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Comment by geocar | Hacker News Reader

Buy an iPhone.

• Did proper random before anybody else

• Active countermeasures against cookie-based retargeting

• Popular enough market that merely having an iPhone in a geographic area doesn't single you out

There's a guy who downloads every page with curl. I see him on web logs. I think he must have some script that parses the amp pages out and does something with it, but because he's the only person in that geographic region who browses the web with curl, he's very easy to spot from a tracking perspective. On the other hand, because he's using curl, I don't think anyone wants to bother trying to show him an ad.

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That would be Stallman.

I love the idea of someone individually targeting Stallman with ads.

Stallman would probably use GNU wget which is licensed under the terms of the GPL, while curl is licensed under a license derived from MIT/X consortium.

He would probably have someone print it for him, similar to his email queue. I email him from time to time and his disclaimer says this.

I've never heard him say anything bad about running MIT licensed software.

On the other hand, I think I've read a FAQ where he says he views web pages by having a script fetch the pages with wget and them emailing them to him, but I'm pretty sure that's simply because wget is free and does the job (being able to recursively download the necessary resources), not because it's GPL licensed.

Obviously Stallman is modifying his wget user agent to show curl just to prevent fingerprinting him accurately... ;)

For the record, Stallman uses GNU IceCat these days.

"I am careful in how I use the Internet.

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

I occasionally also browse unrelated sites using IceCat via Tor. Except for rare cases, I do not identify myself to them. I think that is enough to prevent my browsing from being connected with me. IceCat blocks tracking tags and most fingerprinting methods."

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I don't believe it's RMS because this user appears to "browse" the web interactively. A lot of the sites he hits are on HN so I think he's a user here.

I used to browse with lynx till few years ago. I am not sure if it is practical to do that anymore. Most of the web is no longer friendly for text browsing.

Somewhat suprisingly, youtube is not too bad. I've used elinks to get a URL and then put that into youtube-dl. I suspect that any site that is designed to be friendly to a (vision impaired) screen reader is going to be friendly to text based browsing.

I'll second that. As someone who once worked on fingerprinting scripts I can tell you that iPhones of the same model are basically indistinguishable to Javascript.

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