SMS wrote:

Some recent posts in other threads in alt.home.repair indicate that
there is some lack of awareness of the need for browser extensions and
applications to manage privacy.

I read all the suggestions by in this thread including those of SMS
and Mayayana in particular. While most are good ideas they all involve
huge amounts of effort which gets added to the maintenance one has to
do on a regular basis. The complaints about the laziness of the
average user ignore that he's already inundated with upgrades to
numerous programs including the O/S and browser each of which requires
analysis to ensure that the upgrades don't disable or change other
carefully installed ad-ons or modifications.

Sometimes you can't even tell that disaster is a few keystrokes away.
For example I eventually upgraded Adobe Flash plug-in for Firefox
because of the annoying whining and -- whoops -- another add-on that
changed the color of "read" articles stopped working not only for
future items but for all those (thousands) I'd read in the past ten or
so years. They all reverted to the unread category. The solution for
the future was to re-install the add-on. There is no solution for the
past items. What a mess!

What's necessary is all-out war on the spammers, trackers, privacy
violators, bloat ware installers, and generally programmers who want
to keep their jobs. (My son, who's in the spamming business, goes
ballistic when I tell him, "Software is forever".)

But this isn't a war you can win on an individual basis. Really you
need help. An honest company that can stop the bad guys in their
tracks by making their efforts futile. For example, by telling a nosy
inquirer that you're not using AdBlock Plus or Ghostery or similar and
returning plausible but erroneous information to the sender. Any ad
the sender thinks he making your computer display will simply drop
into the bit bucket. Since most of these pages are in fact ads
themselves I see nothing immoral about lying to the owners.

Probably,with some minor exceptions, the days of the protection for
free seem to be over. It's unlikely that anyone trustworthy is going
to write (say) a sample hosts file complete with annotations as to
what each item means so it can be intelligently customized by the
user. Similarly if the anti-ad, tracking, etc package becomes popular,
Google and other schemers are likely to find a way around the
protection. Like an arms race someone will have to update the software
regularly to deal with the scum.

So the answer has to be some form of payment (horrible though that
thought is), not donations (don't work) and certainly not ads. And it
must pass the general approval test. The more comments and whining the
better provided that the originator actually takes notice.

***********

And, slightly off topic: Those who suggest using the ISP as an email
provider ignore the fact that one would like to change ISP's
occasionally without killing all the contacts one has established over
the years. Further one of my email accounts is with Verizon, my ISP.
They have no anti-spam functionality and they keep wanting me to
change the port. I just ignore them and so far all (except for the
spam) is still well.

Nor is it practical to use a free email account. Last time I checked
they all seem to be in Bangladesh or other third-world countries and
are likely of short longevity. Nope, we're stuck with gmail or
similar.

************

And even further off-topic (although someone mentioned it) is the
inexcusable use of interpreters like .net. About 5 years ago I changed
my back-up program and one of the parameters I insisted on was that it
was written in a compiled stand alone language (Assembler, C, or
similar) and only relies on the O/S for something everyone has to rely
on it for (like writes to media). It also has to be portable and
produce a back-up file that can be used just as is. I.e. it's a
vanilla copy program (no compression or special file format) but it
doesn't copy identical already backed-up files.

I'm not going to turn this into spam so no names but it is right
priced (i.e. free) and with the addition of a replaceable hard drive
(several of them) I have a fast easy copy of my entire system. Change
that prevents change is possible.