Firefox's Optional Tracking Protection Reduces Load Time For News Sites By 44% 207
An anonymous reader writes: Former Mozilla software engineer Monica Chew and Computer Science researcher Georgios Kontaxis recently released a paper (PDF) that examines Firefox's optional Tracking Protection feature. The duo found that with Tracking Protection enabled, the Alexa top 200 news sites saw a 67.5 percent reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set. Furthermore, performance benefits included a 44 percent median reduction in page load time and 39 percent reduction in data usage.
Re:Nice timing... (Score:4, Insightful)
True. I'd still like a fork that is DRM-free and doesn't advertise to me and a million other things. For those that want to enable it:
privacy.trackingprotection.enabled = true
Trolls ahead (Score:2)
Don't pay attention. It's basically just trolls pretending to be outraged just because mozilla decided to give the option to end users to use a 3rd party binary plug-in to handle DRM decryption in HTML5 videos.
(you know, the same way Flash, Java, Silverlight, etc. had always been plug-ins too. Except that DRM is much more restricted in what it can do, as it runs in a sand box that only allows it to work as a decryption filter).
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See, the problem is that the religious conservatives want other religious conservatives to have the privilege of being able to spout their hateful bile without any consequences. They don't want free speech, they want consequences-free speech for their own kind (but no one else).
e-commerce (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in e-commerce once. Our client had fifteen tracking pixels in the final page of the checkout process! It added a good 10 ~ 20 seconds to that page. That was on top of all the Adobe Omniture garbage.
I refused to pulled crazy triple shifts after I the Thanksgiving break and was let go. I was so glad. It was totally not worth it and unemployment felt awesome after all that rubbish.
Also, fuck TOMS shoes!
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It all comes down to trust. People who track you don't trust each other. They'd fake data, so why wouldn't you? They want first hand to the real data, before it's faked and pumped and fluffed to look like it actually is beneficial. And they don't trust the site provider to be honest either, so they can't have the tracking data stored with the site itself.
Re: e-commerce (Score:5, Insightful)
Because there's more than one set of greedy bastards, each of which have their own branding, and feel they deserve a slice of the pie -- because they all have executives who need hooker and yacht money.
Are you expecting greedy advertisers to pool their resources so users only see a single greedy embedded in their web pages? Or that somehow having the big giant clearinghouse of everyone's data would somehow be good?
I have an alternative, block the shit out of all of them, and then nuke the offices of tracking and advertising companies from orbit.
Just because a bunch of advertising agencies thinks they own the internet doesn't mean we should play along. In fact, we should try to weed them out entirely.
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Supposedly there is one 'Kinder, friendlier' advertiser [google.com] who we are supposed to fellate eagerly.
Ghostery and adblock (Score:2)
I use several anti tracking plugins and I've noticed that when I switch to a different browser without them the page load time is much faster. I also have googled safe surf turned on which blocks evil sites. In starting to think these tracking blockers and stuff slow things down. They don't really stop tracking since the blockers or google safe surf are middlemen who can track you.
Thus I would welcome a unified approach to protecting myself that was actually faster
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Block them at the Firewall.
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If you're on a lower end system, Adblock Plus can cause some considerable slowdown because of the manner in which it blocks ads/tracking cookies. You might consider trying ÂBlock instead. I switched about a year back and I've been really happy with it so far. It seems to work just as well, and without so much bloat.
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uBlock is a forked version that adds nothing apart from some donation links, the original version is better and was renamed to uBlock Origin
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Ghostery is awesome. I was a longtime AdBlock Plus user but I switched to uBlock based on a recommendation from a bigger nerd than I am, and I have found uBlock to be better in all the claimed ways. Check it out.
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I installed little snitch on a fresh install of Yosemite on my Mac recently. When I started up Firefox and went surfing I had to spend almost 20 minutes blocking tracing sites so I never see the bitches. I do it at that level instead of trusting Firefox to do it. I was amazed how much bullshit is out there.
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The customer. Especially if they're in a rush.
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The correct answer would be "the repeat customer", but maybe those sites that are pulling such stunts deliver such shitty service or merchandise that it would be highly unlikely that a customer ever came back, even if the checkout page loaded faster...
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The last page, as in the page after the customer has already paid? Who gives a shit how fast it loads?
Yeah, who gives a crap about the user experience of those who have demonstrated they are paying customers?
Re: e-commerce (Score:1)
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That was on top of all the Adobe Omniture garbage.
That makes an awfully expensive garbage!
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Are you still unemployed? :P
Nice way to show how bad sites are... (Score:2)
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Re:How to block Google analytics (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. I don't believe that you can block ALL Google stuff, but you can indeed block the GA servers. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho... [mvps.org] I'm to lazy to read all through it again, but I'm pretty sure that one blocks Google Analytics. If I'm wrong, you should be able to find one that does with a simple search.
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Blocking google-analytics.com doesn't work ?
Anyways, If you want to block all ads with ABP, just uncheck the very obvious checkbox in the settings, or use an alternative blocker like uBlock.
If you are paranoid about the blocker sending data to their company, know that ABP is an opensource project, so is uBlock, you are free to analyse the code and build it yourself. But considering the controversy about ABP, I guess serveral people alredy did this.
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and Adblock plus is simply a front company that sells the right to place adverts in front of its users.
Not a problem; don't use ABP.
Use uBlock instead. As a bonus, it's much much faster and uses far less memory.
Think that's impressive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Add adblocking on top of that and you will double those numbers.
The advertising industry is ruining the internet.
Re: Think that's impressive? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's amazing how incompetent and lazy Web developers have become.
As a developer myself, I feel the need to stand up on this statement.
I have built numerous e-commerce sites. Every one of them performed well and care was taken to reduce HTTP requests, optimize images, minify assets, etc. I do this because it's the right thing to do and I take pride in building something that works well.
Then the site gets turned over to the client and gets managed by SEO and marketing people. I will usually check the site out or show it to a friend or something a month or two after launch. I am disgusted (but never surprised) to see the slow page loads and poor response times that are a result of all the additional tracking garbage they stuff in the header.
I see a lot of people blame web developers for sites that perform poorly. Every single time I have had a hand in building one of those sites, the developer was never the person responsible for that stuff.
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What makes you think that you're the rule, and not the exception?
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Lack of forward thinking ruined the internet. The utopia is dead, capitalism will win out. There was no monitization strategy envisioned during the birth of the internet, and therefor it's not surprising the monitization strategy which companies are using offends the technologists sensibilities, since there was never to be one in the first place.
Until you accept it and start acting like the greedy, commercial actor which you are, someone with better hair and a flashier car will always promise you what you w
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The advertising industry is ruining the internet.
I challenge you to describe a plausible alternative.
Re:Think that's impressive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the public has 'spoken', and the Internet shall be ad-supported and otherwise 'free'. That doesn't mean that internet advertising has to be as intrusive as possible - just because it can be. Certain kinds of internet advertising is probably effective enough without tracking your every move. Even Google was pretty good - and financially successful - when it simply tracked your search queries and used aggregated data to produce good search results. The results may be marginally 'better' (i.e. personalized) today, but that's got plusses and minues. In any case, I wonder how much more revenue personalized searches generate for Google than before. You still have to click on the ads for them to make their money...
As far as other sites go, I imagine they're all sitting on huge troves of tracking data that they can't begin to figure out a use for - except maybe to sell it to somebody else which Google itself does not do, btw.
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I don't think the public has spoken. They're just not aware what's going on and the potential harm. Would people accept it if they had to click an "OK" button telling them they were being tracked each time a site tracked them? I don't think so. Sites added the tracking with very little public discussion or disclosure.
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For one thing there will be far less junk sites like ehow who thrive off of SEO spam for ad clicks. We'd also get rid of all the other shitty clickbait sites like Gawker and Buzzfeed. Finally it would bankrupt Facebook and put Fuckerberg in the poor house. Seems well worth it to me.
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Apparently, it means, 'no salary for jones_supa' by the look of it. I agree, that isn't plausible. For you.
The Internet historically has hated fucking spammers and advertisers. That hasn't changed. And the tools are in need of continual sharpening.
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If they had compelling content people would pay for it directly. Sites like ehow and Buzzfeed create crap but can stay around due to clickbait spam.
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Re: Think that's impressive? (Score:1)
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True, advertising is not the only way to fund the creation of articles and operation of a website. It's just that
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Re:Think that's impressive? (Score:5, Insightful)
No what will happen is shitty sites full of fluff and click bait will go out of business. Nothing of value will be lost.
Seems to work for OSM and Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, Wikipedia seems to work pretty fine without commercial ads (they do some fundraising sometime). And Open Streetmap seems to do fine, as are the plethora of services built upon it. Sometimes NGO:s and individuals do stuff and share it just because they want it done. Finding sponsorship or donations for the hosting fees are a minor problem then.
Re: Seems to work for OSM and Wikipedia (Score:1)
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Be important, get donations, be ran by volunteers or die, be a commercial site (webshops) or die.
Nobody needs the 100000th "i want to play with you, but first see my AAAAAAAAAAAAADS" page, if its not interesting anyway.
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But how about more specialized websites (such as Slashdot) or non-essential relaxation websites (YouTube for the most part)? Would people really bother to chuck in donations if there were no advertisements?
http://news.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/faq/subscr... [slashdot.org]
The answer appears to be "yes".
The way it's supposed to work (Score:1)
Now, someone somewhere pays for that 100/100 connection.
It costs me all of 43 euro per month, and has no limits on capacity or ports or otherwise; that's the standard contract here. We use it for accessing web pages at various sites, including banking and shopping (cookies destroyed and cache cleared immediately afterwards). The web server is just an extra. Like the mail server and media server and file server.
It all just happens to be your hobby.
And that's precisely the point. This is the way the internet is supposed to work.
Re:Think that's impressive? (Score:4, Insightful)
No more audiovisually distracting intrusive advertising burning bandwidth and CPU to peddle things you've already bought or looked into.
Newspapers and magazines had people managing advertising themselves, picking relevant products and the way it's presented. Why can't websites manage it like they do and take responsibility for it?
Lets all chant together (Score:2)
RequestPolicy
Re:Lets all chant together (Score:5, Informative)
+ NoScript + Ghostery + AdBlock + Block 3rd Party Cookies
For Chrome: ScriptSafe + Chostery + HTTP SwitchBoard + Disconnect
The internet is full of shit which needs to be ruthlessly blocked.
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+ NoScript + Ghostery + AdBlock + Block 3rd Party Cookies
For Chrome: ScriptSafe + Chostery + HTTP SwitchBoard + Disconnect
The internet is full of shit which needs to be ruthlessly blocked.
Safersurfing for persistent cookies not stored in the usual places.
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I use links2 as my main browser and only use Iceweasel+NoScript if the page is interesting enough to read. Haven't used an adblocker in a while since NoScript seems to work well enough for me.
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For Chrome: ScriptSafe + Chostery + HTTP SwitchBoard + Disconnect
Just FYI ScriptSafe is abandoned...
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hmm... that will not get you very far. You don't seem to deal with LSO cookies at all, adblock is now as closed source as it gets (unlike adblock plus) and you are not addressing fingerprinting either (extensions like rubberglove, privoxy/proxomitron and disabling font enumeration in firefox).
soon enough there will be a university degree in safe/private browsing.
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ghostery, but not adblock.
adblock: adblock privacy gives you ghostery
noscript: gives you a lot of ghostery
adblock blocks ads, even from the same host. And noscript can allow scripts per domain, while adblock (privacy) blocks some depending on the path.
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And under Firefox, don't forget to tweak your about:config:
dom.storage.enabled = false # DOM storage is cookies reborn
plugins.enumerable_names = "" # Useful for fingerprinting
network.http.sendRefererHeader = 0
network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer = false
geo.enabled=false
general.useragent.override = "???" # May not be worth it.
If you don't need them, WebGL and WebRTC are just big security holes:
webgl.disabled=true
media.peerconnection.enabled=false
Not privacy-related, but...
network.prefetch-next = false # Don't load pages without asking (esp. at work)
network.http.pipelining = true # Improve load performance.
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for useragent.override use a popular one, not a random one. you may be the only person with "???" as UA, but not the only one with " Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0"
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plus Policeman
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uBlock Origin [mozilla.org].
The author of uBlock threw a tantrum and forked his own code to uBlock Origin. The original uBlock is now largely unmaintained.
Faster! (Score:4, Funny)
Wow slashdot now loads faster!
Bullshit ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm going to call complete bullshit on this.
Because disabling 3rd party cookies and setting cookies to "ask before setting" will probably also have the same effect, because once you hit a site you've said "no" to, you never get asked again.
This is saying "our awesome tracking protection is faster than promiscuously accepting all cookies and running scripts".
The slowness comes from letting 3rd party tracking sites set cookies and run scripts ... which modern browsers seem to treat as the default, or letting any crap set cookies or run scripts.
Their tracking protection isn't magic, it's just blocking crap. Some of which can be blocked by default anyway.
And it's a setting which Mozilla backed down on enabling by default because advertisers whined at them.
Re:Bullshit ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not bullshit, it's an ex-Mozilla employee discussing just how bad the situation is. Turns out Mozilla don't have the clout to fix the situation without resorting to compromises we wish they wouldn't have to, but it's not bullshit. Just try it out yourself.
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Fair enough, but TFS makes it sound like this is a speedup due to how super awesome the tracking protection is, as opposed to the default crap of letting everything from a zillion other domains run by default.
Run everything from every cross domain crap and advertising the crux of the problem here, because ads and other tracking crap have fucked up the internet to the point that dozens of other domains get to know every p
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Perhaps. But I look at it this way. The people willing to not turn the settings on are paying the bills. I would tell everyone about it. If no script did not pretty much screw up ~10% of the time. Even this site touches no less that 5. You get on some sites and there are 50+ domains it touches. You have no idea which one is actually serving product or advert or tracking.
I have seen similar numbers in my testing. Throw in a proxy server and some DNS caching and the numbers half again.
I went from abou
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Another 5 or so by not using my ISPs DNS server.
And if you're using GoogleDNS or OpenDNS, you're back on the tracking bandwagon.
And maybe this is the way it should be... have the DNS providers be the tracking clearinghouse, and serve only relevant ads in a way that doesn't get in the way of the actual site content.
The fact that Apple sticks "Safari Reader" in the Safari browser says something about how bad things have got... not only do you end up loading a bunch of stuff you don't actually want that takes time/bandwidth, the end result is often bad enou
Re:Bullshit ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The slowness comes from letting 3rd party tracking sites set cookies and run scripts ... which modern browsers seem to treat as the default, or letting any crap set cookies or run scripts
When Newegg includes a 1px image from criteo.com, criteo is no longer a 3rd party. When newegg directs "promotions.newegg.com" to edgesuite.net, then edgesuite is no longer a 3rd party (and in a way that is much more difficult for even clever ad blocking software to detect).
The point they're trying to raise here is that including all of those web-bugs and their associated cookies does impact the visitor experience, and FF has a system to reduce it. You can take this from the user perspective: here's an easy way to speed up the web, without having to figure out which of the adblocking plug ins are really legit. You can look at it from the host perspective: if web bugs make your whole web site feel much slower, then maybe the analytics aren't worth it. There are a lot of people who just don't think about why their internet is slow. Every time someone stands up and says it takes longer to load all the ads on most pages than the actual content, a few more people will understand the cost of "free' web pages.
Re:Bullshit ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the reason it's faster is you avoid making extraneous HTTP connections which can be slow by slow servers.
A lot of ad and tracking servers stall out the browser, and because everyone uses them, they're overloaded. The browser might have everything it needs to render the page, but all the tracking stuff stalls out the renderer so you get only the headers. You can easily increase the speed if you tell the renderer to ignore those tracking objects and the network stack to not retrieve that content.
Slow ad servers are the bane of the internet - why ad companies don't purchase more bandwidth and capacity is beyond me.
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Yes, you're running to much stuff. Each of them requires CPU cycles. Drop Ad Block Plus, and install uBlock. I saw a rather dramatic drop in system resources with that alone. Keep Better Privacy, and Privacy Badger - drop Ghostery. Agent spoofer I'm not sure about - I tried it, and dropped it. Self destructing cookies? Why bother? Firefox has a session cookie setting, just use that.
But, most assuredly, overlapping security precautions will slow the system down. Perhaps if you're running a state of
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Oh - got it. Dumb question on my part, huh? I should have figured that out.
A little late (Score:5, Interesting)
I've already switched to Pale Moon, in part because Pale Moon loads sites much faster. I also benefit from reduced CPU usage, from about 60% to about 15%. Memory usage has also dropped, although less dramatically than CPU usage.
HELLO FIREFOX!! You started life being the leanest, meanest, most efficient browser in the world! It's time to get back to your roots!
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I'm using HTTPSEverywhere, version 5.04 on Pale Moon version 25.4.1 for 64 bit Linux. It seems to work off and on - it's not reliable. I also installed HTTPNowhere and that pretty simply failed, so I removed it.
Re:A little late (Score:4, Informative)
Uhhhhh - Pale Moon is not Firefox, and it hasn't been for some time. It is a fork, unlike some other Firefox copycats. I remember FasterFox, which simply took each new version of Firefox, and recompiled it with their own tweaks. That is not the case with Pale Moon. The code has been altered to suit a different vision, and they no longer even try to recompile new FF versions. Pale Moon is a complete break with Firefox.
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Their plans are readily available on the site I supplied above. If you're really interested, you'll go read about it. If you're not really interested, I can summarize, and say that they are cherry picking.
Let me make this a little plainer. Pale Moon took the Ghekko engine at - uhhhhhh, version 27 I think it was - and "froze" it. That is what they are working with. Yes, they have broken compatibility with some Firefox things. No, they don't intend to implement all the "improvements" that Firefox builds
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I'd try it, but they took out accessibility features. That just feels like a big fuck you to a segment of the population and I'm not even hard of seeing.
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You're talking like some kind of a damned fool now. So, I switched to a new browser. Let's say that you are right - it folds in two years. Are you saying that I can't come back to Firefox next week, next month, or next year? Huh? Is there some kind of a stop-bit in Pale Moon which will forever prevent me from installing and/or updating Firefox?
FFS, right now, today, in this world that I am experiencing right now, Blue Moon works better than Firefox, in some ways. That doesn't tie me to Blue Moon forev
For anyone else wondering what the hell this is (Score:5, Informative)
[Insert rant about FIrefox's god-awful UI and severely lacking menu system.]
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What do you mean lacking menu system.... ohh, right, you must be on Windows (or *nix, no idea how they do it these days).
A lot of UI/Designers forget that you can't just make a pretty OS X like app in Windows because there is no persistent menu bar across the top to hide all your features. Being forced to dig through that side hamburger menu thing is a PITA.
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there is no persistent menu bar across the top to hide all your features
There used to be. Is that gone? I wouldn't know - I stay as far away from MacOS as I do from GNOME, and for the same reason: if you want to do anything which even slightly deviates from what the UI designers planned for you to do (like enabling tracking protection) then you either know the secret handshake or you're out of luck.
Actually, the thing which has irritated me the most about Firefox lately is the lack of configurability of shortcuts. Ctrl-w closes a tab while Ctrl-q quits the program... right
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The irony: Look at the two urls belonging to the feature "SAFEBROWING_ID" ... oh yeah, there it goes again with the unique id (which is used for phishing protection as well).
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They covered all that in the article. Not just how to turn it on, but why it's not on by default/exposed in the UI yet. Seriously, you can't fail to RTFA and then be all "I had to look this up" and "you need to be in a special club to use this" when it explains what's going on right there in front of you.
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You're right that I didn't click on the links, but since the links didn't give any indication that one of them was providing the information that I was after I'm not willing to ta
Slashdot has a similar problem (Score:1)
If you block "player.ooyala.com", the page loads much faster. Turns out I'm blocking some analytic tracking thing.
Unsupported conclusions (Score:1)
In particular, the first sentence of the conclusion: "The Internet’s principal revenue model leads to misaligned incentives between users, advertisers, and content providers, essentially creating a race to the bottom."
I guess we'll just take your opinion for it.