This is one of the worst pieces of tech/business journalism I have ever had the misfortune to read. The overwhelming desire to paint Jonathan Mayer as David to the digital advertising industry's Goliath completely distorts the reality of the negotiations and misrepresents how decisions about both code and policy are made at Mozilla. It is insulting to Mozilla, which has been working in good faith on these negotiations from the beginning, and to Mayer, who it patronizingly describes as "just a volunteer who hangs around the offices of Mozilla."
It is also riddled with technical errors that suggest this journalist lacks even the basic understanding of technology that should be a prerequisite for working in this space.
This is all especially frustrating because, for some strange reason, these Business Insider pieces get a lot of traction online. This piece is on the HN front page at the moment, and their last, similarly asinine, piece about the proposal to block 3rd Party Cookies in Firefox has over 3,000 comments on Reddit. [1]
For a more accurate representation of the current state of Mayer's 3rd party cookie blocking patch, read Brendan Eich's recent post [2].
I would suggest Business Insider is banned from HN, there is no quality control, it is Demand Media's content farm model applied to news. If this was my responsibility I would also look very closely at who is upvoting Business Insider stories.
Yeah the part that got was me where they said that cookies "also help web sites handle logins and other basic functions" without making the distinction between domain cookies and 3rd party cookies. And then followed it up with "Currently, Apple's Safari blocks cookies;".
It is also riddled with technical errors that suggest this journalist lacks even the basic understanding of technology that should be a prerequisite for working in this space.
This is all especially frustrating because, for some strange reason, these Business Insider pieces get a lot of traction online. This piece is on the HN front page at the moment, and their last, similarly asinine, piece about the proposal to block 3rd Party Cookies in Firefox has over 3,000 comments on Reddit. [1]
For a more accurate representation of the current state of Mayer's 3rd party cookie blocking patch, read Brendan Eich's recent post [2].
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1dy74c/jonathan_... [2] https://brendaneich.com/2013/05/c-is-for-cookie/