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by danShumway 2142 days ago
> Using the same application (the same "modern" browser) for both purposes, [...is...] unnecessary. The text of the articles can be retrieved and read with much simpler software;

Well, to push this a step farther, the great thing about extensions like uMatrix are that you can turn off Javascript+Cookies on a site-specific basis. So I know people who would feel like it was too cumbersome to juggle two browsers at the same time, but who don't have the same aversions to saying, "oh sure, I could turn Javascript and cookies off by default, but turn them on for this one specific video/shopping site."

> There is some relief for the location issue.

Definitely. I didn't want to go too in depth here, but this one of the things I'm getting at when I say Panopticlick shouldn't be the only thing people look at. Panopticlick doesn't even consider geolocation around IP addresses at all, so there's an entire vector there where Panopticlick won't tell you whether or not you're vulnerable.

There's a world of considerations here that are just hard to fit into a single comment.

> employing some software, e.g., standard UNIX utilities, other than a modern browser, to extract the image or video URLs, is sometimes necessary.

cough youtube-dl cough

If you're a user who's comfortable with the terminal, this can be a game changer even ignoring the privacy aspect. I see people all the time on HN complain about bookmarking a video and having it disappear later. Not a problem if you download them.

If you want to go even farther and you're comfortable with Bash scripting, youtube-dl even has options around managing playlists, so you can kind of "subscribe" to ongoing playlists/channels and treat them like podcast RSS feeds.

But with that I'm straying off topic.