This is the personal website of Ian Dennis Miller.

Read qz.com on Chrome with Ghostery enabled

Install this userscript and you're good to go.

Background

Ghostery rocks. It's a Chrome browser extension that prevents privacy-invasive web scripts from running when you load a website. It turns you into a web ghost who floats through the net leaving nothing more than a vague creepy static-electricity feeling in your wake.

Once upon a time, web browsers blindly ran all the code on any website you visited. In the early 2000s, the brilliant folks at NoScript realized this might be slightly insane, so they wrote a fantastic Firefox browser extension that prevented some website-parts from running without permission. Actually, it sortof prevented every script from running, and this unfortunately broke some websites.

If NoScript were like a grenade that blew up all the malware on the Internet (in addition to the good scripts you actually wanted to run), then Ghostery is like the pro-privacy sniper version of NoScript. Ghostery uses a blacklist of known web-bugs and tracking code, and on this basis allows most of the web to behave normally while blocking just the nasty bits. It's great when it works, but some sites still break, and that brings us to Quartz.

Ghostery doesn't play nice with Quartz

Quartz (qz.com) is a website that's been popping up on Hacker News more and more. I've tried viewing it several times and it never worked. It turns out this is probably an interaction with Ghostery , and HN user pilom provided an insanely simple fix. I hate doing things manually, so I fixed it semi-permanently.

what the script does

Here it is, in all its glory:

// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3387427/javascript-remove-element-by-id
function remove(id)
{
    return (elem=document.getElementById(id)).parentNode.removeChild(elem);
}

remove("overlay");

You can download the script here. Just a heads up: userscript installation in Chrome is a little different. You will need to download the script, open the extensions manager, then drag the script onto the extensions window.

Comments

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