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Practice what you preach

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I spend a lot of time looking at screens and interacting with other people in a mediated way through digital technologies. That’s why it’s important to continually review the means by which I communicate with others, either synchronously (e.g. through a chat app or video conference software) or asynchronously (e.g. via email or this blog).

When I started following a bunch of people who are using the #100DaysToOffload hashtag, some of them followed me back:

@dajbelshaw you have a really beautiful site that doesn't open for me. First it's not compatible with LibreJs and then uMatrix block Cloudflare's ajax and you'll not get further than loading screen.

I know that some people are quite hardcore about not loading JavaScript for privacy reasons, but I didn’t know what ‘LibreJs’ was. Although uMatrix rang a bell, I thought it would be a good opportunity to find out more.

It turns out LibreJS is a browser extension maintained by the GNU project:

GNU LibreJS aims to address the JavaScript problem described in Richard Stallman’s article The JavaScript Trap. LibreJS is a free add-on for GNU IceCat and other Mozilla-based browsers. It blocks nonfree nontrivial JavaScript while allowing JavaScript that is free and/or trivial.

Meanwhile uMatrix seems to be another browser extension that adds a kind of ‘firewall’ to page loading:

Point & click to forbid/allow any class of requests made by your browser. Use it to block scripts, iframes, ads, facebook, etc.

Meanwhile, the extensions that I use when browsing the web to maintain some semblance of privacy, and to block annoying advertising, are:

So just running the tools I use on my own site leads to the following:

Privacy Badger found 18 potential trackers on dougbelshaw.com:

web.archive.org
ajax.cloudflare.com
assets.digitalclimatestrike.net
www.google-analytics.com
docs.google.com
play.google.com
lh3.googleusercontent.com
lh4.googleusercontent.com
lh5.googleusercontent.com
lh6.googleusercontent.com
licensebuttons.net
www.loom.com
public-api.wordpress.com
pixel.wp.com
s0.wp.com
s1.wp.com
stats.wp.com
widgets.wp.com

Disconnect produced a graph which shows the scale of the problem:

Graph produced by Disconnect showing trackers for dougbelshwa.com

This was the output from uBlock Origin:

Output from uBlock Origin for dougbelshaw.com

It’s entirely possible to make a blog that involves no JavaScript or trackers. It’s just that, to also make it look nice, you have to do some additional work.

I’m going to start the process of removing as many of these trackers as I can from my blog. It’s really is insidious how additional functionality and ease-of-use for blog owners adds to the tracking burden for those reading their output.

Recently, I embedded a Google Slides deck in a weeknote I wrote. I’m genuinely shocked at how many trackers just including that embed added to my blog: 84! Suffice to say that I’ve replaced it with an archive.org embed.

I was surprised to see the Privacy Badger was reporting tracking by Facebook and Pinterest. I’m particularly hostile to Facebook services, and don’t use any of them (including WhatsApp and Instagram). Upon further investigation, it turns out that even if you have ‘share to X’ buttons turned off, Jetpack still allows social networks to phone home. So that’s gone, too.

There’s still work to be done here, including a new theme that doesn’t include Google Fonts. I’m also a bit baffled by what’s using Google Analytics, and I’ll need to stop using Cloudflare as a CDN.

But, as ever, it’s a work in progress and, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry famously said, “Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.”

This post is day two of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Header image by Gordon Johnson

A modest proposal for nudging young people into finding a direction in life

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

If you go to the Mozilla home page, right click, and ‘view source’, you see something like this:

Mozilla source code

Underneath the ASCII art of a dragon breathing fire (and the Mozilla logo), the page reads:

Hi there, nice to meet you!

Interested in having a direct impact on hundreds of millions of users? Join Mozilla, and become part of a global community that’s helping to build a brighter future for the Web.

Visit https://careers.mozilla.org to learn about our current job openings. Visit https://www.mozilla.org/contribute for more ways to get involved and help support Mozilla.

I don’t know if they’ve got any stats on how many people respond to this call to action, but when I was at Mozilla, there were lots of people who I wouldn’t consider your ‘usual’ tech contributors. I’m guessing things like this make a practical difference.

Last night I had a dream. No, stay with me. In it, I was advising someone who was having a real problem with kids trying to get around filters and firewalls he’d put in place in a school. It’s probably because tomorrow I’ll be at BETT in London where all kinds of technologies will be on offer trying to ever more lock down the internet to children.

Before I continue, I’m not advocating a free-for-all. Goodness knows I have to lock things down a bit for my 12 year-old son at home. However, I do think there’s an opportunity here, and it’s related to what Mozilla do with their home page.

For better or worse, most educational institutions now do some kind of forensic tracking and analysis of searches made and websites visited across their network. Given the duty of care they have and the times we live in, I’d expect nothing different. However, I’m pretty sure we could leverage that to help young people make some choices in life.

It doesn’t have to be ASCII art and volunteering for a tech company! How about the following?

  • Repeated searches for food leads to an email invitiation to cookery club
  • Visiting a bunch of beauty and fashion sites leads to a prompt to ask if they’ve considered doing a qualification in design
  • Violations of school security and privacy policies lead to recruitment to being an ‘ethical hacker’ for the organisation

Schools and other educational institutions have so much data on young people these days. I just wonder whether, with a few little tweaks and some lateral thinking, we could make that useful to students, too?

I’d love to know if anywhere is already doing this! Have you seen any examples?

Got 5 seconds? Help with the redesign of this blog!

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Those who follow me on Twitter will have seen that I’m currently redesigning this blog. More on the theory and practice behind that to come, but I wonder if I could ask for 5 seconds of your time?

The first few seconds of visiting a website are crucial for visitors gaining an impression of its content and author. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to gain insights into what visitors think during that period.

Until now, that is.

Using a tool called Clue I’m able to take a snapshot of the new site and submit it for your consideration. The following link is available until midday on Wednesday 13th October 2010 – I’ll share the results. Take a look!

clueapp.com/17352

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