Wow, a Lain meme was not something I was expecting.

I should watch that show again sometime, I still have the DVDs somewhere I think.

I’m always keen to shit on Google, but, this is about “having search terms in the query string” and “having links that take you directly to the thing you clicked on without any redirect dance to obfuscate the Referer header”. With all the other shit to legitimately complain about from Google, this seems so silly to focus on. Google isn’t even the one that sent the Referer header, that would be your browser (which, Chrome didn’t exist yet at the time). RFC1945, from 1996, for HTTP 1.0, even explicitly stated that any application that communicates over HTTP (i.e. a web browser) should offer the user a configuration option to disable sending Referer headers.

Edit: slight clarification, Chrome did exist during part of the time period that the lawsuit covers, though it only started to pick up serious market share towards the end of the relevant time period.

Man, I’d never read “Stop talking to each other and start buying things” before, that’s a hell of an article.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the same economic changes are also (partially) behind the changing ways companies like Red Hat, Elastic, and MongoDB approach open source projects. It’s not the whole story, but I suspect it plays a significant part.

If that’s the case, then this is bigger than just “oh no twitter and reddit”.