Tried to visit iheartumami.com using my (defensive) browser. The popup is nothing that was generated by the website, but rather an error message of the browser’s own creation. Yet I can see very well that the webpage rendered fine.
Normally if my Auto Overlay Remover extension does not remove a popup, I can force it to run to get rid of the popup. But because iheartumami.com was designed by some obnoxious sneaky motherfuckers, they somehow tricked the browser into falsely believing that it failed to load the page. The browser’s own popup blocks us from seeing the whole page. The user is /forced/ to:
- click cancel, which just loops. The assholes have you re-fetching the page and wasting bandwidth, b/c why would they give a shit about carbon footprints?
- click ok, which leads to yet another popup that demands you enable ads and popups with nothing else rendered, thus defeating the overlay remover.
- or leave it in an tab while viewing another, in which case the page reloads repeatedly non-stop which abuses both the user’s bandwidth and the website’s bandwidth.
This particular assault which somehow abuses our browser’s error detection has become increasingly popular lately.
The circumvention: $ torsocks lynx iheartumami.com. But not useful if pics are important.
Also about trust: trust is not all-or-nothing. Trust has context. I might trust my drug dealer to bring me some good quality cocaine. But I might distrust that very same person to house-sit for me. I do not wholly bluntly state: “I distrust Alice” and therefore wholly refuse to talk to Alice. I engage Alice in accordance with my trust for a particular situation.
It’s fucking annoying how people talk about trust as a binary… something you have or have not. I don’t trust a website with running Javascript from Cloudflare, but maybe I trust it enough to run its 1st party js. People have a right to autonomy. I will be the judge of what I trust and to what extent.
If I’ve learned anything in all my years (and especially with all the awesome work in said span from LGBTIA+, neurodivergent, and other communities), it’s that most of reality is on a spectrum. 🖖🏼