The author does a great job expressing my growing frustration. I have trouble fathoming how it even furthers the goals of organizations, it’s not like they can’t fingerprint my browser and cross...
The author does a great job expressing my growing frustration. I have trouble fathoming how it even furthers the goals of organizations, it’s not like they can’t fingerprint my browser and cross reference.
Also, I grew up web wise in the 90’s, and miss the weird, random, and passionate projects that were as common as login prompts are now.
The web is full of annoyances all over the place. The thing that bothers me the most is how often I'm asked for permissions, either to get my location or to send me notifications. I don't know why...
The web is full of annoyances all over the place. The thing that bothers me the most is how often I'm asked for permissions, either to get my location or to send me notifications. I don't know why I haven't already set my browser to auto-reject them. But the worst offenders are the ones who put a pop-up notification asking if I want to give my permissions instead of just using the requester already built into the browser itself.
There is one particular login prompt that bothers me more than any other, though, and that is when I'm on a random site and it brings up a pop-up telling me to log in with google. I hate it because it's basically a trap. In most of the cases when I've seen them, there are simply no reasons for me to want to log in. But more than that I know that - as the author of this piece brings up - if I were to log in with Google that I'd be giving them my email address and they would immediately start sending me spam and possibly selling my email address to other marketers so they can start spamming me as well.
And of course I know exactly why the web is like this because I understand web marketing. When you accept, that's a conversion. It's proof positive that their marketing, SEO, and content research are paying off.
Of course this is all very cynical. A more pragmatic way to look at this is that these websites are acting in accordance to capitalism; they are paying people to make the content on their website and they need ways to make them profitable. And since they make money with advertisements they need to make sure they have the engagement to prove that their ads are worth spending money on.
That being said, I wish that there was a good in-between option between advertising and subscriptions. Subscriptions, after all, are terrible value propositions for people who aren't going to be scouring all of their content all of the time. There's no way in hell I'd pay the New York Times $17 a month for the two or three articles I'll click on from social media. I don't think it would be worth it even if I made them my only source of news. I personally might be better served with Apple News + since they aggregate a number of sources (including magazines) at $9.99, but I think that the way most people consume news that's still too much to ask. Instead let me just pay the 5-20 cents that my click would normally be worth if the page had ads on them.
You can disable that. Google Account options > Security > (scroll down) > Signing in with Google > Google Account sign-in prompts. Disable that checkbox for any Google account you're signed in...
There is one particular login prompt that bothers me more than any other, though, and that is when I'm on a random site and it brings up a pop-up telling me to log in with google.
You can disable that. Google Account options > Security > (scroll down) > Signing in with Google > Google Account sign-in prompts. Disable that checkbox for any Google account you're signed in with, and you won't be asked again.
Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately I think this prompt still shows up when you are not logged in and there is no way to opt out of those that I am aware of.
Thanks for the tip!
Unfortunately I think this prompt still shows up when you are not logged in and there is no way to opt out of those that I am aware of.
The Google login prompt annoys me too, and I also prefer to say logged out of Google. Couldn't it be blocked entirely with some rule in ublock? I haven't looked into that, but surely it must be...
The Google login prompt annoys me too, and I also prefer to say logged out of Google.
Couldn't it be blocked entirely with some rule in ublock? I haven't looked into that, but surely it must be possible?
I meant to mention something about the need to pay for quality content providers. Creatives, especially good ones, need to get paid, and get paid enough to have the space to be creative (another...
I meant to mention something about the need to pay for quality content providers. Creatives, especially good ones, need to get paid, and get paid enough to have the space to be creative (another day we'll have the conversation about desperation as a motivator in the arts). Also, we need well-resourced investigative journalism organizations and agents. We really need that. There's no shortage of glossy opinions, there's not nearly enough facts on the ground. And we need some real adults in the room.
I pay a half-dozen subscriptions, and read maybe 5% of what they publish, but I want my money where my mouth is. Apple news is a good approach, but they don't yet have the publications I really want (and especially precious little local news).
Don't get me wrong; I entirely agree that people should be getting paid for their work. I'm just saying that leaving choices between a subscription or advertisements is alienating a potential...
Don't get me wrong; I entirely agree that people should be getting paid for their work. I'm just saying that leaving choices between a subscription or advertisements is alienating a potential market.
In the past you didn't need to have a newspaper subscription; if you knew something was newsworthy you could simply buy that day's paper. But you can't do that anymore.
(Yes, I know that those papers were usually ad-supported as well, but they were also held back by extremely expensive publishing and physical distribution. The ads were also much less distracting)
I suppose advertising-supported sources kind of work in a way, but there's a whole can of worms involved with them; users can block advertisements, advertisers have monetized your browsing data and are now tracking your activity across the web, etc. And from my personal perspective, I think that paid advertisements are unethical for a number of reasons. News is especially bad because editors can and are influenced by their sponsors. The very fact that "advertorials" exist is a mark against society.
One of the most frustrating places I encounter this is websites for services that I would potentially pay for- but they only show you pricing after handing over information
One of the most frustrating places I encounter this is websites for services that I would potentially pay for- but they only show you pricing after handing over information
The number of enterprise SaaS companies who put their pricing as "call for a quote" is bewildering. I can't believe how many businesses don't realize that marketing themselves as "for small...
The number of enterprise SaaS companies who put their pricing as "call for a quote" is bewildering. I can't believe how many businesses don't realize that marketing themselves as "for small business" completely clashes with quote-only pricing because most small business owners will simply assume you're not price competitive and are a waste of money. Though I guess that's fair because in my experience they usually are overpriced and underperforming.
On a somewhat related note, because I was involved in the LastPass breach, I've been changing my passwords for everything over the past couple days. In so doing, I've become absolutely astonished...
On a somewhat related note, because I was involved in the LastPass breach, I've been changing my passwords for everything over the past couple days. In so doing, I've become absolutely astonished at how bad the authentication systems are practically everywhere. I've been using this as an opportunity to select strong, unique passwords everywhere, but SO MANY websites have a maximum character limit of 18 or 20 characters, including many banks. I can't fathom why so many sites would implement a maximum character limit, especially one so low.
It's absolutely insane to me that my Tildes account has a much stronger password than my Bank of America account.
If you want to know something really scary, password length limits are usually a sign that your password is not being hashed, which means that your password is likely being stored in plaintext in...
If you want to know something really scary, password length limits are usually a sign that your password is not being hashed, which means that your password is likely being stored in plaintext in their database.
I would say that's true of short length limits, anyway. Practically there has to be some limit, because hashing an entire book is impractical and likely to cause issues. BCrypt allows up to 72...
I would say that's true of short length limits, anyway. Practically there has to be some limit, because hashing an entire book is impractical and likely to cause issues.
BCrypt allows up to 72 bytes, which - with unicode - means you're looking at a smaller limit. Maybe 40-50 characters (or grapheme clusters) would be reasonable.
Along the lines of this article of death by SaaS is the fact that we seem to be coming full circle in a sense. More people, that I know of including myself, are slowly paying to take back some...
Along the lines of this article of death by SaaS is the fact that we seem to be coming full circle in a sense. More people, that I know of including myself, are slowly paying to take back some control. Two examples I can think of would be NextDNS(someone running your Pi-Hole essentially) and Kagi, a new browser startup that you pay for since it’s privacy focused. Reminds me of paying for Netscape to be free of the bloat that was IE.
I guess what I’m saying is that with ourselves/our data being the product, it’s nice to see some random random fun stuff before it all became serious business.
The author does a great job expressing my growing frustration. I have trouble fathoming how it even furthers the goals of organizations, it’s not like they can’t fingerprint my browser and cross reference.
Also, I grew up web wise in the 90’s, and miss the weird, random, and passionate projects that were as common as login prompts are now.
The web is full of annoyances all over the place. The thing that bothers me the most is how often I'm asked for permissions, either to get my location or to send me notifications. I don't know why I haven't already set my browser to auto-reject them. But the worst offenders are the ones who put a pop-up notification asking if I want to give my permissions instead of just using the requester already built into the browser itself.
There is one particular login prompt that bothers me more than any other, though, and that is when I'm on a random site and it brings up a pop-up telling me to log in with google. I hate it because it's basically a trap. In most of the cases when I've seen them, there are simply no reasons for me to want to log in. But more than that I know that - as the author of this piece brings up - if I were to log in with Google that I'd be giving them my email address and they would immediately start sending me spam and possibly selling my email address to other marketers so they can start spamming me as well.
And of course I know exactly why the web is like this because I understand web marketing. When you accept, that's a conversion. It's proof positive that their marketing, SEO, and content research are paying off.
Of course this is all very cynical. A more pragmatic way to look at this is that these websites are acting in accordance to capitalism; they are paying people to make the content on their website and they need ways to make them profitable. And since they make money with advertisements they need to make sure they have the engagement to prove that their ads are worth spending money on.
That being said, I wish that there was a good in-between option between advertising and subscriptions. Subscriptions, after all, are terrible value propositions for people who aren't going to be scouring all of their content all of the time. There's no way in hell I'd pay the New York Times $17 a month for the two or three articles I'll click on from social media. I don't think it would be worth it even if I made them my only source of news. I personally might be better served with Apple News + since they aggregate a number of sources (including magazines) at $9.99, but I think that the way most people consume news that's still too much to ask. Instead let me just pay the 5-20 cents that my click would normally be worth if the page had ads on them.
You can disable that. Google Account options > Security > (scroll down) > Signing in with Google > Google Account sign-in prompts. Disable that checkbox for any Google account you're signed in with, and you won't be asked again.
Thanks for the tip!
Unfortunately I think this prompt still shows up when you are not logged in and there is no way to opt out of those that I am aware of.
The Google login prompt annoys me too, and I also prefer to say logged out of Google.
Couldn't it be blocked entirely with some rule in ublock? I haven't looked into that, but surely it must be possible?
I meant to mention something about the need to pay for quality content providers. Creatives, especially good ones, need to get paid, and get paid enough to have the space to be creative (another day we'll have the conversation about desperation as a motivator in the arts). Also, we need well-resourced investigative journalism organizations and agents. We really need that. There's no shortage of glossy opinions, there's not nearly enough facts on the ground. And we need some real adults in the room.
I pay a half-dozen subscriptions, and read maybe 5% of what they publish, but I want my money where my mouth is. Apple news is a good approach, but they don't yet have the publications I really want (and especially precious little local news).
Don't get me wrong; I entirely agree that people should be getting paid for their work. I'm just saying that leaving choices between a subscription or advertisements is alienating a potential market.
In the past you didn't need to have a newspaper subscription; if you knew something was newsworthy you could simply buy that day's paper. But you can't do that anymore.
(Yes, I know that those papers were usually ad-supported as well, but they were also held back by extremely expensive publishing and physical distribution. The ads were also much less distracting)
I suppose advertising-supported sources kind of work in a way, but there's a whole can of worms involved with them; users can block advertisements, advertisers have monetized your browsing data and are now tracking your activity across the web, etc. And from my personal perspective, I think that paid advertisements are unethical for a number of reasons. News is especially bad because editors can and are influenced by their sponsors. The very fact that "advertorials" exist is a mark against society.
One of the most frustrating places I encounter this is websites for services that I would potentially pay for- but they only show you pricing after handing over information
The number of enterprise SaaS companies who put their pricing as "call for a quote" is bewildering. I can't believe how many businesses don't realize that marketing themselves as "for small business" completely clashes with quote-only pricing because most small business owners will simply assume you're not price competitive and are a waste of money. Though I guess that's fair because in my experience they usually are overpriced and underperforming.
We should be thanking them for helping us to filter them out?
On a somewhat related note, because I was involved in the LastPass breach, I've been changing my passwords for everything over the past couple days. In so doing, I've become absolutely astonished at how bad the authentication systems are practically everywhere. I've been using this as an opportunity to select strong, unique passwords everywhere, but SO MANY websites have a maximum character limit of 18 or 20 characters, including many banks. I can't fathom why so many sites would implement a maximum character limit, especially one so low.
It's absolutely insane to me that my Tildes account has a much stronger password than my Bank of America account.
If you want to know something really scary, password length limits are usually a sign that your password is not being hashed, which means that your password is likely being stored in plaintext in their database.
I would say that's true of short length limits, anyway. Practically there has to be some limit, because hashing an entire book is impractical and likely to cause issues.
BCrypt allows up to 72 bytes, which - with unicode - means you're looking at a smaller limit. Maybe 40-50 characters (or grapheme clusters) would be reasonable.
Along the lines of this article of death by SaaS is the fact that we seem to be coming full circle in a sense. More people, that I know of including myself, are slowly paying to take back some control. Two examples I can think of would be NextDNS(someone running your Pi-Hole essentially) and Kagi, a new browser startup that you pay for since it’s privacy focused. Reminds me of paying for Netscape to be free of the bloat that was IE.
I guess what I’m saying is that with ourselves/our data being the product, it’s nice to see some random random fun stuff before it all became serious business.