Hacker News Reader

Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

Eh, it would be really nice to have back a Web where clicking a link couldn't result in loading a page that's tracking your mouse movements while you're on it.

IOW a web that's safe and user-controlled, again. Just a damn hypertext document browser that doesn't also bundle a spying suite and hand control of it to anyone by default. We should have realized when people started putting up troll pages that broke your computer simply by using JavaScript's normal capabilities, that we needed to seriously rethink including a scripting language with all kinds of ability to act against the user just because they followed a link, as part of the Web. We didn't do that, though, and instead we got gestures at everything.

I'm not sure Gemini's the right solution, but that would be a nice thing to have, which we do not have now.

View on HN

> Eh, it would be really nice to have back a Web where clicking a link couldn't result in loading a page that's tracking your mouse movements while you're on it.

It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it. You don't have to throw the baby (gemtext missing inline links!) out with the bathwater.

> It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it.

Possible, but painful. Take HN's official search engine, for example: https://hn.algolia.com/

I open it. "This page will only work with JavaScript enabled" sigh Accept JS from hn.algolia.net and the mangled cloudfront domain (and make sure not to accept ravenjs.com). Possibly cdn.jsdelivr.net if I want to spare a click later, because I don't know if it's useful (it's not). Reload. Now the results are blank. Ah, it makes XHRs to telemetry.algolia.net, a mangled algolia.net domain, and three mangled algolianet.com domains. Think for a second. Accept the latter too (actually, either is enough, but I don't know that). Reload. Oh, it works now. Luckily there isn't a privacy consent popup I need to reject (or block with uBlock).

It's exhausting to do that almost every time you visit a new website. And with https:// URLs, you don't know ahead of time how many rounds of accepting you'll need to do before opening.

I’m not that familiar with Gemini, but implementing search functionality via Gemtext is impossible right? Would the appropriate comparison not be pages that are similarly static to Gemtext?

I’m not convinced that an entirely new protocol is necessary. How is the Gemini experience different from just browsing all webpages with JS disabled, or if you want to go even further, using a web browser that just doesn’t implement JavaScript?

There are a couple of search engines in Gemini already, as the server software can do as much computing as it wants before serving a page.

Even for gopher there is more than one search engine [1] besides the glourious Veronica-2.

[1] gopher://forthworks.com/1/contrition

I think abut it kind of like this (as someone who has never used Gemini):

There are all sorts of uses for cryptographic proofs; e.g. you can sign a document and prove that you were the one who signed it, or you can do a bunch of double-SHA hashes and prove ownership of a Bitcoin, you can prove via a SSL certificate that the content that claims to come from somedomain.example actually does, etc etc.

But there's no way, via currently existing protocols, to deliver a document with a proof that the document does not contain code designed to track the user or that the document will display properly without running arbitrary scripts.

Gemini is bikeshedding, yes. But it solves this social problem - a problem of expectations. You can't make a webpage with tracking scripts and deliver it over Gemeni because there's no point. No one who received the document would actually execute any of the scripts. So Gemini succeeds at creating a little insular community where tracking and web analytics are not just forbidden, but impossible.

Authors of Gemini admit scripts and tracking is possible on Gemini, just not implemented yet, like it wasn't implemented in Mosaic.

And how exactly do you plan to implement those? I assume by delivering HTML over Gemini?

It would be nice to use a platform without actively working to fight the intentions of the pages you visit.

It’s like the walled garden of Twitter, Instagram, freaking Pinterest… You need their account / app or both to see their content.

I like that the protocols prevent any abuse.

You can do that without making intentions verboten altogether. I'm happy to see someone's weirdly styled homepage or tumblr blog, and Gemini strips too much away for it to be worth it.

> It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it.

I've been blocking JS for a damn long time but it just breaks so many things. And if you selectively block JS with umatrix, that also breaks things sometimes.

I gotta say I'm really fed up with playing whack a mole. I'd like to find a corner of the internet where things just work and don't have antifeatures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com