 | frank liked Lanu – The Roosevelt Blues (feat. Megan Washington).  |
 | frank posted Google’s Safari Tracking: Here Come the Lawsuits. |
| | frank liked Avi Buffalo – What’s In It For? (OFFICIAL VIDEO).  |
 | frank published Firefox preferences for greater privacy. |
| | frank posted Android App Aims to Make Mobile Ads Less Creepy. |
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| | frank posted Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko – The Web is the Platform. |
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| | frank posted Facebook Pushes for Mobile Browser Standards. |
| | frank published Mobile browsers: Opera Mobile 12 shines in html5test. |
| | frank posted Track Who’s Tracking You With Mozilla Collusion. |
Month: February 2012
Mobile browsers: Opera Mobile 12 shines in html5test
Look at Opera Mobile 12 stealing Chrome Mobile’s & Firefox Mobile’s thunder:
And while there’s more to browsers then just HTML5-support, Opera Mobile 12 also seems to offer greater support for modern web technology features than IE9.
To be honest, Opera Mobile 12 doesn’t shine in the JavaScript performance benchmarks (2843,6ms for Sunspider, 463 on the Google V8 test, both of which at least Firefox Mobile does a better job at), but with the upcoming Firefox Mobile 12 and the (Android 4-only) Chrome Mobile beta the mobile browser “wars” have certainly shifted into a -much- higher gear. Let’s hope Microsoft (and Apple, but Safari Mobile isn’t too far behind yet) follows suit.
Firefox preferences for greater privacy
Although browser addons such as NoScript and Ghostery (which is cross-browser with some limitations) provide great protection against tracking, some people prefer not to have to install plugins. Firefox does have configuration options to somewhat limit what trackers can do. You can follow the knowledge base article here to learn how to disable 3rd party cookies (the default setting in Safari, which Google was caught circumventing).
If you’re up to it, you also simply open up the almighty “about:config” and tinker with the following settings (some of which aren’t available in the browser UI):
- network.cookie.cookieBehavior with values:
- “0”: allow all cookies (default)
- “1”: don’t allow 3rd party cookies
- “2”: don’t allow any cookies
- network.cookie.thirdparty.lifetimePolicy with values:
- “0”: keep cookies for as long as the server asks
- “1”: ask the user on each and every cookie set (try it out if only for fun, you’d be surprise how much cookies are set)
- “2”: cookie gets deleted when you close your browser (i.e. at the end of the session)
- “3”: cookies have a lifetime as defined in the “network.cookie.lifetime.days ” preference
- network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly: set to “true” or “false”
- privacy.donottrackheader.enabled: set to “false” (default) or “true”, which gently asks sites not to track you
Setting “network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly” to “true” is a low-impact change which should stop tracking-companies (think Media6degrees or Quantcast) from following you around the web.
If you want to stop Facebook, Google & Co to stop tracking you around the web as well, the above setting will not suffice. You should either log out of their sites as soon as you’ve done your business there or set “network.cookie.cookieBehavior” to “1” (which will break their “social widgets”). Or you can install Ghostery or NoScript, off course.
As found on the web (February 22nd)
| | frank published While waiting for Firefox Mobile 11. |
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| | frank posted EU court blocks net-filtering bid. |
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| | frank posted Google Bypassing User Privacy Settings. |
| | frank published If it looks like a duck; ditching Google Search (again). |
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If it looks like a duck; ditching Google Search (again)
Let’s apply the duck-test to Google;
- They’re changing their privacy policy without offering users a true opt-out
- They severely limited access for Scroogle, the Google-scraper for privacy-nuts, to the point where it is effectively out of service (although apparently Google isn’t the only one to blame)
- They have been caught with their hands in your cookie jar, not only bypassing user’s cookie preferences in Safari but also in Internet Explorer
So if Google looks, swims and quacks like it doesn’t care about user privacy, it must be that it … doesn’t care about user privacy.
I on the other hand do care about my privacy, so I decided to put even less eggs in Google’s basket: I’ve switched my search-engine to startpage.com, which is operated by a Dutch company (i.e. one which has to comply with stricter European privacy laws) and which guarantees privacy while being powered by Google.
Startpage’s only downside: they are blocked by our company internet-filter because they provide proxy-services, so as an alternative I also use the less powerful DuckDuckGo (I changed keyword.url in Firefox’ about:config to “https://duckduckgo.com/?q=”). And a nice bonus; DuckDuckGo also has a nice Android-app, which I have installed to replace Google Search on my Sammy SII as well.
While waiting for Firefox Mobile 11
I’m on the beta-release channel for both my desktop and mobile Firefox and my desktop has been running version 11 (with SPDY) for over a week now, but there hasn’t been an update for Firefox Mobile Beta in the Android Market yet. Apparently the Mozillians are working hard to finish the complete overhaul of the front-end, which integrates with Android UI (instead of using Mozilla’s own XUL) and services (synchronization in particular).
As I’m an impatient guy, I installed the Aurora version of Firefox Mobile, which is already at version 12 and that runs surprisingly well. Firefox Mobile already had the best HTML5-support and superior JavaScript-performance, but the new version (be it 11 or 12) adds a lower memory footprint and (much) faster start-up-time to that (and it has Flash, which I don’t care for really).
Mozilla is doing a great job in the mobile space, with the browser, but also with WebAPI and B2G. No, I don’t think I’ll switch to Chrome Mobile any time soon.
As found on the web (February 15th)
| | frank posted Myths & Realities of Drupal. |
| | frank posted Google to Take On iCloud and Dropbox with Drive. |
| | frank posted the trap of vendor prefixes/webkit, meet ie6. |
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| | frank posted Alan Moore on Anonymous’ rise. |
| | frank liked Unstable Condition – John Tejada (Kompakt).  |
| | frank published Tomorrow’s anti-ACTA protests and beyond. |
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| | frank posted Germany delays Acta signing. |
| | frank posted ACTA is a Bad Way to Develop Internet Policy. |
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| | frank posted Europe takes to streets over Acta. |
| | frank posted Mozilla Building Metro Version of Firefox for Windows 8. |
| | frank posted Apple Hopes to Block First Android 4.0 Phone in U.S.. |
| | frank posted Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die. |
Tomorrow’s anti-ACTA protests and beyond
Opposition to ACTA is to take to the European streets tomorrow, with protests planned in over 100 cities. But the mob that are the internet-proles isn’t alone in objecting to ACTA. Here’s a non-exhaustive overview of the point of view of some organisations that will be, in the next few months leading up to the vote in the European Parliament, important parts of the broad anti-ACTA coalition:
- Electronic Frontier Foundation: “We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA“
- Free Software Foundation: “Acta Threathens Free Software“
- Reporters without borders: “Online freedoms threatened by another step towards treaty’s adoption“
- Doctors without borders: “The deal claims to be an effort to protect consumers from fake medicines, but it will inhibit the production of legitimate, affordable, and safe medicines by giving companies far reaching powers to block competitors’ products.“
- Association Européenne pour la défense des Droits de l’Homme: “L’AEDH s’oppose à cet accord et appelle à se mobiliser à la fois contre des négociations tenues secrètes en dehors de tout débat démocratique et contre le contenu même de cet accord.“
- Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure: “ACTA’s intrusive character harms health and freedom of expression. ACTA will have a chilling effect on innovation, Internet service providers, mass digitization projects, startup companies and diffusion of green technology“
- EuroISPA, GSMA, Cable Europe & ETNO: “We are concerned that ACTA threatens to establish rules that go beyond the EU acquis and undermine the existing balance of the legislative framework, at the risk of undermining Europe’s innovation capacity and competitiveness“
- European Greens: “EU governments wave through ACTA deal, ignoring major legal concerns” with links to very in-depth studies about what makes ACTA a threat.
- Party of European Socialists: “ACTA is “wrong in both content and process”, says PES in strongly worded declaration“
If you want to join the anti-ACTA movement (you should), here’s what you can do:
As found on the web (February 8th)
| | frank liked High Highs – Flowers Bloom (Official Video).  |
| | frank posted Creating thumbnails with drag and drop and HTML5 canvas. |
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| | frank published Is Lana del Rey een Meat Puppet?. |
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| | frank published Fiesta: WP YouTube Lyte reaches 1.0.0. |
| | frank liked Flightless Bird, American Mouth (Wedding Version).  |
| | frank posted Acta protests spread over Europe. |
| | frank liked Anouk & Sarah Bettens – I Alone [Live and Acoustic]. |
| | frank posted Introducing Chrome for Android. |
| | frank posted Google to Strip Chrome of SSL Revocation Checking. |
| | frank published Chrome for Android finally arrives. |
Chrome for Android finally arrives
Just in from Google Mobile Blog: Chrome for Android is out in beta for ICS (Android 4) devices. I won’t bore you with the marketing video, but this “Under the hood” video is a lot more interesting:
Looks like the superb Firefox for Android is (finally) getting some competition. I guess it really is time to upgrade my Galaxy SII to the recently leaked ICS rom!