Saturday, March 16, 2013 5:47:47 PM
privacy, video
This talk is a jewel. I mean who better than a private investigator
to give a lecture on the situation with privacy ? Add a pack full of
humorous real-life in-your-face examples, and the result is just irresistible.
Steve covers a
lot of ground here, starting with the dramatic changes over the last 10 years. Anything from insanely intimate self contribution of data on myspace, twitter, facebook ... to google, gmail, amazon, cell phones, cell phones and did i mention cell phones ?!
Read more...
Saturday, March 16, 2013 1:06:04 PM
privacy, google, extension
It nicely wraps up a few userscripts i've grown very fond of. They make google clean, light and fast.
Try a search for "plane ticket" or "friends" with and without it to see the difference.
It removes all the distractions so you can concentrate on search results. No ads, no side pictures, no annoying javascript, just clean uncluttered search results ! If you remember how good it was when google was only doing search, well this is pretty close. It also gives direct links to websites, so they open faster and google can't track your clicks.
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Sunday, March 3, 2013 10:26:02 AM
dragonfly, opera
Dragonfly's deployment is pretty cool: the first time or when an update is available it gets downloaded from opera, but then it uses the application cache to store itself so it can start almost instantly afterwards. So we get the best of both worlds: always up to date, and quick loading.
There's an opera setting to set the dragonfly url, which makes it possible to run dragonfly entirely from disk. Can be useful to try different versions of dragonfly, or to avoid downloading it every time when working with new profiles. Cool thing also, application cache can now be completely disabled so it can't be abused for tracking.
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Thursday, February 28, 2013 10:17:56 PM
cache, opera, flash, download
A neat old trick to save flash videos: just monitor opera's cache and get them from there. Advantage: no need to download the file twice, works for every site, no extension to install etc. Here's a script for linux which handles most of the juggling. It also fixes some (intentionally?) broken files.
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Thursday, February 28, 2013 9:59:29 AM
noscript, opera, extension
scriptweeder is now available as an extension. Like NoScript it gives the user control back over which scripts are loaded in a page, only it's much much nicer to use, no need to fight with every new website here !
I embarked on this project because i wasn't thrilled with what was available for opera at the time. Main goal is to provide:
- an interface that's a treat to use, right under your hand
- filtering logic that is both powerful and easy to use.
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013 7:27:56 PM
annoyances, javascript, settings, privacy
...
Finally got my thoughts together after a long period of collecting little bits and pieces here and there. Strangely enough there doesn't seem to be too many resources on the subject, so here we go. This focuses on opera, but shouldn't be too hard to adapt to other browsers as well. Also keep in mind web stuff is not exactly my field. I'll stand for the results presented here because i tested them, but the explanations and big picture might well be inaccurate or incomplete. Find something ? feel free to add your bit.
Amazingly enough (or perhaps not so) in spite of all the advances in web technology over the years, when it comes to privacy all major browsers still come with incredibly poor defaults. On the technical side most of the issues are not new, the web was just not designed with privacy in mind. And with privacy not ranking very high in people's preoccupations, and a lot of money lying on the side of companies that have every interest we have as little privacy as possible, it's not surprising little progress was made. Tracking technology however has exploded so we actually find ourselves in a much worse situation than before.
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Sunday, February 17, 2013 7:56:21 PM
linux, opera
I use this trick to test different versions of Opera under linux. It's easier to just reinstall a different package to switch versions, but if you need to do this often this is much more convenient:
- no need to install at all, just extract package content somewhere
- each version has its own .opera profile, so no risk of screwing up settings going back and forth between versions.
- Even possible to run different versions simultaneously
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Thursday, October 11, 2012 2:58:46 PM
flashblock, filtering, privoxy, proxy
...
So we still don't have
true iframe blocking in opera. It's a serious issue.
The problem has been reported and might get fixed one day.
In the meantime, it's a great opportunity to work up a little kung-fu !
Let's get true iframe blocking working right now, and add a cute flashblock like interface to it.
Read more...
My Opera
