22 ms·

GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

466 points by _bxg1 8y ago

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I'm honestly starting to reach the opinion we should all be VPNing our web traffic through Europe so we can pick up more of the benefits.
- matwood 8y ago
  But how will all the startups who need to sell your data stay in business? /s
  - olivierduval 8y ago
    who NEED ???? Are you kidding ??? Even without TARGETED ads, the world is still running, you know?? And if a startup business model is to make money by selling its user datas without telling them and without their consent.. well... let it die!!! And the world will be a better place...
    - hashkb 8y ago
      That was the joke.
    - salawat 8y ago
      People need to not downvote. The in-joke is the bane of communication. Let it be explicitly spelled out for those not in the know.
      - PostOnce 8y ago
        but now we have half a dozen comments including the original sarcastic one that add nothing, when everyone could have inferred all of this from the grandparent "we should pick up some benefits from routing through europe" comment. None of the replies, nor yours, add anything substantial, nor are very funny or interesting. That's why the downvotes have come -- to clean this up, so people can scan past the grey stuff that probably adds nothing.
      - TulliusCicero 8y ago
        It's not an inside joke, just sarcasm.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  It kind of makes me want to throw away the Internet and start over from scratch.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    The net, nah. The web, perhaps. Maybe time to take a new look at gopher and newsgroups?
    - nunodonato 8y ago
      I miss newsgroups so much. But different times.. i dont think it would work again, we need something new
  - niutech 8y ago
    This is what the Project AMP is about.
- AlexeyBrin 8y ago
  It is cheaper to block the ads and tracking scripts.
  - Forge36 8y ago
    Does the site degrade gracefully? What's the easiest way to train non technical users how to step through and configure each site they use? While the technical people have ability to implement solutions. I suspect many are short on time. I think a VPN despite it's cost is a better solution for many (provide websites don't restore the js/bloated functionality)
    - pwg 8y ago
      > Does the site degrade gracefully? Surprisingly many do. With that said, a fair number also require some tweaking and it is that tweaking that non-technical users will be unlikely to understand nor be patient enough to work through in order to get a particular site to work.
  - epicide 8y ago
    Lately, I've found using a VPS and setting up my own VPN is a bit cheaper (and safer? assuming you don't want anonymity). Vultr has a $2.50 a month box with a few European locations. You only get 500gb of transfer per month on that size, but you can test the waters and size as per your needs. They even have an install script for OpenVPN if you don't want to go through that headache. The only real downside is they limit you to 2 boxes at that size per account. Clearly just a loss leader for them (but it got me using their service).
    - crtasm 8y ago
      Alternatively, LowEndSpirit.com will do you the same transfer for about $5/year. It's NAT ipv4 but that's fine for VPN (you get some ports forwarded) and has native ipv6.
  - hk__2 8y ago
    > It is cheaper to block the ads and tracking scripts. The combined effort needed to produce and maintain huge lists of rules to hide ads everywhere is probably way above the one needed to setup a VPN.
- dominotw 8y ago
  or just stop visting crap sites. Sites that do that are a signal that content is crap.
- dominotw 8y ago
  Is anyone concerned that we are starting to replicate real world boundaries on the internet. Internet was supposed to free us from the limitations of the real world. World of internet was supposed to be the one where you can fluidly switch between your preceptions of self, become a new person whenever you felt like, leave your past behind. This was supposed to be a new world where people see themselves differently. Now we have created countries on internet. Transferred our real world identity onto internet. Masses were rushed into the internet before they were ready, before they got the concept of what internet means psychologically. Now we vast bureaucracies ruling the internet, so depressing. Depressing to see ppl on HN saying "Good" to every GDPR news. Sad to see internet age squashed by beurocracies right when it was getting started.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    We haven't "created countries on the Internet". The Internet exists in the real world, and it exists in countries. Those countries have laws, and they always applied. Governments can take time to adopt to new technologies, but this was always going to happen. And GDPR is an awesome thing, it's an example of governments doing the right thing.
    - dominotw 8y ago
      > We haven't "created countries on the Internet". We have though. Your world on the internet looks different based on citizenship( ipAdress) and ppl have to get a visa (VPN) to go that country on the internet. People hated it when China did this but somehow EU doing this is somehow commendable. Now people are europeans, americans, indians ect on the internet. I just want to be a human being.
      - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
        > Your world on the internet looks different based on citizenship( ipAdress) But this started long before government intervention ("personalization", "regional content"), and it is not the fault of the EU that tech companies pursued behaviors that were against the spirit of the laws. There are two ways for tech to respond to the multigovernment problem: conform to all of the laws throughout the world, or "create countries on the internet". As is evident now, most companies chose the latter
- salawat 8y ago
  Orrrrr.... We could actually send a real message that this type of behavior is completely unacceptable by raising awareness in our collective countries of origin to get GDPR like regulations codified in law so this type of abuse becomes the exception rather than the norm. Otherwise, it'll turn into a case where companies will farm out their web design and digital marketing to "marketing heavens" just like they already do creative restructuring and accounting for tax evasion purposes.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I'd say, why not both? You can advocate and also demonstrate that you walk the walk.
  - ashleyn 8y ago
    >implying Congress will do anything other than continue to line the pockets of rich cronies The federal government in the US is profoundly dysfunctional to the point where this isn't worth the time or money. However, it may be worth the effort on the state level.
    - acdha 8y ago
      > The federal government in the US is profoundly dysfunctional to the point where this isn't worth the time or money If everyone who says that voted in the primaries and mid-term elections it wouldn’t be true. The party of dysfunction is in charge now but only because so many people choose not to vote.
      - rainbowmverse 8y ago
        There's a host of reasons why the dysfunction goes all the way down to the low efficacy of voting, but HN is notoriously unable to handle these kinds of discussions without several 500-post demon threads. For example, people tend to get stuck in tribal thinking where one party or the other is to blame when the seeds of the problems go all the way back to the founding of the country. It's hard to shake people out of it so they can have a productive discussion even when everyone's trying to be fair and honest.
- ldjb 8y ago
  On the other hand I, being in the EU, am VPNing my web traffic through the USA so I can access websites that block access to EU citizens or provide a degraded experience (such as the USA Today website). I also get less of those annoying banners asking me to consent to getting cookies or the processing of my personal data when I only want to read an article (these types of banners are in fact a known attack vector).
wlll 8y ago
The day I added an ad blocker (Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock origin) was the day my CPU fans stopped spinning almost constantly, my battery life improved, web pages loaded faster and were more responsive. My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be. I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  >Ghostery You surely aren't using it anymore, are you? They are now owned by an ad company.
  - wlll 8y ago
    I haven't signed up for an account or given them any data (and specifically made sure that I don't share usage or diagnostic data with them). They are a German company very much covered by GDPR, so I think it's relatively safe to use the tool this way. I'd be happy to hear otherwise though.
    - seba_dos1 8y ago
      With Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials and Firefox' Tracking Protection available, there's little reason to keep using Ghostery (and Adblock Plus as well, FWIW). I also recommend Decentraleyes, Smart Referer, First Party Isolation and Facebook Container. Plus of course HTTPS Everywhere. It's hard for me to imagine productive browsing without most of those addons now.
      - 1over137 8y ago
        Good lord, what's that, 10 plugins?! Sure, we nerds could do that, but god help normal people! :(
        seba_dos1 8y ago
        That's what the Web is like these days, unfortunately. Browsing with JS enabled on my Nokia N900 with 256MB RAM is mostly impossible, even though it should be much more than enough to display most of the content. We nerds with our heavily configured browsers often overlook that, but regular folks have to live with it.
simon_acca 8y ago
For all that cannot access both versions, keep in mind that the EU one is a vastly simpler UI, it almost looks like just a blog archive, while the US one is a more feature full typical newspaper homepage. Not saying that either one is better, just that it's not an apple to apple comparison.
- DougBTX 8y ago
  > not an apple to apple comparison. Hm, what if you’re a reader looking for journalistic text articles, is the same content available on both?
  - simon_acca 8y ago
    I'm not a regular USA today reader, but from a brief look it seems like in the EU version only the most recent ~30 articles are "reachable" by clicks from the home page. p.s. the EU version is on it's own subdomain, maybe you can reach it from the US too: https://eu.usatoday.com/ https://eu.usatoday.com/
    - JohnTHaller 8y ago
      Nope, it redirects back to the regular one for US users.
      - nerbert 8y ago
        I’ve rarely seen a website load so fast on mobile...
  - ldjb 8y ago
    Whilst all the articles seem to be accessible if you know the exact URL, the homepage only shows the latest stories and there are no links to different news categories. Also, the articles seem to be missing links and the videos are not available. If all you want is the text of the articles and you only want the latest stories, the EU experience is probably great. But if you want more, you're probably going to be disappointed.
sigmonsays 8y ago
i have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. A single png image of a entire web page is definitely under 5.2MB. Personally, I can't wait for a shift in business practices. Ads have ruined my confidence in privacy. Most sites share your data with over a dozen different ad tracking vendors. I've seen twice that for a specific class of site, ie thechive.com.
- wlll 8y ago
  Back in 2000 people used to do this sometimes (but with jpegs). Exports from MS Publisher seemed to the worst culprit. They used image maps for navigation (https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp). edit Clearly this is a terrible idea, just to clear up any misattribution of intent.
- hashkb 8y ago
  Do you enjoy clicking links? Selecting text? Any interaction at all?
  - baseethrowaway 8y ago
    Let alone scrolling.
- hk__2 8y ago
  > I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst accessibility experience.
  - jpetso 8y ago
    Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs? If companies will gleefully ignore Linux (and BSDs), browsers other than the ones that ship with a major OS, privacy concerns, free speech principles or shipping to remote areas, I can't really expect them to care much for marginalized groups such as people with accessibility issues.
mromanuk 8y ago
Would be really cool to have a list of before and after (size drop), due to GDPR in popular websites.
Zash 8y ago
I would be very happy if everyone followed this example. Think of this as "modern" from now on. Return to the old, simple web that I know we all loved. Keep the lessons in usability and design learned in the last decade or two.
- rock_hard 8y ago
  Now we only need to find somebody to pay for that simple web....
  - otterley 8y ago
    That would be us. :)
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    I think there's somewhat of a false dilemma there. There are plenty of sites that I frequent that have tastefully located, static banner ads that are served directly through the site operator rather than through an add network. This has the dual advantage of allowing the operator some editorial control, and of producing ads that tend to be much higher quality (to me, anyway) because they involve actually telling me about new products and services I might be interested in because they are related to the actual content I'm reading, rather than being a giant pile of "one weird trick" ads and targeted advertisers' sad attempts to sell me things I've looked at before, and therefore either already bought or already decided not to buy. In essence, it would be a return to the kind of advertising that print media uses. Which, incidentally, tends to command a higher price than all this junk, anyway. I've also done paid subscriptions to various journalistic websites in the past. I've since stopped, generally because their reading experience is generally so awful that I've retreated back to print media for such things. So I suppose you could count me as one of those people who would be willing to directly pay for a simple web. (It's not like I prefer to kill trees. I just value readability is all.)
    - dkarras 8y ago
      I don't think it is a false dilemma. The problem is about the difference between the magnitude of revenue generated by the proposed methods. Both for publishers AND people interested in advertising products. Tasteful banners are nice but tracking the performance of such ads is very hard. Ad business is really cut-throat. When you visit a site, there literally are multiple ad networks / advertisers bidding for a spot in front of you, with real money, based on the site, your location and your interests. A huge network of autonomous trader bots that trade real money billions of times per day for a spot in front of a human's eyeballs. If an algorithm decides that you have a higher than normal probability of converting to a paying customer, they (an AI or expert system) decides on the spot to pay "premium" to be in front of your eyeballs. They do this while running A/B tests with different ad variations to figure out what converts better, for which segment of the population etc. Modern ads are not only kind of targeted. They are INSANELY targeted. There have been instances of people targeting singular people through ads based on geolocation and interests. A publisher cannot be expected to run all that bidding code on their own servers. Those networks are actually a network of networks. If you are buying ads today, you want analytics immediately to see how you are doing, how much you are spending so that you can improve and adapt before sinking more money on it. The profits generated by such methods are a couple orders of magnitude higher than a simple untrackable banner on a site placed by a site owner which gets swapped out whenever...
kisstheblade 8y ago
Tried to open the twitter link. Asked me to agree to their terms to continue to use th service. Answered no. No the link just says "Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later." (the link is https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow) Gotta love the GDPR, a nice way to get rid of all the "social media" crap and hundreds of ad trackers that has infested every corner of the internet.
- mort96 8y ago
  The decline button "works" for me, but just takes you to a page where you can delete your Twitter account.
- jwilk 8y ago
  Archived copy will hopefully work better: https://archive.is/NX3VY https://archive.is/NX3VY
urmish 8y ago
what is more scary to me is 2 different versions of the same website for 2 different locations!
- lccarrasco 8y ago
  Happens all the time (besides the obvious i18n) , especially with stuff that has different regulations per country, like gambling.
  - sbov 8y ago
    Yep. They also block countries until they can be sure they can abide by their regulations.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  And then we have many websites that show news display a different version with different content to every user.
  - MH15 8y ago
    That's why I love Hacker News -everyone sees the same thing
- oblio 8y ago
  google.com, google.fr, etc. :)
  - earenndil 8y ago
    Nope, those are actually the same site now (used to be different). If you want to change your language, you have to do it from settings (although google.fr will give you a button to change your language to french).
deleted 8y ago
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rayiner 8y ago
This is great. (1) How do I pretend to be from the EU? (2) Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS. The evolution of the Internet in the last two decades has been such a tremendous disappointment. It really peaked in the early 2000s (when I got my first DSL connection but before JS became a thing).
- highesttide 8y ago
  Do you genuinely believe anyone should be regulating using modern technologies on the web like that, asides from stuff related to accessibility?
  - rayiner 8y ago
    No I’m being glib. I’m not much of a believer in regulation. If the people want the Internet to be crap it should be crap.
- wlll 8y ago
  > How do I pretend to be from the EU? 1. Move here and get a job, I have no idea what the visa system is like for wherever your country is, but if you work in tech that's a good start. 2. Get a VPN
- jaredklewis 8y ago
  > Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS. Having politicians and lawyers micromanage technology decisions for the entire Internet? What could possibly go wrong.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Couldn’t get any worse? The Internet is basically unusable today.
    - orbital-decay 8y ago
      Sounds like an exaggeration since I'm using it to post on HN right now.
deleted 8y ago
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znpy 8y ago
And that's why people use as lockers.
_bxg1 8y ago
Websites can be "documents" or they can be "apps". It's great that we now have the option to build the latter, but far too many things that should be simple documents (news sites, I'm looking at you) are trying to be apps, and it's virtually always a worse user experience, setting aside the cost in load time, memory, and battery usage. I'm saying this as a JavaScript developer.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  The market has spoken. No seriously, if it sucks so much, why haven't users responded by going somewhere else, thus incentivizing sites to behave well?
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    > The market has spoken. That is one tread bare cop out. When the choice is to go without completely, few will do so (and those that do will often get marketing blitzed as "luddites").
  - _euvw 8y ago
    Or: the market does not (always) work. This too is an option.
    - TulliusCicero 8y ago
      Agreed, and my comment was partially as a response to the anti-regulation demo here on HN. But, it's still something worth probing into: if it really does make the user experience worse -- and I agree it does -- why haven't people punished those sites by going elsewhere? My best guess is that it's like bad customer service: it bugs people, but it's not really the differentiating factor when choosing a product/service provider.
      - mmt 8y ago
        Don't be so sure people aren't going elsewhere. Besides craigslist, there's also the not-Internet option, which I think many of us on here forget, possibly largely because it's so seemingly difficult to measure (in our skewed experience). I've met many young people who still default to pen-and-paper for things like note-taking. It's tempting to dismiss them as luddites, but I can't exactly blame them, given how much I know about just how user-hostile modern computer software and hardware can be.
chellam 8y ago
How do you think free sites pay for producing all that valuable content? I find it astonishing that most people seem to think having access to news for free is almost a right. If you had taken their paid subscriptions they'd have served you a less add riddled version.
- Semirhage 8y ago
  You can run ads without 5mb of tracking scripts. The options are not “invade evryone’s privacy to maximize profit” or “become a charity” after all. Most of the history of advertising functioned without probing the virtual rectum of your customers.
- pwg 8y ago
  Ads are perfectly capable of being served without javascript and without cookies and without tracking users across the internet. Serving ads requires exactly: 1) The HTML <img> tag. 2) Server side rendering (at least enough to insert a URL into the src="" attribute of the <img> tags. 3) A webserver that responds to the URL's inserted in #2 above by supplying an image. That's it. And, in fact, in the beginning of ads on the internet, the above was how all ads were served. But sites didn't care for it much, because they had to do extra work to serve ads. And advertisers very much did not like it because they had to trust that their partner sites were truthful in their reporting of add impressions (for the pay by impression model). And having the advertiser be the one running "the server" of #3 above (which would allow them to monitor impression counts) means that their partner sites need to be kept up to date with the latest set of active URL's, lest some <img> tags show the broken link icon. Also a huge hassle. The JS ad frameworks came about because the ad networks realized if they could lower the bar to gaining "ads" on a site, they could get more sites running ads (the push went something like "now use 'ad world 2.0', now just a single <script> tag in your website, no other work on your part"). And along the way the ad networks realized that the companies purchasing the impressions were willing to pay more for impressions that might be more "significant", and "relevant ads" were invented. Of course, the unstated, behind the scenes, part of "relevant" was that in order to determine "relevance" we now have to track and monitor the end users activities all across the internet so that if we see J. Smith searching for cat food on Amazon, we can now start serving him ads on facebook for catfood, and they will be "relevant" because we know he is interested in cat food for some reason. So sites don't have to go "ad free" to also be "track your users activities everywhere" free. They just have to return to the original model where the ad was the internet equivalent of a highway bill-board or a poster on the side of a bus-stop shelter. Untargeted, just there, maybe it is seen, maybe it is not.
orbitingpluto 8y ago
So we've recently heard in the news that cryptocurrency mining supposedly takes .5% of all global power. Now compare that to the extra electricity required for everybody undergoing the horrible experience of 80 poorly written trackers and ads constantly overloading each tab in a web browser. This reminds me of the American budget. Cut the funding for Planned Parenthood and the Arts but we need a hundred new tanks!
- makecheck 8y ago
  It’s similar to tons of paper wasted for flyers no one asked for. The people spamming this stuff are never really held accountable for their environmental footprint.
Animats 8y ago
They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34. Wow.
AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
I wish that all sites provided alternative mini-versions such as this.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
Even before the GDPR, text-only news sites seemed to be making a comeback. On bad cellular connections, these two are great: https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org
- nitrohorse 8y ago
  These are also worth including: https://legiblenews.com https://legiblenews.com https://thecontext.net https://thecontext.net
pickpuck 8y ago
Looks like this is for all Gannett-owned newspapers, including my local paper :D
getcrunk 8y ago
Their eu site only has access to a limited quantity of articles. Shame
pronik 8y ago
I have a very strange feeling that GDPR will end up resetting the internet (in a good way). It's already astonishing how we're getting unsubscribed from every possible mailing list we didn't want to be on in the first place, and it'll become even more awesome when all the websites will take notice, how little they are allowed to do in terms of piling crap on top of their web presence. I'm rather excited about the future right now.
smsm42 8y ago
When I see a site imploring me to disable my adblocker I think - nope, too late, you ad people screwed up this thing forever, look for a new business model. This one is dead. Or at least, it's dead for me. I am ok with having reasonable number of ads. I am not ok with blowing up site 10x and making my laptop max out CPU and my mobile devices get stuck trying to render all that garbage.

466 points by _bxg1 8y ago

I'm honestly starting to reach the opinion we should all be VPNing our web traffic through Europe so we can pick up more of the benefits.

matwood 8y ago
But how will all the startups who need to sell your data stay in business? /s
- olivierduval 8y ago
  who NEED ???? Are you kidding ??? Even without TARGETED ads, the world is still running, you know?? And if a startup business model is to make money by selling its user datas without telling them and without their consent.. well... let it die!!! And the world will be a better place...
  - hashkb 8y ago
    That was the joke.
  - salawat 8y ago
    People need to not downvote. The in-joke is the bane of communication. Let it be explicitly spelled out for those not in the know.
    - PostOnce 8y ago
      but now we have half a dozen comments including the original sarcastic one that add nothing, when everyone could have inferred all of this from the grandparent "we should pick up some benefits from routing through europe" comment. None of the replies, nor yours, add anything substantial, nor are very funny or interesting. That's why the downvotes have come -- to clean this up, so people can scan past the grey stuff that probably adds nothing.
    - TulliusCicero 8y ago
      It's not an inside joke, just sarcasm.
saalweachter 8y ago
It kind of makes me want to throw away the Internet and start over from scratch.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  The net, nah. The web, perhaps. Maybe time to take a new look at gopher and newsgroups?
  - nunodonato 8y ago
    I miss newsgroups so much. But different times.. i dont think it would work again, we need something new
- niutech 8y ago
  This is what the Project AMP is about.
AlexeyBrin 8y ago
It is cheaper to block the ads and tracking scripts.
- Forge36 8y ago
  Does the site degrade gracefully? What's the easiest way to train non technical users how to step through and configure each site they use? While the technical people have ability to implement solutions. I suspect many are short on time. I think a VPN despite it's cost is a better solution for many (provide websites don't restore the js/bloated functionality)
  - pwg 8y ago
    > Does the site degrade gracefully? Surprisingly many do. With that said, a fair number also require some tweaking and it is that tweaking that non-technical users will be unlikely to understand nor be patient enough to work through in order to get a particular site to work.
- epicide 8y ago
  Lately, I've found using a VPS and setting up my own VPN is a bit cheaper (and safer? assuming you don't want anonymity). Vultr has a $2.50 a month box with a few European locations. You only get 500gb of transfer per month on that size, but you can test the waters and size as per your needs. They even have an install script for OpenVPN if you don't want to go through that headache. The only real downside is they limit you to 2 boxes at that size per account. Clearly just a loss leader for them (but it got me using their service).
  - crtasm 8y ago
    Alternatively, LowEndSpirit.com will do you the same transfer for about $5/year. It's NAT ipv4 but that's fine for VPN (you get some ports forwarded) and has native ipv6.
- hk__2 8y ago
  > It is cheaper to block the ads and tracking scripts. The combined effort needed to produce and maintain huge lists of rules to hide ads everywhere is probably way above the one needed to setup a VPN.
dominotw 8y ago
or just stop visting crap sites. Sites that do that are a signal that content is crap.
dominotw 8y ago
Is anyone concerned that we are starting to replicate real world boundaries on the internet. Internet was supposed to free us from the limitations of the real world. World of internet was supposed to be the one where you can fluidly switch between your preceptions of self, become a new person whenever you felt like, leave your past behind. This was supposed to be a new world where people see themselves differently. Now we have created countries on internet. Transferred our real world identity onto internet. Masses were rushed into the internet before they were ready, before they got the concept of what internet means psychologically. Now we vast bureaucracies ruling the internet, so depressing. Depressing to see ppl on HN saying "Good" to every GDPR news. Sad to see internet age squashed by beurocracies right when it was getting started.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  We haven't "created countries on the Internet". The Internet exists in the real world, and it exists in countries. Those countries have laws, and they always applied. Governments can take time to adopt to new technologies, but this was always going to happen. And GDPR is an awesome thing, it's an example of governments doing the right thing.
  - dominotw 8y ago
    > We haven't "created countries on the Internet". We have though. Your world on the internet looks different based on citizenship( ipAdress) and ppl have to get a visa (VPN) to go that country on the internet. People hated it when China did this but somehow EU doing this is somehow commendable. Now people are europeans, americans, indians ect on the internet. I just want to be a human being.
    - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
      > Your world on the internet looks different based on citizenship( ipAdress) But this started long before government intervention ("personalization", "regional content"), and it is not the fault of the EU that tech companies pursued behaviors that were against the spirit of the laws. There are two ways for tech to respond to the multigovernment problem: conform to all of the laws throughout the world, or "create countries on the internet". As is evident now, most companies chose the latter
salawat 8y ago
Orrrrr.... We could actually send a real message that this type of behavior is completely unacceptable by raising awareness in our collective countries of origin to get GDPR like regulations codified in law so this type of abuse becomes the exception rather than the norm. Otherwise, it'll turn into a case where companies will farm out their web design and digital marketing to "marketing heavens" just like they already do creative restructuring and accounting for tax evasion purposes.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I'd say, why not both? You can advocate and also demonstrate that you walk the walk.
- ashleyn 8y ago
  >implying Congress will do anything other than continue to line the pockets of rich cronies The federal government in the US is profoundly dysfunctional to the point where this isn't worth the time or money. However, it may be worth the effort on the state level.
  - acdha 8y ago
    > The federal government in the US is profoundly dysfunctional to the point where this isn't worth the time or money If everyone who says that voted in the primaries and mid-term elections it wouldn’t be true. The party of dysfunction is in charge now but only because so many people choose not to vote.
    - rainbowmverse 8y ago
      There's a host of reasons why the dysfunction goes all the way down to the low efficacy of voting, but HN is notoriously unable to handle these kinds of discussions without several 500-post demon threads. For example, people tend to get stuck in tribal thinking where one party or the other is to blame when the seeds of the problems go all the way back to the founding of the country. It's hard to shake people out of it so they can have a productive discussion even when everyone's trying to be fair and honest.
ldjb 8y ago
On the other hand I, being in the EU, am VPNing my web traffic through the USA so I can access websites that block access to EU citizens or provide a degraded experience (such as the USA Today website). I also get less of those annoying banners asking me to consent to getting cookies or the processing of my personal data when I only want to read an article (these types of banners are in fact a known attack vector).

wlll 8y ago

The day I added an ad blocker (Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock origin) was the day my CPU fans stopped spinning almost constantly, my battery life improved, web pages loaded faster and were more responsive. My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be. I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.

NullPrefix 8y ago
>Ghostery You surely aren't using it anymore, are you? They are now owned by an ad company.
- wlll 8y ago
  I haven't signed up for an account or given them any data (and specifically made sure that I don't share usage or diagnostic data with them). They are a German company very much covered by GDPR, so I think it's relatively safe to use the tool this way. I'd be happy to hear otherwise though.
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    With Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials and Firefox' Tracking Protection available, there's little reason to keep using Ghostery (and Adblock Plus as well, FWIW). I also recommend Decentraleyes, Smart Referer, First Party Isolation and Facebook Container. Plus of course HTTPS Everywhere. It's hard for me to imagine productive browsing without most of those addons now.
    - 1over137 8y ago
      Good lord, what's that, 10 plugins?! Sure, we nerds could do that, but god help normal people! :(
      - seba_dos1 8y ago
        That's what the Web is like these days, unfortunately. Browsing with JS enabled on my Nokia N900 with 256MB RAM is mostly impossible, even though it should be much more than enough to display most of the content. We nerds with our heavily configured browsers often overlook that, but regular folks have to live with it.

simon_acca 8y ago

For all that cannot access both versions, keep in mind that the EU one is a vastly simpler UI, it almost looks like just a blog archive, while the US one is a more feature full typical newspaper homepage. Not saying that either one is better, just that it's not an apple to apple comparison.

DougBTX 8y ago
> not an apple to apple comparison. Hm, what if you’re a reader looking for journalistic text articles, is the same content available on both?
- simon_acca 8y ago
  I'm not a regular USA today reader, but from a brief look it seems like in the EU version only the most recent ~30 articles are "reachable" by clicks from the home page. p.s. the EU version is on it's own subdomain, maybe you can reach it from the US too: https://eu.usatoday.com/ https://eu.usatoday.com/
  - JohnTHaller 8y ago
    Nope, it redirects back to the regular one for US users.
    - nerbert 8y ago
      I’ve rarely seen a website load so fast on mobile...
- ldjb 8y ago
  Whilst all the articles seem to be accessible if you know the exact URL, the homepage only shows the latest stories and there are no links to different news categories. Also, the articles seem to be missing links and the videos are not available. If all you want is the text of the articles and you only want the latest stories, the EU experience is probably great. But if you want more, you're probably going to be disappointed.

sigmonsays 8y ago

i have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. A single png image of a entire web page is definitely under 5.2MB. Personally, I can't wait for a shift in business practices. Ads have ruined my confidence in privacy. Most sites share your data with over a dozen different ad tracking vendors. I've seen twice that for a specific class of site, ie thechive.com.

wlll 8y ago
Back in 2000 people used to do this sometimes (but with jpegs). Exports from MS Publisher seemed to the worst culprit. They used image maps for navigation (https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp). edit Clearly this is a terrible idea, just to clear up any misattribution of intent.
hashkb 8y ago
Do you enjoy clicking links? Selecting text? Any interaction at all?
- baseethrowaway 8y ago
  Let alone scrolling.
hk__2 8y ago
> I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst accessibility experience.
- jpetso 8y ago
  Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs? If companies will gleefully ignore Linux (and BSDs), browsers other than the ones that ship with a major OS, privacy concerns, free speech principles or shipping to remote areas, I can't really expect them to care much for marginalized groups such as people with accessibility issues.

mromanuk 8y ago

Would be really cool to have a list of before and after (size drop), due to GDPR in popular websites.

Zash 8y ago

I would be very happy if everyone followed this example. Think of this as "modern" from now on. Return to the old, simple web that I know we all loved. Keep the lessons in usability and design learned in the last decade or two.

rock_hard 8y ago
Now we only need to find somebody to pay for that simple web....
- otterley 8y ago
  That would be us. :)
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I think there's somewhat of a false dilemma there. There are plenty of sites that I frequent that have tastefully located, static banner ads that are served directly through the site operator rather than through an add network. This has the dual advantage of allowing the operator some editorial control, and of producing ads that tend to be much higher quality (to me, anyway) because they involve actually telling me about new products and services I might be interested in because they are related to the actual content I'm reading, rather than being a giant pile of "one weird trick" ads and targeted advertisers' sad attempts to sell me things I've looked at before, and therefore either already bought or already decided not to buy. In essence, it would be a return to the kind of advertising that print media uses. Which, incidentally, tends to command a higher price than all this junk, anyway. I've also done paid subscriptions to various journalistic websites in the past. I've since stopped, generally because their reading experience is generally so awful that I've retreated back to print media for such things. So I suppose you could count me as one of those people who would be willing to directly pay for a simple web. (It's not like I prefer to kill trees. I just value readability is all.)
  - dkarras 8y ago
    I don't think it is a false dilemma. The problem is about the difference between the magnitude of revenue generated by the proposed methods. Both for publishers AND people interested in advertising products. Tasteful banners are nice but tracking the performance of such ads is very hard. Ad business is really cut-throat. When you visit a site, there literally are multiple ad networks / advertisers bidding for a spot in front of you, with real money, based on the site, your location and your interests. A huge network of autonomous trader bots that trade real money billions of times per day for a spot in front of a human's eyeballs. If an algorithm decides that you have a higher than normal probability of converting to a paying customer, they (an AI or expert system) decides on the spot to pay "premium" to be in front of your eyeballs. They do this while running A/B tests with different ad variations to figure out what converts better, for which segment of the population etc. Modern ads are not only kind of targeted. They are INSANELY targeted. There have been instances of people targeting singular people through ads based on geolocation and interests. A publisher cannot be expected to run all that bidding code on their own servers. Those networks are actually a network of networks. If you are buying ads today, you want analytics immediately to see how you are doing, how much you are spending so that you can improve and adapt before sinking more money on it. The profits generated by such methods are a couple orders of magnitude higher than a simple untrackable banner on a site placed by a site owner which gets swapped out whenever...

kisstheblade 8y ago

Tried to open the twitter link. Asked me to agree to their terms to continue to use th service. Answered no. No the link just says "Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later." (the link is https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow) Gotta love the GDPR, a nice way to get rid of all the "social media" crap and hundreds of ad trackers that has infested every corner of the internet.

mort96 8y ago
The decline button "works" for me, but just takes you to a page where you can delete your Twitter account.
jwilk 8y ago
Archived copy will hopefully work better: https://archive.is/NX3VY https://archive.is/NX3VY

urmish 8y ago

what is more scary to me is 2 different versions of the same website for 2 different locations!

lccarrasco 8y ago
Happens all the time (besides the obvious i18n) , especially with stuff that has different regulations per country, like gambling.
- sbov 8y ago
  Yep. They also block countries until they can be sure they can abide by their regulations.
ajmurmann 8y ago
And then we have many websites that show news display a different version with different content to every user.
- MH15 8y ago
  That's why I love Hacker News -everyone sees the same thing
oblio 8y ago
google.com, google.fr, etc. :)
- earenndil 8y ago
  Nope, those are actually the same site now (used to be different). If you want to change your language, you have to do it from settings (although google.fr will give you a button to change your language to french).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 8y ago

This is great. (1) How do I pretend to be from the EU? (2) Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS. The evolution of the Internet in the last two decades has been such a tremendous disappointment. It really peaked in the early 2000s (when I got my first DSL connection but before JS became a thing).

highesttide 8y ago
Do you genuinely believe anyone should be regulating using modern technologies on the web like that, asides from stuff related to accessibility?
- rayiner 8y ago
  No I’m being glib. I’m not much of a believer in regulation. If the people want the Internet to be crap it should be crap.
wlll 8y ago
> How do I pretend to be from the EU? 1. Move here and get a job, I have no idea what the visa system is like for wherever your country is, but if you work in tech that's a good start. 2. Get a VPN
jaredklewis 8y ago
> Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS. Having politicians and lawyers micromanage technology decisions for the entire Internet? What could possibly go wrong.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Couldn’t get any worse? The Internet is basically unusable today.
  - orbital-decay 8y ago
    Sounds like an exaggeration since I'm using it to post on HN right now.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

znpy 8y ago

And that's why people use as lockers.

_bxg1 8y ago

Websites can be "documents" or they can be "apps". It's great that we now have the option to build the latter, but far too many things that should be simple documents (news sites, I'm looking at you) are trying to be apps, and it's virtually always a worse user experience, setting aside the cost in load time, memory, and battery usage. I'm saying this as a JavaScript developer.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
The market has spoken. No seriously, if it sucks so much, why haven't users responded by going somewhere else, thus incentivizing sites to behave well?
- digi_owl 8y ago
  > The market has spoken. That is one tread bare cop out. When the choice is to go without completely, few will do so (and those that do will often get marketing blitzed as "luddites").
- _euvw 8y ago
  Or: the market does not (always) work. This too is an option.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    Agreed, and my comment was partially as a response to the anti-regulation demo here on HN. But, it's still something worth probing into: if it really does make the user experience worse -- and I agree it does -- why haven't people punished those sites by going elsewhere? My best guess is that it's like bad customer service: it bugs people, but it's not really the differentiating factor when choosing a product/service provider.
    - mmt 8y ago
      Don't be so sure people aren't going elsewhere. Besides craigslist, there's also the not-Internet option, which I think many of us on here forget, possibly largely because it's so seemingly difficult to measure (in our skewed experience). I've met many young people who still default to pen-and-paper for things like note-taking. It's tempting to dismiss them as luddites, but I can't exactly blame them, given how much I know about just how user-hostile modern computer software and hardware can be.

chellam 8y ago

How do you think free sites pay for producing all that valuable content? I find it astonishing that most people seem to think having access to news for free is almost a right. If you had taken their paid subscriptions they'd have served you a less add riddled version.

Semirhage 8y ago
You can run ads without 5mb of tracking scripts. The options are not “invade evryone’s privacy to maximize profit” or “become a charity” after all. Most of the history of advertising functioned without probing the virtual rectum of your customers.
pwg 8y ago
Ads are perfectly capable of being served without javascript and without cookies and without tracking users across the internet. Serving ads requires exactly: 1) The HTML <img> tag. 2) Server side rendering (at least enough to insert a URL into the src="" attribute of the <img> tags. 3) A webserver that responds to the URL's inserted in #2 above by supplying an image. That's it. And, in fact, in the beginning of ads on the internet, the above was how all ads were served. But sites didn't care for it much, because they had to do extra work to serve ads. And advertisers very much did not like it because they had to trust that their partner sites were truthful in their reporting of add impressions (for the pay by impression model). And having the advertiser be the one running "the server" of #3 above (which would allow them to monitor impression counts) means that their partner sites need to be kept up to date with the latest set of active URL's, lest some <img> tags show the broken link icon. Also a huge hassle. The JS ad frameworks came about because the ad networks realized if they could lower the bar to gaining "ads" on a site, they could get more sites running ads (the push went something like "now use 'ad world 2.0', now just a single <script> tag in your website, no other work on your part"). And along the way the ad networks realized that the companies purchasing the impressions were willing to pay more for impressions that might be more "significant", and "relevant ads" were invented. Of course, the unstated, behind the scenes, part of "relevant" was that in order to determine "relevance" we now have to track and monitor the end users activities all across the internet so that if we see J. Smith searching for cat food on Amazon, we can now start serving him ads on facebook for catfood, and they will be "relevant" because we know he is interested in cat food for some reason. So sites don't have to go "ad free" to also be "track your users activities everywhere" free. They just have to return to the original model where the ad was the internet equivalent of a highway bill-board or a poster on the side of a bus-stop shelter. Untargeted, just there, maybe it is seen, maybe it is not.

orbitingpluto 8y ago

So we've recently heard in the news that cryptocurrency mining supposedly takes .5% of all global power. Now compare that to the extra electricity required for everybody undergoing the horrible experience of 80 poorly written trackers and ads constantly overloading each tab in a web browser. This reminds me of the American budget. Cut the funding for Planned Parenthood and the Arts but we need a hundred new tanks!

makecheck 8y ago
It’s similar to tons of paper wasted for flyers no one asked for. The people spamming this stuff are never really held accountable for their environmental footprint.

Animats 8y ago

They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34. Wow.

AnaniasAnanas 8y ago

I wish that all sites provided alternative mini-versions such as this.

LeoPanthera 8y ago

Even before the GDPR, text-only news sites seemed to be making a comeback. On bad cellular connections, these two are great: https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org

nitrohorse 8y ago
These are also worth including: https://legiblenews.com https://legiblenews.com https://thecontext.net https://thecontext.net

pickpuck 8y ago

Looks like this is for all Gannett-owned newspapers, including my local paper :D

getcrunk 8y ago

Their eu site only has access to a limited quantity of articles. Shame

pronik 8y ago

I have a very strange feeling that GDPR will end up resetting the internet (in a good way). It's already astonishing how we're getting unsubscribed from every possible mailing list we didn't want to be on in the first place, and it'll become even more awesome when all the websites will take notice, how little they are allowed to do in terms of piling crap on top of their web presence. I'm rather excited about the future right now.

smsm42 8y ago

When I see a site imploring me to disable my adblocker I think - nope, too late, you ad people screwed up this thing forever, look for a new business model. This one is dead. Or at least, it's dead for me. I am ok with having reasonable number of ads. I am not ok with blowing up site 10x and making my laptop max out CPU and my mobile devices get stuck trying to render all that garbage.