Comrades,

This is glorious news! Our collectivist leadership at Google will be tracking users, even while logged off, in the name of The Common Good™, as in "better service." Yes, better service for all.

What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.

Source

Yes, yes, of course, for better service for us, for our own good! I ask you: would a company named "Google" do anything underhanded? That's like saying a Vice President named "Biden" could be stupid. Or something.



Fight Google; use your browser settings to block their effing cookies. Or use Bing.

Often as I sit waiting and waiting for the People's Blog to load I notice way down in the LEFT margin of my browser the words "waiting for google analytics"...

Now I am understanding the purpose of the delay. I feel well served.

I know how Google personalizes its search.

Last month I was searching images to illustrate my Butt Bombing al Qaeda Training Video. After all the sex toys, gay porn, and S&M pictures I saw in Google that week I felt nauseous and in need of mental therapy. When I was done with the video I was happy to switch my attention to other matters and never having to see those images again in my life. But Google didn't think so.

In the name of a "better service" for The Common Good™ Google kept supplying me with pictures of gay sex regardless of the search subject for a long time. Thank you, Google, for defining my tastes and preferences for me!

Comrade Whoopie wrote:Often as I sit waiting and waiting for the People's Blog to load I notice way down in the LEFT margin of my browser the words "waiting for google analytics"...

Soon you troubles will end, as we are planning to migrate to a dedicated server. Everything then will be faster, bigger, redder.

Bigger. Faster. Redder. Glorious! Simply glorious! While backwards and reactionary capitalist websites plod along, The Cube will rocket light years ahead of them in technology and thinking. This is a glorious day for the cause of socialism. Doubtless the next Worker's Congress will give a standing ovation to this heroic effort. Praise Al Gore, from whom all Internets flow!

Colonel - your exemplary groveling does not relieve you of responsibility to answer, as Commissar of Time, for the loading delays and server timeouts. This is all clearly your fault. The next time the masses complain, I will tell them who they must denounce.

You'll just have to take this one for the team, comrade. The masses must always hope for something, even if it's the idea that denouncing the Commissar of Time will shorten the wait and load the People's Cube pages faster.

Red Square wrote:I know how Google personalizes its search.

Last month I was searching images to illustrate my Butt Bombing al Qaeda Training Video. After all the sex toys, gay porn, and S&M pictures I saw in Google that week I felt nauseous and in need of mental therapy. When I was done with the video I was happy to switch my attention to other matters and never having to see those images again in my life. But Google didn't think so.

In the name of a "better service" for The Common Good™ Google kept supplying me with pictures of gay sex regardless of the search subject for a long time. Thank you, Google, for defining my tastes and preferences for me!

A "cookie" is simply a small data file placed on your computer by your browser at the behest of a web site. Cookies are used for various things like keeping track of your userid/password for the site (People's Cube uses cookies for this purpose), keeping track of session data between browser iterations or tracking a user's habits and the like. Some of these uses are innocent, some are less so.

You can block cookies from specific sites (like Google) fairly easily. In Internet Explorer, click on "Tools" (located on IE Menu bar on top) then click on "Internet Options" (on bottom of resulting menu.) Click on the tab "Privacy" and use the vertical slider to select "Low" or higher to allow blocking of cookies. Then click on "Sites" and type the address "google.com" in the "address of website" box and then click the "Block" box. Then, exit all the dialog boxes by clicking "OK" or "Apply" at the bottom of each.

In Firefox, the process is similar. Click "Tools" on the menu bar, then click "Options" at the bottom of the next dialog box. On the next dialog box, click "Privacy" and you will see a 4-5 check boxes, one of which will say "Accept cookies from sites". You probably have this box checked. To the right on that line, there is a box labelled "Exceptions". Click on this and it will bring up a dialog box; type "google.com" in the box labelled "address of website" and then click "Block". Then, exit all dialog boxes by clicking "OK" or "Close" at the bottom, whichever applies.

These procedures will block the setting of new cookies but does not get rid of the cookies Google already placed there. To get rid of these, in Firefox on the "Privacy" tab mentioned earlier, there is a box labelled "Show Cookies". Click on this and it will bring up a list of all cookies it has stored on your machine. You can use the SEARCH bar at the top and look for Google cookies. It will bring up a list (Google may store 3rd party cookies on other sites like People's Cube so there may be quite a few) highlight the ones you want to get rid of and then click "Remove Cookie". Don't click "Remove All Cookies" for this may remove some you wanted to keep and you may end up having to re-enter userids and passwords at some of your favorite sites (my wife yelled at me when I cleared her machine this way.)

To get rid of existing cookies in IE, click "Tools" and then "Internet Options" just as before. This time, select the "General" tab. In the section titled "Browsing History", click "Settings". On the next dialog box, click the "View Files" button. A full screen window will come up listing all the temporary internet files stored by IE. Click on "Name" to sort the files by name alphabetically. Your IE cookies begin with the prefix "cookie:". Look for the cookies stored by google (should have "google.com" in the file name) then right-click on the name to highlight it and bring up the file menu. Click on "delete" to delete the file. Unlike the Firefox procedure, it is a bit harder to find the Google cookies here so you may have to do it, go back to Google to see if you deleted all its cookies and come back and repeat the procedure if not. Again, if you simply delete all the cookies, you should be rid of the Google menace but you may have to re-sign in to your favorite websites afterwards. Be sure to close all the windows and dialog boxes opened by this procedure when you're done.

This is just awesome! There's nothing I'd like more then to be using my computer, minding my own business, then suddenly, BAM! I get some popup from them about various porn sites! After all, I want everyone in the room (at home or in the dorm) to know I visit porn sites on campus

(off)
I don't visit porn sites on or off campus, and is there anything I can say which hasn't been said?

Ah, yet another way to separate the oligarchs from the apparatchiki. Firefox has a private browsing setting that will not store any cookies. Truly subversive.

Red Square wrote: Soon you troubles will end, as we are planning to migrate to a dedicated server. Everything then will be faster, bigger, redder.

Thank you comrade and please ignore the drunken rant I left scrawled on the wall of the communal washroom. The Party^TM has been most fair and I have no complaints.

Comrade Whoopie wrote:

Red Square wrote: Soon you troubles will end, as we are planning to migrate to a dedicated server. Everything then will be faster, bigger, redder.

I can't wait.

Comrade Red Square; the glorious thing is, once the server problems have been fixed, I simply put a little kink in time, and we all forget about the past issues. Those moments can be better redistributed to some more noble cause, such as saving endangered insects from capitalist farmers.

Good call, Colonel. In the PWoNT(TM) all pages will be loading with equal intervals. And the best part, there will be no browsing. The Party will decide what pages you shall watch, for how long, and in what sequence. In fact, there will remain only one site on government server that everyone will be obliged to visit daily for exactly 45 minutes, with your hands held behind your back, while the pages are being automatically scrolled before your eyes. Naturally, the loading times will be equal because there will be nothing to compare them with.