2019-12-02 - The broken www
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The last couple of days i've spent a little time on the
full-fledged www again after a long time. While i was anticipating
for some joyous experience, it only left me depressed and more
convinced that the www in it's current state is broken beyond
repair.
Instead of using the opportunity to retrieve some information FROM
the web, i mostly ended up fighting to prevent the unwanted
spilling of a my own information TO the web.
So before even visiting a single website, i ended up finding a
proper browser, and installed some extensions to hopefully prevent
all the excessive tracking, the cookie setting, and fingerprinting.
And the funny thing is, with these tools installed (for example
Noscript or uMatrix), it starts to become incredibly visible what
all these websites are doing in the background.
Of course in most browsers you could already see that in the
"Developer tools", but that was much less in your face. And the
thing is, the more i look into all the nasty details of these www
sites, the more i feel the need to leave this www place as much as
possible.
When browsing the www, i feel i am a now seen as a walking
beacon that has to be followed everywhere i go. Every step i make
is tracked, and every tracked step is being logged somewhere.
As a fun activity, browse a bunch of random sites on the web with a
standard browser installation, and find how many sites do not load
any resources from google or facebook. Those sites are hard to find
these days. (Yes fonts from googleapis are also from google...
good luck dodging those...)
In addition, find some sites that do not rely on any Javascript,
and while you're at it, find some sites that do not set cookies.
Probably by now, you're left with a handful of html 3.2 websites
that were built in 1998 or something :P
Now, you might say; ooh booh, you melancholic twat, it's not the
nineties anymore. Things change, so just stop whining...And indeed
things did change. And they will keep changing. But I feel the
current state of the www is unmaintainable and will change. For
example it might change because of;
- The excessive tracking, not only using cookies, IP's and header
information, but also fingerprinting through all kinds of browser
features such as the Canvas, or WebGL or name whatever element you
can find. It's nice to know your browser happily spills the unique
deviceid of your camera, even though you blocked camera access in
the browser. When you are on the www, all your shit is being
tracked, and it's being tracked in a much finer detail than i can
even imagine.
- The absolute overkill of running every single bloody thing on
Javascript. So you want to click this button here? Well, it's not
working without first downloading half a megabyte of our
ridiculous bullshit Javascript framework which also tracks you
every move. Because, you know what, just using a form and sending a
proper POST request to our server doesn't provide our marketing
people with sufficient information.
- As a result of this, browsers nowadays are sending away more
information than they are receiving information. And instead of
limiting this, somehow browsers seem to insist on expanding the
ever increasing amount data they can send away to these servers...
I mean, why on earth do webkit browsers even have access to usb
drives, or my clipboard or midi devices... Why do browsers insist
to have background synching in place (Oh hey, we've created a
WebWorker API, so marketing people can now spawn background JS
threads in your browser so it becomes much more convenient to track
everything you do on their website...)
All these things are completely unnecessary in order to receive
some bits of information in a browser. As said before, i want to
have a Server -> Client relationship, where my browser is the
client and a remote document is just sent from a server based on
my request. As a client i don't want to be the one that's sending
all my shit data to a remote server all the time so it can collect
every detail of me, day in day out, year in, year out.
Somehow though, i have the impression that at a point in the near
future, people will have grown incredibly tired of having handed
ALL of their data over to huge marketing companies for the past 10
or 15 years.
And the current state; that you hide behind VPN's, install a whole
number of browser extensions and other tools to prevent becoming a
target for excessive data collection is not maintainable.
Especially for something that was intended to provide a simple
server->client data transmission on request of a client.
At some point people will wake up and go back to the essentials.
And the fun thing is that for all this time Gopher has been quietly
doing this simple job pretty well, and hopefully will remain to do
so in the future. Quietly... and under the radar... for the people
who do care.
