A week with tor
Posted: June 15, 2011, 1:13 pm
I saw an article a few weeks back about news & search providers "customizing the user experience"; basically only showing them the news & ads that are most likely to make them come back for more.
It's the norm, I really don't think you're seeing a "newsprint" type of view anywhere, where you get to see everything and pick what's of interest to you.
Later I did a search looking for a book from work and found it cheap from a corporate PC appearing to be in IL. Went looking for it from a home PC and it was only with some extra work - as I knew it existed cheaper - that I was able to find it. Otherwise I'd have been out an extra $6.
That annoyed to me the extent that I loaded a tor client on my home PC and nuked the old identifying marks. Google, FB and others don't play nice with tor as they aren't profiting (as much) from a non-trackable user. Bing works fine oddly enough.
News articles offered at news sites & search results change noticably, as they don't have a predefined profile to tuck you into. Drudge shifted farther right for instance. Fox changed a lot too, from looking at them previously they're very heavily "optimized" too. It's amazing the amount of crap they run if you don't have script blocker(s) running.
It's the norm, I really don't think you're seeing a "newsprint" type of view anywhere, where you get to see everything and pick what's of interest to you.
Later I did a search looking for a book from work and found it cheap from a corporate PC appearing to be in IL. Went looking for it from a home PC and it was only with some extra work - as I knew it existed cheaper - that I was able to find it. Otherwise I'd have been out an extra $6.
That annoyed to me the extent that I loaded a tor client on my home PC and nuked the old identifying marks. Google, FB and others don't play nice with tor as they aren't profiting (as much) from a non-trackable user. Bing works fine oddly enough.
News articles offered at news sites & search results change noticably, as they don't have a predefined profile to tuck you into. Drudge shifted farther right for instance. Fox changed a lot too, from looking at them previously they're very heavily "optimized" too. It's amazing the amount of crap they run if you don't have script blocker(s) running.