That's a another data point for fingerprinting, sadly. Not that Chrome would care, but Firefox and Safari teams do, I guess.

And I feel like this is a lost cause at this point. Just assign every one of us a unique online ID and be done with it.

This recent HN submission is relevant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43083151

Firefox’s “resist fingerprinting” does a lot of things to stop fingerprinting. One of those things is that it fakes my time zone as being UTC. 99% of of the time I never notice this being an issue. But occasionally I’ll try to pull up the wordle late in the day and get tomorrows puzzle.

> No JavaScript is sent to the browser.

Is a design goal. I doubt it is possible without JS. Especially inside SVG.

It is probably technically possible to have the time continue to update with just CSS on the client (based on [1]), but the initial time still has to be set server-side.

[1] https://css-tricks.com/of-course-we-can-make-a-css-only-cloc...

I'm in the UK but my work PC's Internet exit node is in New York due to enforced use of corporate proxies, so the time shown to me is 5 hours out. Javascript would report the correct timezone.

It is not possible to correctly identify physical location from IP addresses. Not just because of proxies and VPNs and the accuracy of the data: you can go near a border and find your mobile phone connects to a cell tower in a neighbouring country, without even visiting! IP Geolocation is accurate enough for statistics and marketing but probably shouldn't be used for anything user-facing.

- you could render the page using puppeteer server-side, getClientRect/calc and apply the dimensions to the path, then spit back the markup, OR

- you could use HTML + CSS to render the bubbles

I mean in the 2000s there were a number of other options (flash, silverlight, java, probably more) but that era is behind us, and that would be extra pedantic.

WASM esp in the browser offers a great opportunity to "Do Things Right" that JS in the browser got all wrong in hindsight. I'm not talking about language design, but about what JS can do, access, control, etc: from telemetry to security issues.

The modern DOM apis show how this can be fixed. But there's no way we can fix "the old APIs" which are also used for fingerprinting, tracking, DOSing clients, breaking your back button, annoying scrolling etc. We can see this clearly in how browsers bolt stuff on, like popup blockers early on, and "copy to clipboard only after a human interaction" or "detect too many dialogs" or "detect CPU hogging".

WASM seems to head in the right direction: sandboxing, careful exposure to resources, proper permission systems etc.

But, as a bystander, I don't see much public discussion on how the WASM runtime/sandbox/layers in browsers can and should be shaped to i) fix and avoid mistakes JS made, and ii) while also having better DX and UX in this regard. As mentioned, just a bystander, maybe this discussion is happening, and I just missed it?

The Tintin character entered public domain in many countries in January 2025.

I think this “What a week” image is from a 1930 album (“The Crab with the Golden Claws”), so it’s part of the public domain now and can legally be used for things like this meme generator.

The situation in EU is different though. Hergé died in 1983, and I think his entire oeuvre has 75 years of protection after his death. I’m not 100% sure.

Many countries or only US (which uses the publication date)? Considering that the original publication is in Belgium and that almost all countries use the author's death as the benchmark, I am not so sure (even with the rule of the shorter term).

> Also note that this image may not be in the public domain in the 9th Circuit if it was first published on or after July 1, 1909 in noncompliance with US formalities, unless the author is known to have died in 1954 or earlier (more than 70 years ago) or the work was created in 1904 or earlier (more than 120 years ago.)

And links to this footnote (https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain#Fo...):

> The differing dates is a product of the question of controversial Twin Books v. Walt Disney Co. decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996. The question at issue is the copyright status of a work only published in a foreign language outside of the United States and without a copyright notice. It had long been assumed that failure to comply with U.S. formalities placed these works in the public domain in the United States and, as such, were subject to copyright restoration under URAA (see note 10). The court in Twin Books, however, concluded "publication without a copyright notice in a foreign country did not put the work in the public domain in the United States." According to the court, these foreign publications were in effect "unpublished" in the United States, and hence have the same copyright term as unpublished works. The decision has been harshly criticized in Nimmer on Copyright, the leading treatise on copyright, as being incompatible with previous decisions and the intent of Congress when it restored foreign copyrights. The Copyright Office as well ignores the Twin Books decision in its circular on restored copyrights. Nevertheless, the decision is currently applicable in all of the 9th Judicial Circuit (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), and it may apply in the rest of the country.

It might not even PD in the US if this is upheld.

> All HTTP date/time stamps MUST be represented in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), without exception.

according to [rfc2616](https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3....). Presumably that makes a lot of awkward conversions unnecessary, but a separate TZ header would be a great addition.