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A comment on MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading.

Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by makepanic on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @01:57PM (#16747316)
First time seeing a website checking for private mode:

> Hello,

> We noticed you're browsing in private or incognito mode.

> To continue reading this article, please exit incognito mode or log in.

> Why we made this change

> Visitors are allowed 3 free articles per month (without a subscription), and private browsing prevents us from counting how many stories you've read.

> We hope you understand, and consider subscribing for unlimited online access."

In case others don't want to leave private mode: http://archive.is/DjsiK

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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Raphmedia on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:49PM (#16747857)
That's so stupid. There's nothing stopping anyone from browsing 3 articles and then clear the cookies...
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by m-p-3 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @08:51PM (#16750897)
What's even more stupid is that it's even possible to detect you're browsing incognito.

The server should never be able to know.

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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Raphmedia on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @04:32PM (#16758743)
Probably a bunch of front-end checks to see if cookies are enabled, etc., etc., roughly giving them a clue that it is in incognito.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by andrewmunsell on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:08PM (#16747425)
Or you can disable it with a query param: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610743/mit-severs-ties-to...
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Anm on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:52PM (#16747883)
Interesting that this works with any query parameter: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610743/mit-severs-ties-to...
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by ngngngng on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:57PM (#16748486)
They're probably only using query params at that endpoint for referral links. There are a couple high profile subscription news sites that let you in as much as you want as long as your referer header says "facebook.com".
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by godzillabrennus on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:19PM (#16748151)
I use http://outline.com to read and share content from sites like this.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Rotten194 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:03PM (#16747360)
How does it do that? Do browsers set a flag? That seems like a privacy hole.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by makepanic on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:19PM (#16748147)
Peeking into the source:

  /**
   * Detects incognito/private mode in various browsers.
   *
   * Adapted from:
   *   https://gist.github.com/cou929/7973956
   */
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Something1234 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:27PM (#16748229)
Link for the lazy.

https://gist.github.com/cou929/7973956

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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Jacqued on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:06PM (#16747403)
My guess is that they feature detect, using disabled stuff (eg localStorage error 22 on safari private mode) to find out if your browser looks like one in private mode.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by bentruyman on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:06PM (#16747401)
There are certain browser APIs disabled in the browser in incognito mode that can be detected. How else would you implement incognito mode?
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by brohee on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:09PM (#16747436)
By sandboxing, e.g. localStorage fully functional but deleted at the end of the session...
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by 2fifty3 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:21PM (#16747554)
Mozilla recently released containerized tabs[0], I imagine the next logic step is building containerized Private Browsing Mode

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Paul-ish on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:43PM (#16747795)
My understanding is that things actually went the other way. Private browsing came first, then the same approach was used to create more labels than just "private" and not "private". I think more features may be turned off in private browsing mode though.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by m-p-3 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @08:54PM (#16750909)
I use multiple computers daily and not having those synced with my Firefox account is a pain in the ass.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Analemma_ on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:09PM (#16747432)
That's interesting. Why are the storage APIs disabled, instead of just using ephemeral storage that goes away when the window is cleared?
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by lallysingh on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:42PM (#16747789)
It's less work to disable them. There's likely already an API access control system in place, for internal-only APIs, testing, etc.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by eridius on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:51PM (#16747869)
It also means sites can avoid promising to do things that aren't actually possible, like saving information for access next time.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by RickS on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @04:54PM (#16749066)
The detection is JS based after the proper article loads, so you can smash the escape key in a timely way to disable it.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by baobrien on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:09PM (#16747438)
I was able to see the article in private mode on Firefox 59.0.2 with uBlock Origin (enabled and disabled).
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by mavidser on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:48PM (#16751739)
I tend to disable Javascript for news/blog websites. In maximum cases, I get a popup-free, ad-free experience, and no private browsing warnings too.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by DanBC on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:31PM (#16748281)
Please don't use spaces to quote blocks of text. It's completely broken for mobile users, forcing them to use horizontal scroll.
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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by friedButter on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @08:00AM (#16753878)
Netflix does this too
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