Posted by mwheelz 1 day ago
> Every page you have ever visited knows at least this much. Most of them know more. None of them told you.
So? Why would I want the news site I'm visiting to "tell me" it knows my preferred language, that I'm using light mode, or the estimated location of my IP address...?
It's not surprising that a browser which renders text can be used to identify which fonts are available. It's not surprising that a browser which allows calculation with your GPU will identify your type of GPU.
The "without asking" framing is just silly. I expect to be asked for consent to use my webcam or microphone or exact precise location. But the last thing I want is to be asked for permission around detecting my local time zone or preferred language or my screen resolution or 20 other totally reasonable things for a website to be able to know.
The site does seem to be implying that disclosure and consent are the issues:
> We did not ask for your location.
> Nothing about this was requested. The information arrived on its own.
> Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. It will do this again on the next page you visit, and the one after that.
> No permission is required.
It's framing this as if browsers are maliciously volunteering information that ought to be protected, and that sites are maliciously hiding the information available to them.
It does seem to be clearly suggesting that even basic pieces of information ought to be available only upon request and that this must be disclosed to users.
You say this is "not a proposal to gate every header", but it's sure looking like something close to that to me.
> With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops.
What? When I enable JS it shows me a lot of stuff that is only queriable with JS.
No it didn't. It was queried by the JS running on the page. It's a fun demo but it could really do without the slop prose.
if you want to make me afraid of browser fingerprinting, try explaining how that information can be used to harm me. i'm aware that it's possible, i just don't care because it doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal.
I use windows color filters (Grayscale inverted is my preferred, in the past I used plain inverted) for poor man's dark mode (or light mode in this case) for stuff that doesn't honor my color scheme and hurts my eyes. It also has a hotkey, so it is really handy sometimes, but you need to enable it in the settings.
Assistive technologies are great, not only because they benefit those who have no choice but to rely on them, but also they can benefit the luckier people.
> The prose
> Hand-written · Template-based, not generative
> Every sentence on this page was written by Matt. The code selects among prose templates based on what your browser returned. No language model writes or rewrites anything at runtime. If a condition is not covered by hand-written prose, the page stays quiet about it — we'd rather say less than say something false.
It looks like this is an ad by the way, check op's posting history
My general location is also wrong.
This site's theme is barely visible.
And the entire idea for the site is at least couple decades old.
Unoriginal slop.