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

https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000166112615714816?s=19

by _bxg1 • 8 years ago

466 205 8 years ago

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

But how will all the startups who need to sell your data stay in business? /s

olivierduval• 8 years 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...

saalweachter• 8 years ago

It kind of makes me want to throw away the Internet and start over from scratch.

digi_owl4• 8 years ago

The net, nah. The web, perhaps.

Maybe time to take a new look at gopher and newsgroups?

niutech2• 8 years ago

This is what the Project AMP is about.

AlexeyBrin• 8 years ago

It is cheaper to block the ads and tracking scripts.

Forge36• 8 years 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)

epicide• 8 years 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).

hk__24• 8 years 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.

dominotw5• 8 years ago

or just stop visting crap sites. Sites that do that are a signal that content is crap.

dominotw5• 8 years 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.

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years 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.

madez4• 8 years ago

I don't follow your idea of the internet. The internet is a faster, cheaper, immaterial postal system. Of course there are legal frameworks and national borders in it.

anvandare• 8 years ago

The story of mankind, I'm afraid. A few people find a neat little spot where they can hang out, and for a while things are great, everything is pretty cool. Then, sooner or later, the group gets Too Big. Not so cool stuff starts happening, and where formerly you had a small anarchic group that worked with mutual understanding and (unspoken) agreements, now you have a need for Laws and Enforcement and Bureaucracy.

Every beautiful place on Earth will sooner or later be exploited for mass tourism and marketing. If you ever find such a place, keep it a secret, to keep it intact.

wlll11• 8 years ago

I feel freer now companies are limited with what they can do with my data.

I hope that preventing companies exploiting data will lead to more interesting business models than "provide distracting trinket and harvest data".

I don't want to take part in a grand age of the Internet which basically amounts to people harvesting information about me so they can do anything from trying to sell me shit to attempting to corrupt the democratic process.

rayiner7• 8 years ago

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.

Since when? The Internet was designed to be a robust way for Americans to communicate in the event of a nuclear attack.

digi_owl4• 8 years ago

Its been that way since day one.

The FBI can clobber your .com domain if you infringe US law, even if both you and your server are located in places it would be perfectly legal.

virgilp• 8 years ago

I see that you are one of the privileged, who didn't have to constantly deal with "this is not available in your country" messages.

white-flame4• 8 years ago

It comes down to one thing: Money.

The older internet was not a network of for-profit users trying to rent-seek on every digital interface & every page view. Standards were created by academics, internet committees, and concerned & involved users, trying to figure out what would work best as a resilient distributed system.

Now what goes on online is defined by the rent-seekers, the data pimps, and the predators. Their actions have real-world, legal consequences which ruin it for everybody, and their size & clout overwhelms the decisions of average people.

salawat2• 8 years 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.

TeMPOraL4• 8 years ago

I'd say, why not both? You can advocate and also demonstrate that you walk the walk.

ashleyn• 8 years 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.

ldjb2• 8 years 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).

wlll11• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Ghostery

You surely aren't using it anymore, are you? They are now owned by an ad company.

wlll11• 8 years 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.

_phaq• 8 years ago

They used to be owned by Evidon Inc., later renamed to Ghostery Inc., which was a classic ad company (sold data gathered from the opt-in GhostRank feature to help other ad companies figure out how to not have their ads blocked).

Nowadays, the Ghostery extension is owned by Cliqz GmbH, which is still an ad company, but they specialize in privacy-conscious ads (mainly ad personalization based on evaluating browser history locally), have a privacy policy that has no holes as far as I can tell, have all of their client-side code open-sourced and they are even minority-owned by Mozilla, so Mozilla can at least check over what they're doing and would probably give up ownership should Cliqz infringe on privacy (even if you think Mozilla itself is the devil, they would still likely do that for PR reasons).

So, I do think it is nowadays fine to use Ghostery. I still don't quite understand why it's so popular, there's tons of other tools for the same purpose (for example Disconnect, Privacy Badger, Firefox's built-in Tracking Protection), but yeah.

dman• 8 years ago

If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a couple of years back and the difference is astounding.

dmead• 8 years ago

Is there a list somewhere of what websites actually work without JavaScript enabled?

wlll11• 8 years ago

That's a great idea, I'll give that a go!

microtonal• 8 years ago

I good compromise is uMatrix, which by default only allows first-party JavaScript and cookies and makes it easy to quickly enable JavaScript/XDR/cookies when necessary using a point and click matrix:

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

cm2187• 8 years ago

I have been doing that for a long time but with the use of javascript framework & SPA for pretty much any website, including the least appropriate applications like blogs, I kind of had to capitulate in the name of convenience.

jlarocco• 8 years ago

I'd be willing to bet your "small number" of white listed websites is actually a lot more than you think. Turning off Javascript breaks a ton of sites, IME.

Same thing with cookies.

On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off nowadays, I hit one or two sites a day that won't even display and then often get stuck in infinite redirect loop.

Even white listing sites to use cookies is a PITA. Outlook for Office65, for example, requires white listing cookies from 3 or 4 domains, and due to the way it redirects, I had to dig around in Chrome's page inspector to even find out what those domains are. And of course the page itself gives no indication of why it's not loading, it just flashes between empty pages forever.

zzzzzzzza• 8 years ago

if that's too extreme try just disabling images.

nothrabannosir• 8 years ago

I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.

Which will be when access portals (currently search engines, and app stores for apps) heavily correlate resource usage with ranking / commission / etc.

Currently, the biggest access portal(s) are invested in ads, so not any time soon. But when every kb drops your pagerank one point, and every cpu cycle costs an extra penny of App Store commission, that is when the entire market will suddenly follow.

It’s not soon but it’s not never. It’s possible.

mygo• 8 years ago

I think this is sensible, because sites in the same industry should have the same energy consumption. For example a video streaming site will always use more CPU than craigslist, but that’s okay because a video streaming site is competing with other video streaming sites.

But I think the industry’s solution to this has always been to just wait for the inevitable faster and faster computers that come out each year, so that the lag becomes less just by the passage of time. But that becomes a cat and mouse game because as CPU’s and network speeds get faster and storage gets cheaper, developers can get away with larger sites and slower code.

case in point, nowadays you can barely browse the web with an iPhone 4, but when it first came out people weren’t waiting 30 seconds for a pageload on it. Even look at the average size of an app in the App Store now. I think facebook was 40MB when it first was released, now it’s 300MB. It’s like you have to keep getting newer and newer hardware just to keep up.

dawnerd• 8 years ago

Add a pihole into the mix and everything gets even better.

wdr1• 8 years ago

I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.

Maybe, maybe not.

The problem with straight up blocking of all ads is obviously it cuts of funding for content creators whose work I enjoy.

What I really want is blocking of the ridiculous crap you find in ads, but still allow reasonable publishers to show ads & monetize.

That's why I'm hopeful for the "Coalition for Better Ads". It's essentially trying to define that standard across multiple parties.

simon_acca2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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_acca2• 8 years 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/

ldjb2• 8 years 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.

MBCook• 8 years ago

This tweet shows the difference with screenshots:

https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/999998807856242688

denzil_correa• 8 years ago

The NPR version though ...

https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/1000000898289033216

distances• 8 years ago

I use uBlock to explicitly make some newspapers "article only", that is, remove all UI elements that are not the article. No ads, other article links, or navigation. Vastly improved reading experience.

Sylos• 8 years ago

Firefox has Reader Mode (little book icon to the right of the URL bar, appears on text-heavy sites) which should do this automatically.

I believe Safari has this, too. Might find an extension for other browsers.

sigmonsays• 8 years 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.

wlll11• 8 years 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).

edit Clearly this is a terrible idea, just to clear up any misattribution of intent.

hashkb2• 8 years ago

Do you enjoy clicking links? Selecting text? Any interaction at all?

baseethrowaway• 8 years ago

Let alone scrolling.

hk__24• 8 years 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.

jpetso2• 8 years 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.

earenndil2• 8 years ago

What about something like a PDF?

bschwindHN• 8 years ago

at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client

That point is never. Never do that.

bo1024• 8 years ago

What is wrong with sending plain HTML?

andrewmackrodt• 8 years ago

Opera mini used to work this way more than a decade ago, it was pretty nifty as it let moderately powerful feature phones access the 'full' (non client JavaScript) web efficiently. Such a thing is no longer needed though; I'd hope a large amount of that 5.2mb is for reusable assets making subsequent requests a few/hundred kilobytes.

lima• 8 years ago

Opera Mini is still a thing, mostly in developing countries.

mromanuk• 8 years ago

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

Zash• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Now we only need to find somebody to pay for that simple web....

otterley• 8 years ago

That would be us. :)

bunderbunder• 8 years 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.)

white-flame4• 8 years ago

It's a heck of a lot cheaper than it was in decades past, and things like torrents and ipfs can help eliminate high-cost choke points.

kisstheblade• 8 years 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)

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• 8 years ago

The decline button "works" for me, but just takes you to a page where you can delete your Twitter account.

jwilk• 8 years ago

Archived copy will hopefully work better:

https://archive.is/NX3VY

_blz2• 8 years ago

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

ajmurmann• 8 years ago

And then we have many websites that show news display a different version with different content to every user.

MH15• 8 years ago

That's why I love Hacker News -everyone sees the same thing

lccarrasco• 8 years ago

Happens all the time (besides the obvious i18n) , especially with stuff that has different regulations per country, like gambling.

sbov• 8 years ago

Yep. They also block countries until they can be sure they can abide by their regulations.

oblio• 8 years ago

google.com, google.fr, etc. :)

earenndil2• 8 years 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).

rayiner7• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Do you genuinely believe anyone should be regulating using modern technologies on the web like that, asides from stuff related to accessibility?

rayiner7• 8 years 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.

wlll11• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

rayiner7• 8 years ago

Couldn’t get any worse? The Internet is basically unusable today.

ahallock• 8 years ago

Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS.

I know this is well-intentioned, but so is most authoritarianism. We don't want to go down that road. Your personal preferences don't get to become law.

ddebernardy• 8 years ago

Not so, it's about basic accessibility, so blind readers can use your site. The EU could and probably should dig into that at some point too, and the rest of the world will (hopefully) benefit. (I added hopefully because, unfortunately, a number of websites have engaged in dick moves; namely implementing GDPR protections for EU users only or blocking EU users entirely.)

znpy3• 8 years ago

And that's why people use as lockers.

_bxg1• 8 years 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.

TulliusCicero5• 8 years 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_owl4• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Or: the market does not (always) work. This too is an option.

DmenshunlAnlsis• 8 years ago

People who say this, do you realize that if the market were left to its own devices cars would still be deathtraps without seatbelts?

The market isn’t magic, and the market we actually have is far from free.

white-flame4• 8 years ago

A properly working market requires informed decisions. Internet privacy invasions are not something that people are well-informed about at a practical level. So GDPR is actually helping to restore the market.

massysett• 8 years ago

They have. Growth is not through the WWW. Instead, it's through phone apps.

The news experience through websites is so bad that I don't read news on the WWW anymore.

acchow• 8 years ago

They do and they have. A ton of old media companies are going bankrupt.

USA Today definitely would not have survived another 5 years with 25 second page loading times. Or at least, such an old website wouldn't have generated enough revenue to survive long term (and USA Today would put their content on something else like Apple News, Youtube, etc)

mikec3010• 8 years ago

why do you assume it's a market in the first place?

niutech2• 8 years ago

This is what project AMP is all about: to make websites lightweight again, using radical but effective means. You can feel the difference in desktop Chrome using the AMP Browser Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amp-browser-extens...

thirdsun• 8 years ago

This is what project AMP is all about: to make websites lightweight again, using radical but effective means.

It's also completely unnecessary. Those radical means that lead to lightweight websites are plain HTML and CSS with as little JavaScript as necessary. I don't see the point of adding all that bloat, just to have it removed by a third party like Google.

chellam• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

pwg2• 8 years 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.

cge• 8 years ago

For that matter "untargeted" in this case just means "not targeted using unrelated viewer data." There's a significant amount of targeting that can take place by targeting based on the content and site. If anything, I would argue that the obsessive ad-network, viewer-based targeting online often has tremendous targeting failures as compared to traditional content-based targeting.

I started distinctly noticing this over the last year or two in thinking about how much more relevant I found advertisements in print magazines and journals as online. In literary journals, I'll find advertisements from publishers about their new releases in related topics. In scientific journals, I'll find conferences, new lab equipment and products for related fields, and so on. In design journals, I'll find advertisements for furniture, fabric, and so on. I get one local art magazine mostly for the advertisements, which are primarily new exhibition announcements. I actually somewhat enjoy seeing these sorts of advertisements: they're clearly marked as ads, but they're also actually useful. If, say, New England Biosciences puts out a kit with new features, their advertising in Science can let me know about an option I might otherwise not have heard about, for example.

Yet even before I started very strongly blocking as many ads and tracking online as possible, the targeting was horrible by comparison. There were the saturation-advertising systems, which would come up with wonderful decisions like "this person just bought a new mattress; that must mean they buy mattresses often, so let's show those advertisements" or "this word was used somewhere in the website, let's show stuff tangentially related to that word," or "everyone is interested in ONE WEIRD TRICK." Most of the time, these advertisements had nothing to do with me, or what I was reading, and they were obnoxious and unhelpful. How this became the norm online, just because on some rare occasions, the algorithms might work well, as opposed to the very well-targeted advertisements in print publications, is quite confusing.

orbitingpluto• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

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

LeoPanthera• 8 years 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://text.npr.org

nitrohorse• 8 years ago

These are also worth including:

https://legiblenews.com

https://thecontext.net

pickpuck• 8 years ago

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

getcrunk• 8 years ago

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

pronik• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

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

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