I discovered, a while back, that the Guardian's web pages also have a line that puts the known 'nasty' tracking cookie revsci on your computer. Some other newspapers seemed to have adopted the same practice later, as visiting those didn't do the same at first.
That, of course, is easy to block (e.g. in the 'exceptions' settings of cookies in Firefox), though I didn't know enough to do that until more recently.
All this additional baggage that comes with modern web pages is a real bind, and the simplest of pages (actual content-wise) can nowadays be a fair chunk of a megabyte in size – hundreds of times what the information itself takes up.
It is hardly surprising, I suppose, that among all the external (i.e. from other sites) references and links, something bad will occasionally turn up...
I discovered, a while back, that the Guardian's web pages also have a line that puts the known 'nasty' tracking cookie revsci on your computer. Some other newspapers seemed to have adopted the same practice later, as visiting those didn't do the same at first.
ReplyDeleteThat, of course, is easy to block (e.g. in the 'exceptions' settings of cookies in Firefox), though I didn't know enough to do that until more recently.
All this additional baggage that comes with modern web pages is a real bind, and the simplest of pages (actual content-wise) can nowadays be a fair chunk of a megabyte in size – hundreds of times what the information itself takes up.
It is hardly surprising, I suppose, that among all the external (i.e. from other sites) references and links, something bad will occasionally turn up...
Oooh, I've zapped that cookie so many times!
ReplyDeleteDidn't know about the Firefox setting though - will have to see if Chrome has a similar one.