Interesting thread. But I don’t understand why the data needs to be collected and correlated by a third party, can’t the ads themselves detect views and clicks? (that’s what they need right?)

Or am I missing something about the process?

“Winning” is like making it to max level in a mmorpg. It’s not the end but it is the beginning of the endgame.

Best of luck with that.

If you’re making a mil a year in revenue there’s a good chance your profit margin is tiny and licensing fees could obliterate it.

Omg they’re going to get n-bombed by a 12 year old to death!

I am not sure how Manifest V3 is relevant here?

Because they literally tout security as one of the primary reasons for forcing it onto people.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/

The first line is “A step in the direction of security, privacy, and performance.”

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/

“Manifest V3 is more secure, performant, and privacy-preserving than its predecessor.”

It’s the first thing they say.

If it doesn’t prevent a malicious extension from lifting your password in perhaps the most dumb and naive way I can think of, then it seems fairly disingenuous to describe it as “secure”.

Doing the lord’s work

Fair enough. But devil’s advocate: presumably they’re still selling it there at a profit?

I mean there a number of big publishers who don’t seem to give two fucks about their image if there’s profit in it…

Ok. So. That doesn’t seem so bad to me.

I do not understand why publishers don’t cancel the keys. Why do they allow that parasitic industry to exist? Surely they know which key corresponds to a chargeback?

Ok so it’s my fault that now someone at Intel knows how much porn I look at because I clicked “next” on a beta driver?

They collect:

The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself

The information collected includes categorized web browsing history that shows how long and how often you visited specific categories of sites (i.e. social media, personal finance, or news). All site visits are classified into one of 30 categories. We do not collect URLs, web pages titles, or user-specific content without explicit permission from you.

Software usage: for example, frequency and duration of application usage such as Intel® Driver & Support Assistant, but not the application content itself such as specific actions or keyboard input.

Feature usage: for example, how much RAM you usually use or your laptop’s average battery life.

Other devices in your computing environment

Includes universal plug and play devices and devices that broadcast information to your computer on a local area network: for example, smart TV model and vendor information, and video streaming devices.

(the emphasis is mine, as is the minor reordering to not hide the browsing behaviour stuff at the bottom)

Yeah that’ll be a no from me there, bud.

I know. I don’t disagree. I’m just tired of everything being desperate to collect invasive amounts of information about me.

Because they invariably record way more data than they need to.

How bout just don’t install privacy-invading data collection services alongside a fucking device driver at all.

Did I say it was a native dropdown? Nope. I said it was implemented as a separate window.

You can demonstrate that by trying to take a screenshot of the whole window when you have an open dropdown (cmd + shift + 4, then press space to select a window), and you’ll see the contents of the dropdown aren’t in the resulting screenshot (but are if you select an area or screenshot the whole screen).

Regardless, the fix is the same: use the inspector tab to navigate to the option element inside the select in the DOM itself, you can manipulate the elements there, although if you want to change the styling supported CSS styles are extremely limited. If you really want to control the appearance of a select element you’re probably going to have to render them yourself.

You can access the option elements inside the select via the dom and style them there. In most browsers on a Mac (which that looks like?) those selects are actually implemented as separate windows - not even part of the browser, so you’re going to struggle to access them directly.

Firefox is awesome now. It was great, then it lost out a bit to chrome, but it’s back to being awesome. If anyone’s reading this and isn’t using Firefox, please switch!

And importantly, their import mechanisms are great. A typical user can switch with basically no effort. Next time they ask you for help, switch your parents too, and your siblings, and that neighbour who keeps referring to the internet as “the google”. Set them up with Firefox and ublock origin and they’ll be set.

You can trademark dictionary words.

You can’t trademark anything too generic, like you might struggle to trademark a drink called “drink” or something (although you might be able to trademark, eg, shoes called “drink”!), but there’s nothing stopping you trademarking words.

Oh, and, Adobe is an english word, too.