When I started angel investing in the late 1990s, a tech investment included a significant technology risk, with the potential upside being groundbreaking innovation. Being an investor at this time meant taking a considerable technology risk and betting on actual tech, such as nanotech, semiconductors or biotech.
E-commerce, albeit hyped and interesting, was not considered tech. It was “Business 2.0”, plain and straightforward, hype included.
I run a whitelist. I’d rather be more private than know what to blacklist (and there’s often a lot of extra JavaScript that gets called, mostly for tracking).
It’s not that tedious. You just add as you use the internet. Refresh the page when you’ve whitelisted.
Do you mean that your tool (whatever you use) can selectively block some JS while admitting others on one website?
Yes! NoScript is my tool of choice.
It can sometimes be annoying to have to whitelist things, but after seeing that when I allow the main domain (and maybe their CDN) through the filter, and ten more domains will try to do whatever it is they do—Google Tags and Analytics, some data broker, some cookie tracker, etc.—I’m willing to take that extra step just to keep all these companies from snarfing up my data.
A little annoyance is a small price to pay, in my mind.
Incredible, I had no idea that this was a thing. Is there any tutorial out there that you recommend to figure this stuff out? Or may I ask you questions if need be? I wanna start doing this, too!
Come to think of it, is it possible for you to export settings if you wouldn’t mind others (especially those who may not be as savvy) riding off of your work? Haha, that could be interesting.
I would, but I just switched to LibreWolf, and in the process, my settings got wiped out, so I’m still rebuilding.
Surprisingly, there’s still plenty of websites that don’t need much JavaScript at all, so I think it’s better to just start fresh for your personal use.
NoScript is pretty straightforward. Default behavior is to block most JavaScript, but they have a few that have been let through to keep the web mostly functioning. You can go into settings and change the default behaviors or just ignore all that and start whitelisting things as you go.