From the things-getting-worse-online department...
[
www.forbes.com]
Google Starts Tracking All Your Devices In 6 Weeks—Forget Chrome And AndroidGoogle announces its plan to make up for the loss of third-party cookies by attempting to track users via browser & device fingerprinting attacks, which most users would have a harder time opting out of.
Meanwhile, for 26 years, you could use Google's search engine without Javascript. Since January 15th, they serve a block page saying "Turn on JavaScript to keep searching." Fat fucking chance when we know what they want to do with it.
[
www.startpage.com]
Startpage only gets Google's "syndicated search results", from which Google deliberately leave out many results to try to force you to use them directly instead. You can instead access the full results via a proxy:
[
searx.space]
https://searx.space/In just the past year, we've seen,
- Reddit start rudely blocking non-logged in reading from VPNs
Fuck Reddit. Unfortunately more and more forums are dead, and the activity moves to Reddit instead.
old.reddit via tor still works, for now, but frequently requires 20 attempts to load a page due to throttling ("429 too many requests")
- Twitter/X start blocking people from even reading without an account
[
xcancel.com]
https://xcancel.com- Amazon reviews, which could be read anonymously for 30 years, moved behind a login wall,
- And now this.
And "AI" is the excuse for all of it. However, professional harvesting companies have full-time engineers to find ways past the browser groping & PoW defenses ([
web.archive.org]
example), so all it really does is screw over the hypothetical ordinary internet user.