Commented Links for 2020-06-21

Google Lawsuit for Ignoring Incognito Mode, Chrome Exploit in the Wild, Benchmarking HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0, Creating Tables in C++, Understanding Emacs, Open Source Licenses, Builder Pattern in Rust, Why Leave Medium.

Google faces $5 billion lawsuit for tracking people in incognito mode

Company that makes money tracking people keeps tracking people even when they ask for not doing it, news at eleven.

I keep repeating this over and over, but let's put this again: If you rely on anything Google, you can assume your privacy is gone. Your salary? They know. Your secret emails? Known. The trash you talk about your boss with your coworkers? All noted.

Worse: When you suggest people to start using Google products, you're basically telling them you don't freaking care about that person privacy. What kind of friend does that to a friend?

Exclusive: Massive spying on users of Google's Chrome shows new security weakness

Still in news about who doesn't care about you, a security alert for Chrome being explore by others -- besides Google -- to spy on you.

The interesting part part here is that the security flaw was found by a company called "Awake Security". Why is this interesting? 'Cause Google has a specialized group in finding security flaws that, it seems, can only find security in other products, never on theirs.

Performance testing HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/2 + Server Push for REST APIs

A curious comparison: The way to do several requests using different versions of HTTP with different properties.

Obviously, the new stuff is more performant, but one has to ask if doing that many requests is actually a real thing -- as in "You know loading the real site, not the site and 300 trackers and bullshit libraries for stupid animations".

tabulate: Table Maker for Modern C++

My desire to work with C++ got a lot lower after I learnt Rust, but I have to reckon that this library, to create ASCII tables on the console, looks a lot interesting.

A Life Configuring Emacs

Do you want to learn Emacs? Like, really learn it?

Here is a very complete, very long explanation of how to do things in Emacs.

Choosing a license for GoatCounter

Discussions about open source licenses are always nice and cool, 'cause there is always something else you can learn about the licenses that exist.

In this case, a post analysing several licenses about trying to, besides keeping the source open, also being able to make money on top of it.

The builder pattern, and a macro that keeps FFI code DRY

I kept this post for a while for one single reason: How freaking easy it is to create the builder pattern in Rust without any external libraries. There are crates that allow doing it so with simple #[derive] directives but this just shows how you don't even need that, if you're willing to type a bit more.

Why we left Medium, and how!

You may have noticed that, from some time, none of the links I commented here are from Medium. And there is a reason for me to not share content posted there and it is exactly due the aggressive measures they are taking to gather resources -- not that there is something wrong doing it so, but there are other ways besides blocking people out of content, or taking our features for people that publish content -- and remember that Medium itself doesn't publish anything, they need other people to create content for them.