A little follow-up on my earlier post about using ad block plus to keep google analytics from violating your privacy :
Here are the filters that I've added in this past week:
*.hitbox.com/*
drupal.org/files/hbx/hbx.js
These two were added to avoid the nasty slowdown and privacy violations recently instituted on the drupal.org site. It seems that the Drupal Association is doing a study of site usage, and decided to use a (donated license) proprietary system that works via complex javascript on the client side instead of a Free Software system that would use server logs. Oh well, I guess they won't learn anything from my use of the site as I am now invisible to the system in use.
Actually, given that the users of the site tend to be rather technologically savvy, I'd bet that the majority of users of the site are blocking the javascript and therefor the information generated by the expensive system will be rather useless. shrug.
I also added the following, but I can't remember what site prompted me to do so.
*.statcounter.com/counter/counter_xhtml.js
s1.amazon.com/exec/*
Nice
I didn't bother on your last post but this morning, while listening to the news about Yahoo and thinking that maybe I'd write a wee blog post about how trusting capitalists is like trusting a tiger. Meaning that we have no idea what will set them off and sure some will lie purring in your lap for decades but that doesn't mean you know the first thing about tigers. So I thought that and then went to work and I think that what is next is that I'll go ahead and install adblock plus.
a bit of a tangent, but
the entire reason opensource/free software/GNU/ the GPL etc exists is, as you point out, capitalists can't be trusted.
Software was assumed free, put in the public domain. Corporations saw code in the public domain that was useful and stole it. Legally they were allowed to take it out of the public domain and put it under their copyright. The GPL exists to prevent that from happening. It's the answer to the question of how to write code that is available to everyone in a way that can't be stolen by by anyone. (however this does not prevent capitalists from manipulating the communities that produce Free Software, that requires transparency and clear definition of process)