On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 06:49:52PM +0000, MAGA wrote:

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Zenaan Harkness zen at freedbms.net Sat Mar 11 02:22:01 PST 2017

Relying on senders to break their links for you

The archives are for the children. List MVP like you shuud know this.

The Referer request header contains the address of the previous web page from which a link to the currently requested page was followed.""

Any link that we post, will exist in a thousand other places, and may be linked, displayed, and therefore clicked from a thousand other places. Any child who is not taught the basics of sane internet use, is most likely to click one of those thousands of other links, almost all the time - most often from "Referring" Faceblock, Gargoyle and Twatter. Again, any (security or otherwise) benefit from our breaking of links around these relatively unknown parts of the web, will be utterly drowned out by all and sundry remainder intersected set of the Internet. Now, if that were still a net security benefit, I would personally still be inclined to break my links, to benefit the rare one who might otherwise click my link from the cp archives and thereby give an extra two bits of data about themselves to Gargoyle, Factsluts and Twitcher. But this is not actually the case AFAICT, because, to the extent that we teach people that clicking random links actually helps NSA/ Google track them, we are actually failing to educate on the underlying problem - insecure or tracking-supportive software (MUA, browser), and thus net-contributing to the problem. A random and uninformed web surfer who finds a broken link will either unbreak the link and be irritated, or just move on to somewhere that links are unbroken. A not so random informed web surfer will already be using software which protects to at least limited extents of possible (e.g. text based MUAs as many folk round here use), and the balance of users need education - broken links, by themselves, do not educate, at all - they just cause irritation. But it's slightly worse (net loss) since that irritation, for the non-conscientious folks, causes them to skedaddle to some place less irritating. If we put a warning next to every link (broken or otherwise), to "get educated about your privacy, anonymity and other forms of online security", then we might be going some tiny way towards this education. But broken links by themselves, in general cannot achieve this - except perhaps for highly conscientious individuals, who have yet to learn the issues involved, and who pretty quickly learn such things anyway (if they don't, they're not conscientious by definition). Teach you children, and friends who care and are conscientious enough to bother, as well as you can. That's the most effective thing we can do, and something I am personally proactive about in my life/ circles of acquaintances. tl;dr - I see broken links as a net loss to online benefits/ education possibilities, without any shadow of a doubt.