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Comment by RMPR | Hacker News Reader

> My own extension StopTheMadness stops web sites from disabling your browser's built-in paste and autofill features, a kind of madness commonly implemented by sites that have a misguided, ignorant notion about what makes a login form "secure"

Now, this is an extension I didn't know I needed. I'm baffled that there are some things without which the web is unusable for me. Looking at my extension list, on Firefox I have:

- ClearURLs - Clickbait remover for YouTube - Cookie Autodelete - Firefox Multi-account container - I don't care about cookies (not updated since bought by Avast) - Privacy badger - Tampermonkey - Tridactyl - uBlock Origin

I feel like I'm pretty conservative with the add-ons that I install, yet I can't comfortably browse the web if I'm missing one of them. When did everything go so wrong?

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Here's the non-enshittified version of "I don't care about cookies": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/istilldontcar...

Yes, the web is hostile. It's frankly incredible we're still allowed the power to control our user agents like we do. If the web was built today it would be a locked down nightmare controlled 100% by corporate interests.

Wasm seems to have the power to make that nightmare a reality, but if they can just force you to use native apps, then maybe they don't want wasm. The web itself is what they are looking to kill.

You say corporate nightmare but give the example of cookies, and the need to accept or reject those are a result of government regulations.

A fair point, but the government regulation was a response to corporate abuses. There's a discussion to be had about the efficacy of this particular regulation, but zero regulation and letting corporations run free is not a better solution.

In an ideal world governments are accountable to a well-educated populace and enact the will of the people to rein in the excesses of the greedy and powerful. Of course that is not how it currently works, but that is the ideal to strive for.

GOVT vs CORP is the same as left vs right. They are the same. Two wings on the same bird. You are being played.

This is essentially the correct explanation.

Karl Marx showed 150 years ago that a state under capitalism is a capitalist state and therefore predominated by the interests of capital itself, an observation that has never been refuted.

the capital of its inhabitants.

> A fair point

Is that sarcasm? It was a terrible point.

And any lack of efficacy of said regulation is straightforwardly due to corporate influence on governments.

It's a point I disagree with, but it's a fair question to ask. I chose to engage with the statement in good faith and assumed the person just hadn't connected the dots fully. People are more likely to be receptive to changing their views if you first acknowledge where they currently stand.

> zero regulation and letting corporations run free is not a better solution

I was fine with this solution. Most people don't care this much about privacy, and the govt is already violating it harder than anything else.

The banner is malicious compliance to exhaust and trick people into giving the same tracking privileges the companies previously assumed they had. Sites are welcome to not have the obtrusive cookie banner if they behave themselves with only relevant cookies.

Corporate nightmare.

Malicious compliance is the perfect way to describe websites' behavior. Sites have many ways to deal with regulations, but they choose: Punish the user with terrible UX, while crying 'look at what they made me do!'

These banners are on plenty of smaller sites. Seems the law is unclear, so they have to cover their butts. Doesn't help that many top search results for "do I need a cookie popup" say an unqualified "yes."

> The banner is malicious compliance

Tell me what the banner on https://gdpr.eu/ says.

If you don't unnecessarily track people, you don't need a cookie consent banner.

Holy koolaid. The annoyance of gdpr consent popups are the result of data collection and malicious compliance, not the regulation that says don't collect data.

How come I live under those same regulations yet don't have any such annoying popups on my sites? I thought they were cause by that regulation?

Thos awful regulations don't go far enough. GDPR is 1% of the step in the right direction. Any pain is like the first initial pain from poking at a boil. The sane reaction is to lance that fucker with extreme prejudice not friggn back off and let it continue slowly eating you alive.

Look at github.com. There is no banner. Why? They don't have any tracking cookies and only use cookies for essential functionalities, and as a result they don't need to ask for consent. That's how websites should work.

There's also the easylist version available here: https://easylist.to/

> Here's the non-enshittified version of "I don't care about cookies":

The best way to deal with that crap is to use uBlock Origin's cosmetic filters to simply remove those prompts from the page. No extra extension needed, and you don't need to opt-in or opt-out. Remove the prompt and ignore it.

There's also a built-in list for this, but I only just enabled it now so idk. Definitely don't want this to be a manual effort.

Try Consent-O-Matic instead of IDCAC.

It is possible to reject consent instead of blindly accepting them with IDCAC... and also the Avast thing

I think the point of these is that GDPR requires an affirmative action, i.e., there is no need to decline, so just get the shitty overlays out of the way.

Consent-O-Matic submits those forms on your behalf. I don't want that. I'd rather not participate at all.

It's kind of upsetting finding out about stuff like this, that you don't know it could exist.

Adblock is interesting because for adblock to work, you need some engineer hours working to find a good filter to delete ads on websites that don't have active countermeasures, and potentially in websites all over the world in languages as well (I'm bilingual, and I see that ublock origin still works in non-english websites).

Now if you throw in websites with active adblock countermeasures, it seems the proposition that a free, mostly self-governed extension all has that figured out just seems impossible, but it seems to work quite well (albeit with a few notable blocking failures, especially at Facebook which has extremely aggressive anti-adblock features)

Wow, I had ClearURLs installed forever ago and I just totally forgot about it.

I often have to manually delete tracking elements that make my URLs long and nasty, but I just realized that only happens when I copy a link that I haven't visited yet. ClearURL has been on my back this whole time!

Even without this extension, generally holding shift when right-clicking gets around right-click blockers.

The caveat of this is, this don't workaround sites that just declares text unselectable.

The css property 'user-select' exists to allow developer stop user from select something like button text by accident. But end up abused so heavily. And you can neither disable all of them because you don't know if they use it in good faith.

To save someone else the time: StopTheMadness requires you to install OS-level software and costs $12

You don't strictly need an addon for this, with a caveat.

You can disable this behaviour by setting `dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled` to False; However this also disables copy functionality on sites.

StopTheMadness is a godsend (but I recommend it only to technical users). The developer is also very responsive. Recommended.

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