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Comment by mateuszf | Hacker News Reader

> OTOH the history shows that technically poor, and even terrible, things can get wide enough adoption and stick with us for a long time; X is a good example, SysV init is another.

Funnily Unix and C are also examples of "worse is better".

https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

View on HN

Clicking that link from HN will (usually?) give you something NSFW; jwz doesn't like HN, so copy/paste the link if you want to see the real link.

Didn't do it for me after multiple attempts :(

You end up with a redirect to https://web.archive.org/web/20191014203443/https://www.jwz.o...

(Mildly NSFW)

perhaps your browser strips the http referer header (with custom settings or done by some privacy extension)?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smart-referer...

Wait, you do not block HTTP referers by default? In this day and age where vast majority of websites are out to scoop any and all available information about you?

The fact that you don't send a Referer may ironically make it more easy to track you.

It’s information for fingerprinting, sure, but not sharing the page you’re visiting from for every link click is much more important for privacy IMO.

Anything you do online can be used to track you. The point is that by doing this, you plug an additional information leak about yourself.

The best option I think is to spoof Referer to a random choice of known good values. This, of course, after disabling other, more reliable tracking vectors like JS and cookies that would just identify you as a Referer spoofer.

More testicles mean more iron.

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