Dear Google, Cookie This! 2022-01-19

At some point today I tried to view a video on youtube, and got this crap:

Dick.

So, a few years ago there was this GDPR thing that happened. the most significant effect of which was that a shitload of web sites suddenly had stupid warnings about cookies. Some were modal like this Google garbage, and some were big fat banners that hogged up the bottom quarter or third of your browser window. Ultimately, the effective change for users was mostly to look for blockers that would hide the stupidity of it all. Unfortunately that crap just never went away. Now, Google is just doing its best to not get hassled by the EU by stuffing some irritating modal popup in my face telling me things I really do not want to hear.

So, people should drive down to some Google office building and set it on fire right? Well, I can't say I don't like that idea, but in the meantime a simpler option is to just stop using Google. Sadly their search engine is hard to beat, but you can at least bypass the YouTube garbage by using Invious or something similar. I made a keyword bookmark for !vid that points to

https://vid.puffyan.us/search?q=%s

... so now when I type !vid i hate youtube I get a puffyan search for videos about something I like. But that isn't everything. What about when people on IRC send me links to youtube? Well, I also got a redirector addon for Pale Moon that automatically converts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=*

into

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=$1

... and BAM. I'm watching the video on puffyan without any stupid modal interruption or ads. Phew! That was close! Seriously though, please stop using Google. And GMail, and youtube, and google+ [giggle], and well, you see where this is going.

PS: I tried to make this post via sshfs and it bombed. First there was the complaint about udevil not being installed when I tried to access the bookmark I made in SpaceFM, then there was the invalid -o option it didn't like... bah, that didn't last long.