation here.
FireFox has a Do Not Track Addon (Score:5, Insightful)
If websites wanted to make money from advertising DO IT FROM YOUR OWN SITE and dont take the cheap way out, and people relying on generic advertising for an income better get some business sense and stop complaining your not making any money.
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Thanks for the tip on Ghostery! I'll add that the Anonymizer Nevercookie addon is now in the Mozilla addon directory, version 0.1 mind you.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/260205/ [mozilla.org]
Do not want; ads. I can find a product just fine. Make more noise, and I avoid your product. Pretty simple. Advertising is a waste of time and money, but not people. The people in advertising are just a waste of air and should be sewn together to make a protective CME shield for the Earth. Thank you.
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You can also use ...) from tracking if web sites continue to rely on them to host their content.
* EasyPrivacy: abp:subscribe?location=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt&title=EasyPrivacy
* Social Annoyances: abp:subscribe?location=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-addon.txt&title=fanboy-annoyances
which are both lists for Adblock+. Of course one can't prevent cloud-providers (Amazon, Microsoft,
Inprivate Browsing (Score:2)
So how is this any different from Forcing InPrivate Filtering on and adding a filter list to it like you can with IE8?
Is it going to have a constantly updated list like AdBlockPlus?
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Hell, I'd be glad if they just stop turning off IPF on new browser sessions.
For those who don't know: InPrivate Filtering is a very cool (but never-used) IE8 feature where third-party content embedded in sites is tracked, and if the same content is used in more than a specificed threshold of sites, it gets blocked. For example, Google Analytics is blocked, because their script is embedded on so many sites. It also makes a decent ad-blocker, since either the ad-embedding script or the ad itself is almost alw
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Basically, yes, it will have constantly updated lists like AdBlock Plus. I can't tell for sure whether Microsoft intends to actually provide a list themselves, but it looks like the user can opt into any number of them. This as opposed to InPrivate filtering's heuristic identification.
Since this is Microsoft... (Score:2)
It will have one or more of the following issues:
* It will be defective by design from day one.
* It will be easily disabled remotely.
* MS will share some way to detect it with advertisers, who will then add functionality which refuses to display a page until you disable it.
* It will have one or more security holes, allowing compromise of PII.
* It will be dropped, at the last minute, from the release.
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* It will attract ridiculous speculation on what it may or may not do or be.
Playing Devil's Advocate, and I do mean Devil. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it's in Microsoft's interest for something like this to work, and work well.
I've mentioned before that I believe this is the best way for MS to fight Google. (Since MS is a software company, Google is an ad company. Why try to fight them with a search engine, it misses the point.)
Add an ad-blocker to IE, built in, on by default (in addition to this bug-blocker.) Single button on the toolbar to turn ads back on, with options for finer-grained settings.
Microsoft can then go further. Allow an opt-in user-requested ad feature, where the ads are served by the browser for participating websites. Users can set what type of ads they want (no anim, no sound, for example), white- or black-list products or companies, and list areas of interest. Advertisers will hate the user control, but because people have asked for the ads, and are thus more likely to trust the network, that increases both click-through and sales, so advertisers would generally pay more. That also means more money per-ad for websites, increasing their participation. etc etc. Users win, websites win, advertisers win.
Meanwhile, if most Firefox users use ABP, and all IE-default-setting users have ads blocked, that leaves only Chrome users to give Google their ad-revenue. Less money means less research, less innovation, more rivals, fragmented market. Microsoft wins.
No substitute for a federal do-not-track LAW tho. (Score:2)
A Do-Not-Track Law [slashdot.org] is still very necessary to spell out what rights users have (over their own frickin' data) and to create a bright line that companies can be clear about staying behind or getting sued.
Of course, I trust Congress to create such a law balanced in the interests of individual citizens about as much as I trust Microsoft to implement this feature with benign intent.
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Careful what you wish for... Remember what happened when we finally got a so-called "anti-spam" law...
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Just because the US passes some law, it won't prevent tracking from happening. This is ironically both a negative and positive attribute. It's a global network, it can't truly be "policed".
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Why should Congress pass a law balanced in the interests of individual citizens? How does this help big corporations? Why should they care about individuals at all? Are individuals going to give them generous campaign contributions like big corporations do?
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Then just move servers outside the united states where the law doesn't exist.
HTTP header (Score:4, Interesting)
How about we just have an HTTP header that, if present in the request, states exactly which tracking the user consents to? No ambiguity, easy to implement on both the browser and the server side. End of problem. At least for users, and since it's our data I don't see where any other party should be getting a say in how it's used.
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The From request-header field, if given, SHOULD contain an Internet e-mail address for the human user who controls the requesting user agent. The address SHOULD be machine-usable, as defined by "mailbox" in RFC 822 [9] as updated by RFC 1123 [8]:
From = "From" ":" mailbox
An example is:
From: webmaster@w3.org
This header field MAY be used for logging purposes and as a means for identifying the source of invalid or unwanted requests. It SHOULD NOT be used as an insecure form of access protection. The interpretation of this field is that the request is being performed on behalf of the person given, who accepts responsibility for the method performed. In particular, robot agents SHOULD include this header so that the person responsible for running the robot can be contacted if problems occur on the receiving end.
The Internet e-mail address in this field MAY be separate from the Internet host which issued the request. For example, when a request is passed through a proxy the original issuer's address SHOULD be used.
The client SHOULD NOT send the From header field without the user's approval, as it might conflict with the user's privacy interests or their site's security policy. It is strongly recommended that the user be able to disable, enable, and modify the value of this field at any time prior to a request.
We could amend this definition to include the definition: No from field implies that the user wishes not to be tracked. Or to prevent ambiguity that a standard value of 'anonymous@anonymous' would be used by all browsers indicating the same. For all users wishing to be tracked a value of UNIQUE_GENERATED_CODE@ORGANIZATION would be used to allow anonymous tracking. No cookies needed and adheres to current HTTP spec.
Will every feature of IE9 be posted here ? (Score:2)
I do not understand why there is a Slashdot article for every IE9 feature.
Microsoft is very well known for announcing products that were released very late or even never in some cases.
Why do we have to comment on a such a feature, obviously designed to piss off Google ?
And who cares about IE9, when the other browsers are better in every way ?
Instead of announcing every future functionality, to let us believe that they work on their browser and care about us, why not simply release an upgraded browser every
Funny, but this is where it goes (Score:2)
The problem is that we have the idea that everything on the web should be free. So the idea of "ad supported" has come about. Well, advertising brings along a host of evils because it has to be pervasive and intrusive in order to work to the best benefit for the advertiser.
Also, while you might think it is handy to not have to pay for anything, the web sites that are trying to be ad supported are finding the money a bit thin. Advertising rates are down and ad blocking is up. End result is the web sites
Serious Problem With Mozilla (Score:2)
This is the first I am hearing about this. Such behavior from Mozilla is a serious problem. I thought FireFox was supposed to be the new and better way to do web browsing, and now I find out that this project is just as beholden to moneyed interests as other browsers. Not cool, Mozilla. Not cool.
Congressional hearing on "Do Not Track" (Score:2)
This is coming very shortly after the congressional hearing where Eben Moglen gave testimony [softwarefreedom.org] among others (see C-SPAN [c-span.org] at 1:37:52). He actually explained AdblockPlus to counter the argument that the advertisment industry would collapse if privacy in the Internet would be restored.
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"Most" people are not still using IE6. There are some, but they have bigger worries than tracking with ads. :(
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Also note that most IE6 users are using it in their work environments, where they are bound to IE6 because of enterprise software they use (and upgrades are costly)
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Re:Microsoft doesn't need ads (Score:5, Insightful)
For the same reason that they started investing in IE in the first place. Netscape made a big deal of how 'browser apps' were going to turn the PC into a thin client and make the desktop OS interchangeable. Now, FireFox, Safari and Chrome, are going on about how 'web apps' are going to make the browser more important than the OS for the software that it can run.
IE9 isn't there as a browser, it's there to sell Windows. Microsoft doesn't mind if you run FireFox on Windows, except that doing so means that it's much easier for you to switch to Mac, *NIX, or whatever. If all of your apps are web apps, then there is no lock in. This is why the IE team is suddenly enthusiastic about HTML5 - if people are going to write HTML5-based web apps (which, it seems, they are), then Microsoft wants to ensure that they run best on Windows (with or without IE, it doesn't matter to them).
It's the same reason that MS invests so much effort in developer tools. They don't make a profit, but they make it more likely that people will have some compelling reason to buy Windows.
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- WebDAV
The first thing your security team will tell you is "remove this shit as fast as you can."
- TWAIN (DynamicSoft started supporting chrome, but installation must be manual)
Isn't that the scanner infrastructure? I've never heard of this in IE.
- Digital signing
What does this have to do with browsers?
- No enterprise policies in chrome (you can't prevent users from saving files or restricting content)
Smokescreen, but managers like to feel good. As for restricting content, proxy servers are the only way. It's notable our proxy server blocks anything but IE and Firefox, yet I make SRWare Iron jump around the restrictions by pretending it's Firefox. Run as a portable app.
- Problems with NTLM credentials
Yes, that's annoying when
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Sure, they would love to make big dollars on ads (Bing),
Can you explain me why the avalanche of "In the cloud" [google.com.au] ad campaign I'm seeing recently? Join the WindowsLive and they won't need cookies or fancy HTML5 thingies to track you anymore.
Does Facebook need cookies to sell your data or expose you to ads?
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You are free to block users who block ads. If you don't want me to see your pages why do you send them to me when I request them?
So nothing I would be interested in. In any case if I stopped blocking ads I'd be "taking" from the advertisers
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So what if google "dies"? Ever since they became a mainstream Internet name they ceased being a "do no evil" innovator. They turned cold shoulder on real net neutrality. Why should I give a shit about a company that doesn't give a shit about me?
Now, I'm not saying that MS is any better. MS is likely motivated in crushing ads simply to financially hurt google without sustaining much damage themselves (since most of their revenue is in sales o
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It is, but if you've ever tried maintaining a patch set for a third party application without any cooperation from said third party you'll know it's bloody painful. If said third party is actively working against you then it's just not worth bothering with.
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