France

May 18, 2023 ∞

Reducing website carbon emissions by blocking ads

Blocking advertising on the web is not only good for increasing the speed and privacy of your own web browsing, but also good for the planet.

What is the environmental impact of visiting the homepage of a media site? What part do advertising, and analytics, play when it comes to the carbon footprint? We tried to answer these questions using GreenFrame, a solution we developed to measure the footprint of our own developments.
The results are insightful: up to 70% of the electricity consumption (and therefore carbon emissions) caused by visiting a French media site is triggered by advertisements and stats. Therefore, using an ad blocker even becomes an ecological gesture.

[…]

Overall we observe the same thing: the carbon footprint of a website decreases if there are no ads or trackers on the website. The difference is significant: Between 32% and 70% of the energy consumed by the browser and the network is due to monetization.

The websites analyzed generate between 70 and 130 million visits per month, and their work has therefore a real impact on the environment.

Reducing the consumption of one of these sites by only 10% (20mWh), per visit for a site with 100 million monthly visitors is equivalent to saving 24,000 kWh per year.

Source: Media Websites: 70% of the Carbon Footprint Caused by Ads and Stats | Marmelab

Oct 18, 2019 ∞

Friday flowerings

Did you see these things this week?

Happy 25th year, blogging. You’ve grown up, but social media is still having a brawl (The Guardian) — "The furore over social media and its impact on democracy has obscured the fact that the blogosphere not only continues to exist, but also to fulfil many of the functions of a functioning public sphere. And it’s massive. One source, for example, estimates that more than 409 million people view more than 20bn blog pages each month and that users post 70m new posts and 77m new comments each month. Another source claims that of the 1.7 bn websites in the world, about 500m are blogs. And Wordpress.com alone hosts blogs in 120 languages, 71% of them in English."
Emmanuel Macron Wants to Scan Your Face (The Washington Post) — "President Emmanuel Macron’s administration is set to be the first in Europe to use facial recognition when providing citizens with a secure digital identity for accessing more than 500 public services online... The roll-out is tainted by opposition from France’s data regulator, which argues the electronic ID breaches European Union rules on consent – one of the building blocks of the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation laws – by forcing everyone signing up to the service to use the facial recognition, whether they like it or not."
This is your phone on feminism (The Conversationalist) — "Our devices are basically gaslighting us. They tell us they work for and care about us, and if we just treat them right then we can learn to trust them. But all the evidence shows the opposite is true. This cognitive dissonance confuses and paralyses us. And look around. Everyone has a smartphone. So it’s probably not so bad, and anyway, that’s just how things work. Right?"
Google’s auto-delete tools are practically worthless for privacy (Fast Company) — "In reality, these auto-delete tools accomplish little for users, even as they generate positive PR for Google. Experts say that by the time three months rolls around, Google has already extracted nearly all the potential value from users’ data, and from an advertising standpoint, data becomes practically worthless when it’s more than a few months old."
Audrey Watters (Uses This) — "For me, the ideal set-up is much less about the hardware or software I am using. It's about the ideas that I'm thinking through and whether or not I can sort them out and shape them up in ways that make for a good piece of writing. Ideally, that does require some comfort -- a space for sustained concentration. (I know better than to require an ideal set up in order to write. I'd never get anything done.)"
Computer Files Are Going Extinct (OneZero) — "Files are skeuomorphic. That’s a fancy word that just means they’re a digital concept that mirrors a physical item. A Word document, for example, is like a piece of paper, sitting on your desk(top). A JPEG is like a painting, and so on. They each have a little icon that looks like the physical thing they represent. A pile of paper, a picture frame, a manila folder. It’s kind of charming really."
Why Technologists Fail to Think of Moderation as a Virtue and Other Stories About AI (The LA Review of Books) — "Speculative fiction about AI can move us to think outside the well-trodden clichés — especially when it considers how technologies concretely impact human lives — through the influence of supersized mediators, like governments and corporations."
Inside Mozilla’s 18-month effort to market without Facebook (Digiday) — "The decision to focus on data privacy in marketing the Mozilla brand came from research conducted by the company four years ago into the rise of consumers who make values-based decisions on not only what they purchase but where they spend their time."
Core human values not eyeballs (Cubic Garden) — "Theres so much more to do, but the aims are high and important for not just the BBC, but all public service entities around the world. Measuring the impact and quality on peoples lives beyond the shallow meaningless metrics for public service is critical."

Image: The why is often invisible via Jessica Hagy's Indexed

Jun 21, 2019 ∞

Friday fancies

These are some things I came across this week that made me smile:

The fake French minister in a silicone mask who stole millions (BBC News) — "For two years from late 2015, an individual or individuals impersonating France's defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, scammed an estimated €80m (£70m; $90m) from wealthy victims including the Aga Khan and the owner of Château Margaux wines."
No, You Don’t Really Look Like That (The Atlantic) — "The global economy is wired up to your face. And it is willing to move heaven and Earth to let you see what you want to see."
Can You Unwrinkle A Raisin? (FiveThirtyEight) — "Back when you couldn’t just go buy a bottle of wine, folks would, instead, buy a giant brick of raisins, soak them in water to rehydrate the dried-out fruit and then store that juice in a dark cupboard for 60 days."
What Ecstasy Does to Octopuses (The Atlantic) — "At first they used too high a dose, and the animals “freaked out and did all these color changes”... But once the team found a more suitable dose, the animals behaved more calmly—and more sociably."
The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years (Nautilus) — "The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. "

Image via webcomic.name