← Back to context

Comment by gruez

14 hours ago

That just creates another problem: if you're taking any measures to reduce tracking (ie. clearing cookies on shutdown or using temporary containers), this won't work. If anubis was being deployed on a site that a user visits often (eg. HN), the user might be convinced to whitelist it, but most anubis deployments are on random blogs or fediverse instances that I might not visit again in months. I'm certainly am not going to whitelist those sites, nor am I going to enable cookies wholesale just to avoid solving challenges.

Look, if you're going out of your way to break expected behaviour on websites you shouldn't be surprised when people code to the most common denominator and then you have weird subtle breakage as a result.

  • Gotta agree. Turning tracking cookies off? Sure! Turning session cookies off and then complaining that the server doesn’t remember you? Uhhh…

    And while I’m sympathetic to the idea of not wanting to run JS, to a first approximation modern browsers are JS engines that have graphical displays. How things should be vs how they are is a classic is/ought problem. The world took a vote on what a browser’s meant for and we lost. Fighting it today is rough; tomorrow, futile.

    • >Gotta agree. Turning tracking cookies off? Sure! Turning session cookies off and then complaining that the server doesn’t remember you? Uhhh…

      No, because there are technologies that don't have this issue, eg. privacy pass.

    • There's no mechanistic difference between the two types of cookies, let's not pretend this is an actual config choice that people are making.

      Whenever I hit Anubis, I simply go "keep your secrets then" and take my leave. The vast majority of the sites posted to HN (that catch my fancy) work fine or fine enough, and are better for it.

      If I really, really desperately want to check something out, I can always just turn stuff back on. Turns out, I rarely do.

      Shoutout to the particularly dogshit few that don't just require cookies and JS, but even third party JS. For reading a blogpost or a message thread!

  • Clearing cookies when all you want to do is read static content is not "breaking expected behaviour on websites".