ised

"I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate to block ads."

And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.

It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme.

Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the computer (and are continually becoming more and more successful at it).

There will always be content on the www. I have watched it grow since its inception and from the beginning quality content was contributed without any expectation of return. Why? I really do not know, but this is how it happened.

And I have no reason to believe www users won't continue that tradition even if ads completely disappeared.

Perhaps this is why sites like Google never try to charge people. Because the www has always had heaps of free content. Maybe these large sites, Facebook included, know that if they were to charge, most people would not pay. There might be a backlash.

It is silly to pay for ads to be removed when they never had to be there to begin with. Yes, I remember using search engines before there were ads. But I know there are generations that never experienced that, and who probably find it hard to imagine.

Ads are smothering the flow of content over the www, not enabling it.

I am not sure I understand the comparison. Search engines and adtech are not selling a product, other than the process of serving ads. If sales of ad space and adtech decline, these companies are in trouble. And their "assets" are mainly personal data.

Maybe I missed what you were trying to say.

"When it bursts companies are going to be more desperate and will unload all the personal data they have... to any willing buyer."

I have long predicted this outcome and always thought I was being a bit too realistic. It's nice to see someone else making the same forecast.

Of course, only time will tell.

Am I the only one who thought for a moment this might be about Bruce Evans' C compiler (bcc)? I believe Linux used bcc in the early days. I know they used the assembler (as86) and I think they still do. Could be wrong.

Looks like a parked domain at park.above.com.

With Javascript disabled nothing happens. No redirect, no compressed payload of who knows what.

Their scheme appears to be 100% reliant on Javascript.

It was actually a rhetorical question. :)

col -bx strips nonprintable characters. I have been using this for many years. Especially since the spread of Unicode. As for _viewing_ nonprintable characters, I am a heavy sed user and honestly I rarely use the l command except occassionally to view newlines, tabs and carriage returns. I prefer od or xxd.

Can escape sequences survive being piped through "col -bx"?

GNU sed only.

I really enjoyed reading the paper.

The author's focus is in the right place (IMO).

Technical ability is perhaps common but having the right focus is, sadly, rare. It's the difference between someone who says they could do or did something many years ago versus the the person who actually does it, _now_, when it is sorely needed.

Computing today is in dire need of _true_ minimalism, IMHO.

I prefer progress(1) written for BSD UNIX.

Dates back to 2002.

"You're free to want sites to work..."

How do you define "work"?

My definition of not working would be failure to receive a 200 response and some useful content.

The text of every recipe on this site is viewable without Javascript. In my experience, this is the case with most websites today.

I know the Javascript on website must do something to enhance the plain text of the recipe. Javascript is a cool language and I respect the creativity of web developers.

By not using Javascript I may have to forgo the "user experience" the developer has prepared for users, however I still get the text of the recipe. For me, that is enough. In other words, the website "works".

It was once possible access Google's archive of Usenet without Javascript. And there were "heavy" and "light" versions of the messages. The heavy versions have an enormous amount of Javascript, CSS and HTML cruft.

For example, http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.wizards/msg/24222e5...

However, later they switched to HTTPS and #! URLs. Around this time I remember getting $CLASSPATH errors. Perhaps this is evidence to support your incompetence argument?

The "content" here is nothing but some plain ASCII Usenet posts. How difficult is it to serve plain text?

Anyway, today the same URL has been converted to this:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.unix.wizards/bllj...

As I said in an earlier thread, Google itself developed a proposal to deal with this #! URL problem and advises webmasters to revise these AJAX URL's to "escaped_fragment" style URL's:

http://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/s...

But apparently when the webmaster is Google, the specification does not apply.

Years ago, I made my own archives of some important comp and net groups. Google is not reliable. This stuff should be placed with the Internet Archive.

"I feel its about time this data monetization cloud bonanza be disrupted."

Ironically, having users controlling their own routers could be the best chance to do that. That is, toss out the crappy consumer routers and instead embrace the router as a user-controlled computer that sits between the user's devices (including IoT devices) and the ISP connection (e.g., modem). This router could run an open source source OS and be programmed _by the user_ to do all sorts of useful things, such as block ads, block tracking, perhaps even create private overlay networks among family and friends, protected from spam.

In a world where the Internet user can have some respite from radio, TV and other advertising, Google (=slave to advertisers) should not be selling routers. Should they come to dominate the market, the respite will come to an end. Users probably will not even know what happened. No one pays attention to routers as computers. They just want a strong WiFi signal.

But, as with RPi, you get to boot your own choice of OS.

In my opinion the advantage of this (=more control) easily outweighs tradeoff of not "opting in" to hardware features enabled via binary blobs.

A MIPS board that pretty much "just works" with BSD kernels. No brainer. I'll take it.

The interesting thing with Google Groups is that Google cannot even crawl its own pages.

This is because it fails to follow its own specification for "escaped_fragment" URLs.

http://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/s...

http://groups.google.com/robots.txt

Google wants webmasters to "opt in" and let Google access #! URLs without using Javascript (they want to be able to use a bot). This is done by providing an alternative "escaped_fragment" URL.

But Google themselves will not allow users to access Google Groups #! URLs without using Javascript. They will not provide alternative "escaped_fragment" URLs. Why not?

Search for the newsgroup comp.unix.soures and you will see an error message that Googlebot was unable to access Google Groups because of its robots.txt

Of course, you will also see comp.unix.sources has (fortunately) been mirrored on numerous servers elsewhere, probably well before the Google acquisition of Deja.

I think Google should give these old newsgroups back to the community in their original format.

Change the gateway on the Windows 10 install computer (or "default route" as another commenter calls it) to a computer _you_ control, i.e., a UNIX install, that can do IP forwarding. Turn on IP forwarding. Connect the UNIX install to the internet.

Also change your default DNS servers on the Windows 10 install to point to the UNIX install. If you know how, set up DNS on this computer. I recommend using your own cache listening on 127.0.0.x, not a public one.

Then monitor traffic being forwarded by the UNIX install.

This is not difficult for anyone familiar with UNIX. Plenty of good and bad software to help you.

Do people need instructions? If there is interest in blocking this nonsense I for one would be willing to help.

There are a lot more Windows users than Apple users so this is fun to watch how the Windows users react to the incessant connections to the mothership, which is par for the course with Apple products. Would love to see the stats on how much cumulative user-purchased bandwidth Apple and Microsoft are usurping in order to track the people who have to pay for it.

If you want to block this nonsense, then the easiest way to do it is from another computer acting as a gateway.

Trying to block these connections from the computer on which Windows 10 has been installed will probably be an exercise in frustration for most users and they will give up. (Most Apple users do not know or care so they do not try to block.) I am sure that Microsoft is counting on their users acting like Apple users.

But how open is it to other open source OS kernel besides Linux? For example, would they send a pre-release boards to FreeBSD or OpenBSD "kernel hackers" if there was interest?

Though it may not be intentional the article seems to have a strong Linux bias.

I want more hardware like this and I always use open source software, but I may not necessarily choose to run Linux. Nothing against it, simply personal preference. I would like to see hardware that can run a variety of kernels.

The image, without the Javascript:

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/dsc...

Interesting note (from NASA?) to visitors embedded in the page:

    <script>  (function($) {
    $.reject({
    display: ["msie", "firefox", "safari", "opera", "chrome",   "gcf"],
      reject: { 
          msie5: true, msie6: true, msie7: true, msie8: true, msie9: true, firefox2: true, firefox3: true, firefox4: true, firefox5: true, firefox6: true, firefox7: true, firefox8: true, firefox9: true, safari1: true, safari2: true, safari3: true, safari4: true, opera1: true, opera2: true, opera3: true, opera4: true, opera5: true, opera6: true, opera7: true, opera8: true, opera9: true
      },
      imagePath: '/sites/all/modules/contributed/jreject/jReject/images/',
      enable: true, header: "Did you know that your Internet Browser is out of date?", paragraph1: "To ensure that all features of NASA.gov work effectively, please upgrade to the latest version of one of these web browsers. <br /><br />For Internet Explorer users: The site will only be fully functional on version 11 with compatibility mode turned off. If you're using version 11 and you're seeing this message, compatibility mode is turned on in your browser. If you need compatibility mode turned on to use other sites or applications, you'll need to use another browser to see the full NASA site.", paragraph2: "Just click on the icons to get to the download page:", closeMessage: "By closing this window you acknowledge that your experience on this website may be degraded.", closeLink: "Close This Window", closeURL: "#", close: true, closeESC: true, closeCookie: true, overlayBgColor: "#000", overlayOpacity: 0.8, fadeInTime: "fast", fadeOutTime: "fast"
    });
  })(jQuery);</script>

"... (so just one DNS request)."

Are you sure?

request #1

1 news.ycombinator.com: 207 bytes, 1+0+4+2 records, response, noerror query: 1 news.ycombinator.com authority: ycombinator.com 172800 NS ns-225.awsdns-28.com

request #2

1 news.ycombinator.com: 225 bytes, 1+1+4+0 records, response, authoritative, noerror query: 1 news.ycombinator.com answer: news.ycombinator.com 300 CNAME news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net authority: ycombinator.com 172800 NS ns-1411.awsdns-48.org

request #3

1 news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net: 367 bytes, 1+0+5+10 records, response, noerror query: 1 news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net authority: cloudflare.net 172800 NS ns1.cloudflare.net

request #4

1 news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net: 89 bytes, 1+2+0+0 records, response, authoritative, noerror query: 1 news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net answer: news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net 300 A 198.41.190.47

A HOSTS file entry for HN will avoid this routine.

There is a lot of history and useful knowledge archived in Usenet. A lot of that content (e.g., the early UNIX newsgroups) puts today's forums and blogs to shame.

Google acquired Deja News (if Usenet is wortheless, why?) and now all the archived Usenet messages are web-access only and fronted by Java and Javascript nonsense.

If the Usenet archives are no longer important or if everyone thinks Usenet is "dead", then why put these messages behind Javascript and try to prevent bulk downloads (which is how NNTP was designed to work)?

"The solution suggested by Stevens... The problem with this is..."

I see no problem with it. But perhaps I am missing something.

"... an application is expected to tune the backlog..."

Two simple applications I use everday called tcpserver/sslserver and tcpclient meet this expectation.

See "-b" and "-c" switches.

Has the author looked at Stevens' own example?

http://www.icir.org/christian/sock.html

That means the full lookup for your personal domainname is for an Amazon S3 domainname. PairNIC just handles the first lookup to give the CNAME for blog.lmorchard.com, pointing to Amazon.

Then there are multiple other CNAME's that Amazon uses. It is about the same as looking up a Akamai customer domain. Lots of extra DNS queries.

"263 HTTP requests"

Seems reasonable. bwahahaha!

Shall we discuss the number of DNS requests?

And how many of those offsite servers are using something convoluted like Amazon for DNS? (which I find is more and more prevalent thanks to AWS)

The blog author, e.g., is using Amazon for DNS.

Alas, for each and every name, this adds more than a few lookups to what could be a 1-2 request process. Amazon uses multiple levels of indirection.

This dance is not of much consequence in the case of a single name.

But in the aggregate, e.g., many names requested from one overloaded site (such as one author singles out) after another, it does add up.

This also creates a larger margin for errors (failed lookups getting retried and timing out, again and again... while the user sits and waits).

Are there any hosting providers that will truly accomodate raw disk (filesystem: ffs, etc.) images as opposed to proprietary image or container formats (Amazon's, VMWare's, etc.), without having jump through numerous hoops?

For the sake of example, say I already have my system built and configured just the way I like it, as a "raw" ffs image file. And FWIW the kernel on that image is multiboot compatible and can run as a Xen guest.

I also have my own non-GRUB bootloader. But I realize that it may not be feasible for the hosting provider to let me use it.

Try again. tnftp, tcpclient and nc are my friends. And, increasingly, q's builtin TCP client (alas, closed source).

There was a short time long ago when I used wget. That period did not last very long.

curl is overloaded with "features" I will never use.

My idea of a good TCP client is a small, relatively simple program with few options that compiles quickly and easily.

FreeBSD's fetch utility is another one that comes to mind.

Perhaps counterintuitively, I feel I get more "control" from the simpler TCP clients with fewer options (that I complile myself) than I ever did from the more popular programs with too many options and unneeded libraries linked in by default. But that's just my opinion, nothing more. I would not "recommend" the programs I use to anyone. It is just my personal preference to use them.

But "modern", Javascript-enabled web browsers are generally not my friends. I am rather circumspect in when and how I use them.

If I need to use a modern web browser on the open web it is generally because I _need_ Javascript. Bank, etc.

Most of the time I can get what I'm after without using a web browser, and when I need to browse HTML I can do it with browser that has no Javascript engine linked in.

It all depends on what the user is trying to do. And not all users are the same.

For retrieving content I find I do not need a web browser.

For reading HTML I find I do not need a Javascript-enabled browser.

Looking at photos is a different task. When I used to use X11, there were a few good options for viewing large number of photos quickly.

Watching video is a different task. For this I prefer a dedicated application. Interestingly enough, the player I use on the iPad has a built-in FTP server, HTTP server... and a web browser. Quite useful.

I routinely use HTTP/1.1 pipelining from the command line to retrieve 100 assets at a time. But these are assets that I actually want: i.e., the content.

Somehow I doubt that the 200+ "assets" coming from 1 or 2 hosts automatically when using a web browser authored by a corporation or "non-profit organization" that is connected to the ad sales business are going to be "assets" that I actually want.

I enjoyed this article. But I have one nitpick.

The author suggest HTTP/2 as a solution to web cruft.

I could be wrong, but I see the HTTP/2 ploy as a proposed way to deliver more cruft, faster.

What do you think is going to be in those compressed headers? How large do HTTP headers need to be? What exactly are they trying to do? I look at headers on a daily basis and most of what I see is not for the benefit of users.

We can safely assume the compressed headers that HTTP/2 would enable would have nothing to do with advertising?

Again, I could be wrong, but in my estimation the solution to web cruft (unsolicited advertising) is not likely to come from a commercial entity that receives 98% of its revenue from web advertisers.

The web cruft problem parallels software bloat and the crapware problem (gratuitous junk software pre-installed on your devices before you purchase them).

The more resources that are provided, e.g., CPU, memory, primary storage, bandwidth, the more developers use these resources for purposes that do not benefit users and mostly waste users' time.

This is why computers (and the web) can still be slow even though both have increased exponentially in capacity and speed over the last two decades. I still run some very "old" software and with today's equipment it runs lightening fast. The reason it is so fast is because the software has not been "updated".

www world really needs more www "browsers", particularly some more that do not implement javascript. Would it hurt to give users more choice and see what they choose?

Only my opinion but there is much one can do without all the .js

I certainly do not need Javascript to fetch some newspaper articles via HTTP.

Would you believe I want to run something else other than Linux?