52

I audited the privacy of popular free dev tools, the results are terrifying

Using canary URLs in these and other sites may be interesting too.

3 hours agogmuslera

> Free Dev Tools

And test only online websites (」°ロ°)」

2 hours agohohithere

I love regex101.com, so really happy to see it breaks the mold here.

3 hours agobeart

Comment is a bit of an aside, but it's a shame what happened to JSONFormatter.org. The UI was preferable to alternatives for me, it ranked highly in Google so I could just search "JSON formatter" and access it, etc.

Now the site freezes 50% of the time when loading it on my Mac and when it doesn't freeze, there's a 5 second period of waiting before I can paste any input. Not to mention ads taking up 40% of the screen. The classic tech cycle of life.

3 hours agospeedyapoc

Can we stop it with "and the results are terrifying", "and you won't believe what I found", "the <x> situation is insane", etc.? The over-hyping of low quality, low effort content is making it hard to find actually interesting or informative things.

3 hours agobmenrigh

Yea I was thinking the same thing.

When you reach for the most exaggerated, over-the-top word possible when describing something relatively mundane, what will you use when you talk about something that actually is "terrifying?"

3 hours agoSunshineTheCat

“The most terrifying thing you’ve ever heard”. You can even stick with that one as long as your subjects are monotonically scary.

3 hours agothfuran

Find a better and more accessible solution than clickbait.

Please, do it.

3 hours agocheschire

"Privacy concerns found in audit of popular dev tools" (or something along those lines) would work without feeling sensationalized.

3 hours agoarcfour

Yes this one time. I’m speaking generally in response to the general plea.

an hour agocheschire

"better", "more accessible"? What the hell are you talking about? Clickbait doesn't make anything better or more accessible.

Instead, it makes it impossible to pre-select for interesting information. Instead of telling you what something is about, it tells you how you should feel about it. That's not improving accessibility.

3 hours agobmenrigh

I meant from the author’s perspective. Clickbait is too easy, which is probably why it’s so popular.

an hour agocheschire

Oh completely. But my perspective is that we all should individually punish clickbait by not clicking. More broadly, we should strive to keep HN full of quality tech content rather than clickbait.

an hour agobmenrigh

Glad that I am using Firefox with:

- uBlock Origin

- cookieAutodelete

- privacy badger

Any additions to my arsenal welcome!

2 hours agodbacar

Ironfox/Librewolf with just uBlock. The more extensions you have the way easier you are to fingerprint.

2 hours agoozlikethewizard

That's why real programmers are those who can work offline without the Internet. (just the repositories)

:)

local first.

3 hours agoiberator

Yeah, I run all my LLMs offline. That way I don't need documentation at all!

(I jest of course.)

10 minutes agoLoganDark

what dev uses public websites to do any kind of work?

2 hours agodeafpolygon

[flagged]

3 hours agoramoz

Decent article. Painful to read the LLM output.