My browser of choice is, and has generally been Firefox for quite some time. Mostly because it was one of the first ones I started using after IE (which my father has tried to convince is "the best"...which really only means that everyone with half a brain uses it to download a less shitty browser). And while everything, even some cobbled together piece of shit coded by a high schooler with only a cursory understanding of programming is better than Internet Explorer, Firfox is, in layman's terms, a gluttonous memory whore. BUT it was, at the time of installation, the only browser that had stumbleupon, and as everyone should know, I'm a stumble addict. Well since I've started working, I've decided that perhaps using a browser that didn't immediately come with such an easily installed productivity vortex, so I went with google chrome instead.
So Chrome has been my browser for some time now whilst I'm at work. I've been using it for all kinds of things, music, email, web browsing, the typical kind of stuff, and it's kept up with my usage for quite some time. Well recently as an April fools prank, Google released an extension that changed all the fonts to Comic Sans, the bane of the professional world. Well while deleting this obnoxious extension from my browser, I noticed a little option called "Incognito mode". Now I know what the word "incognito" means (and if you don't...google it...I'm not gonna do all your work for you) and I had my suspicions as to what it did. But, curious as I am, I decided to click on it anyways. And, like the scientific genius that I am, my hypothesis was proven correct. It was a mode whereby Chrome would not store your browsing in it's history, it would not save any cookies and it would not retain any URL or Google search information. Now, being a denizen of the intarwebs and well versed in the vast network of tubes that our information superhighway is made of, I'm sure you can think of the ONE SINGULAR PURPOSE THIS MODE SERVES.
Yes it's for minecrafting at work....
NO YOU IDIOT IT'S FOR LOOKING AT PORN. Seriously Google, how much more obvious can you make it?! That's like giving a dropping a fat kid off at an all you can eat buffet and just saying "well lets just see what happens". I'm sure that when they came out with that mode, they figured "Well it's an added layer of security for our users...surely they would never think to use it for inappropriate or otherwise morally reprehensible uses!" (or what I like to call the hacker/torrenter excuse, which typically goes something like "Oh I just made a tool for people to monitor network traffic/share files rapidly...I NEVER thought that THEY would use it for THAT! That's just TERRIBLE and I certainly had NOTHING to do with how they use it!") Do I think this is a bad thing? Not really...because I do believe that it's not the tool, but the user of that tool that dictates the legality of the action blah blah blah stupid boring philosophy stuff.
Also am I surprised that porn likely motivated the creation of incognito mode? Not in the slightest. All great innovations were likely driven by porn. 14th century Italians got bored of having to work for their naked women so they started painting them. 19th century English inventors got tired of painted women, so they invented photography. These same English inventors then got bored of their still images and invented film. Am I exaggerating? Yes. Am I completely off base? I don't think so. If there has ever been a new innovative technology, porn has found a way to exploit it and make it great. Telephones, print news, the internet, VHS, DVD, I'm sure porn even had a hand in deciding the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD battle. And when the singularity happens (Here's a link for those of you too lazy to look it up yourself) I can guarantee you that porn will drive our cloud-connected cyborg brains to greater connectivity and more intricate design. We will push the man/machine boundary to new levels of compatibility all for the sake of porn, and Google Chrome Incognito is just the next step in that direction.
...And that's what I learned today.
I recently discovered the Incognito thing when I accidentally clicked the wrong thing under the tool icon. I couldn't figure out why anyone would want something like that.
ReplyDeleteNow I know the reason.
Since I do not play Minecraft and I have no interest in crappy internet porn, it still holds no interest to me.