Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

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You can add even more pros to asm web apps.

- Sandboxed, web apps can't wander around in your filesystem, and you can even prevent them from knowing anything about you (private mode). That's good for privacy and security.

- You bypass the apple/google store, their paytoll, capricious criteria and how they promote apps

And I think asm apps (not websites) will have a great success when asm has become a full VM not just because of these reasons, but also because it will make it possible to develop cross-platform in a language that isn't javascript. Some people love javascript, I personally hate it. C++ devs will be able to develop in C++, I expect C# and Java dev to be able to write their apps in C# or Java, and I am sure even more languages will join the party. That's a great thing.

Private mode is about hiding a trail from yourself rather than the websites you visit. They still get all your request logs.

When you launch private mode (save for browser fingerprinting and other super cookies), you are a new user to the website. When you close it, anything the website attempted to store on your machine is gone. Of course it can track you during that session but not before or after.

Unfortunately techniques like browser fingerprinting[0] still work in private browsing and can be used to link your private browsing to your normal browsing.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint

Can, but usually aren’t. Advertisers aren’t interested in advertising to you unless it’ll “work” (in terms of sales, clicks, or whatever the KPI is). If I think you want to not see my ad, I don’t want to buy your eyeballs.

My own experiments with GL and the timing-based methods is that they just don’t work well (compared to say, cookies) when delivered via an advertisement. Plugins and fonts work very poorly as well, lately.

I don’t think anyone is using these methods to target advertising, and state-level actors don’t have to (they just bug your ISP).

Who are you trying to protect against?

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