Funny, I figured the name would be derived from the Latin word for "life", but it's named after a person with the last name Vivian (which itself has roots in said Latin word).
Can you link these? This kind of comment can mean anything from "6 years ago I was constantly commenting against something they were doing and it kinda happened twice with some employees that are HN regulars and had it in their bios but didn't feel the need to disclose in the first message" to "It's a regular occurrence even despite the number of threads about Cloudflare here and they are often done with freshly created company accounts" or anything in-between. This makes it hard for one to judge for themselves how much of a real issue this has been vs a personal grudge someone might hold against the company.
Disclaimer: I don't have a damn thing to do with Cloudflare :).
(Incorrectly, I assumed that the name related to 'vital' - as in 'living' - but apparently not :
"It was named by Abraham Gottlob Werner in 1817, the year of his death, after either John Henry Vivian (1785–1855), a Welsh-Cornish politician, mine owner and mineralogist living in Truro, Cornwall, England, or after Jeffrey G. Vivian, an English mineralogist."
TIL that the name "ultramarine" is because it came from "beyond the sea" (Afghanistan) from the perspective of Rome. I always figured it was because it's such a deep blue.
Tangentially related - the low-poly retro horror game Cave Crawler (2023) touches on this concept (minerals growing on bodies). It's currently $1.99 USD and I thoroughly enjoyed a playthrough.
The protomolecule is such a haunting idea in hard science fiction, even the way that it disassembles and re-assembles human bodies makes perfect sense under assembly theory:
100%. This also bugs me: Why can’t websites set a cookie that stores whether I’ve consented to the cookie pop up? On some sites I have to keep consenting over and over (IKEA comes to mind).
This is mostly malicious compliance - the law does not require these annoying popups, but the websites want them to a) make you dislike the law that prevents them from freely collecting your data and b) wearing you down, so you just accept instead of making the effort to go and deny the data collection. Also, at this point it's probably also a lot of cargo culting.
It's mostly ignorance now. Most people don't know the law and don't know how to comply with it. If the popup method hasn't been invalidated by a court, why spend more on time, energy, and risk doing something different?
Is there really much risk in just not tracking by default?
I think ignorance is part of it, but also, they don’t actually want to do what users want them do to, which is just not track unless the user goes looking for options that actually require tracking at a technical level.
Stack Exchange is downright malicious in having you click it on each subdomain.
No, I don't care that one user created the Math forum and another created the Sysadmin forum, it's all run by you Jeff, that's who I am engaging when clicking the popup, not MathFan1982
Having a pop up for only cookies is silly, but at least as often they’re used for data processing consent and that makes more sense than putting the consent form on a splash screen or in the body of the page I guess.
I know this is a pretty unoriginal point, but I wish cookie consent could be a browser setting you set once and never have to deal with again unless you need to change it for a specific site. The nag screens have got to be the worst possible implementation, it's like none of the people who decided this was the way it ought to be done ever heard of alarm fatigue.
Its also malicious legislation. The EU could have easily wrote a line in the GDPR requiring companies to respect the Do Not Track header. But they chose not to. They also included various loopholes such as "legitimate interest". The legislation was just enough that it looks like they're doing something, without actually hurting the surveillance industry's bottom line too much.
The DNT header was devalued when Microsoft enabled it by-default in Internet Explorer, because it made it impossible for websites to determine if the DNT header was actually set by user-choice or not: any in-page cookie-consent popup that collected actual consent wouldn't change the DNT header sent by the browser, for example.
I honestly don't know if Microsoft in 2011 was doing this for unsurprising business reasons (e.g. as a ploy to hurt Google (AdSense was still all-the-rage), because it's good PR, because they had any genuine concern for their users' privacy, and to do anything to win-back market-share from Chrome and Firefox) - or if it was an intentional move to torpoedo the DNT header by showing how useless it is but only because they implemented it precisely so that it would be useless... but Microsoft wouldn't benefit from user-tracking over the Internet anywhere near as much as Google did/does/would-do.
In that case just like anti ad-blockers, the first thing we see on a page will be a very helpful guide to enable the opt-in header for that particular browser.
The EU is willing to force every user to go through an annoying browser ballot upon buying a new phone or computer, but can’t force the browser to include a DNT prompt up front if it’s that much of an issue?
Plus it’s not as if these companies weren’t willing to assume consent in the absence of the DNT flag. It sounds like a bit of BS to suddenly worry about what consent really means when it goes against their bottom line. I don’t see many hands being wrung about whether the user is meaningfully consenting when they click the easiest and most visible button to dismiss a banner that obscures a quarter of their screen.
If it was a browser setting, which already exists but gets ignored, it would get ignored and would throw up a popup anyway. You can use Consent-O-Matic[0] though, you can even select the types of tracking you do want.
No sites want that though because everyone would either check 'no cookies' or 'only necessary cookies' which would ruin their ability to make money off the vast majority of visitors to their sites.
