Editing 2432: Manage Your Preferences
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
The edit can be undone.
Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision | Your text | ||
Line 8: | Line 8: | ||
==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
− | + | {{incomplete|Created by COOKIES KEEPING ATRIUS IMPRISONED IN THE PAGE. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. This page had some confusing and possibly harmful edits that had actual real information in all of them, sorting it out is kind.}} | |
− | + | This comic is a play on dialogs that often pop up when you visit a website for the first time, and various other laborious interactions involved in settings required for visiting websites as one prefers. Often things need to be changed inside a browser to view certain websites correctly or safely: clearing or changing or disabling some cookies, changing scripts settings, installing and correctly configuring a plugin for an overlay network, running or configuring a proxy, enabling experimental features, restarting the browser with special flags passed, installing a fork of the browser such as with the tor browser bundle to access onion sites or the beaker browser to access dat sites, or installing and configuring a secondary gateway app such as with freenet, ipfs, or i2p. | |
− | + | The 2018 European {{w|General Data Protection Regulation}} (GDPR) and similar laws in other countries require websites to obtain consent from users for collecting personal data not essential to the functioning of the website, and to allow the user from opting out of such data collection. Web advertising agencies often collect as much information as possible about a user in order to display ads that the user is more likely to click on. One method of collecting data is to place small data files, called cookies, in the user's browser that can be used to identify the user across multiple websites. | |
− | + | Website operators have an interest in the user allowing cookies, both because targeted ads make money, and because cookies are used to maintain things like shopping carts and email states. As a corollary, they have little incentive to make it easy for users to turn off cookies. In worse situations, some websites try to pretend to be the user's browser, to possibly steal their identity or trick them into installing malware. In real browser settings, a user still might have to opt out of every tracking cookie separately using "confusingly labeled toggle switches". Randall compares this to ''{{w|Myst}}'', a 1990s puzzle video game. Note that the GDPR states that disapproval regarding what is shown should be as easy to choose as approval: websites and browser vendors doing what is shown in the comic is actually not complying with the GDPR, despite being very rarely raised by the European authorities. | |
− | Some browsers and websites do have actual games embedded within their various configuration | + | On the other hand, only someone very familiar with the technology behind internet advertisement and technology would really know what they are agreeing to in these situations. Hopefully in this age of millenials understanding these things is more common. But to many users, it just means "agreeing to whatever" so that they can see the website they came to visit. |
+ | |||
+ | Additionally as deep learning models rapidly spread, configuration settings may get more human. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The black background possibly shows how many sites are providing tools to switch between light and dark backgrounds now. For a long time white backgrounds were heavily dominating, and only people who understood esoteric configurations could use many things with a black background. More recently, it is easier. It is out-of-place for Randall to show a black background, as many of his comics take place in technical computer systems that often have a black background anyway, as most bare-metal computer terminals still do. | ||
+ | |||
+ | "Atrus" in the title text may refer to Atrus, the main non-player character in the ''Myst'' series. In the first game these people were imprisoned within books. Pages needed to be collected to complete the books, and it was incredibly hard to find a single page, involving extensive laborious navigation and exploration, and the finding and solving of hidden puzzles. In the ''Myst'' mythos, the books open portals to other worlds, a little like web hyperlinks. Similar to old websites, they were handmade tomes of letters written by people holding rare knowledge and skills. | ||
+ | |||
+ | "Atreus" was a mythological king of Mycenae. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Some browsers and websites do have actual games embedded within their various configuration interferes. Chrome for example has a well-known dinosaur game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Game . | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==Trivia== | ||
+ | The title-text originally said "Atrius" instead of "Atrus". A few hours after the comic's release, this was changed. | ||
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
Line 23: | Line 36: | ||
:Transport me to an immersive Myst-like game where I click confusingly-labeled toggle switches, only some of which work, perhaps never to find my way back to the page I wanted. | :Transport me to an immersive Myst-like game where I click confusingly-labeled toggle switches, only some of which work, perhaps never to find my way back to the page I wanted. | ||
− | |||
− | |||
{{comic discussion}} | {{comic discussion}} | ||