The misadventures of a prospective traveler

Three issues that have collaborated to drive me nuts today:

1. I had promised my father and step-father to try to come to Sweden over Christmas or New Year’s.

   For this purpose, I had already made several attempts to find suitable tickets with the Tor Browser (relayed through Tor or directly over my non-torified Internet connection, even with JavaScript enabled). This had proved very annoying and unproductive. For instance: The Lufthansa site simply does not load at all, it just hangs with a perpetually waiting tab. The SAS site loads, appears to work, allows me to fill in all criteria—and then does nothing when I try to submit the search. Ditto EuroWings. A meta-search that I attempted to use was hopelessly slow, insisted on (with every single search) re-including flights with a change of planes,* and also insisted on re-ex(!)cluding potentially cheaper late-night** flights. At least one site interrupted my search by having a JavaScript pop-up demand that I take a survey to improve its usability…*** Almost invariably, these sites had various annoying blend-ins/-outs, animations, overly large images, poorly structured pages, …

   *Which roughly doubles the travel time between Düsseldorf and Stockholm (that have the most suitable airports) and is highly unwanted by me.

   **A smaller negative than changing flights…

   ***First tip: Do not molest customers with such pop-ups!

   Having given up and postponed the search twice already, and now having the 28th of December, I decided to install a brand-new vanilla Firefox, in the hope that at least the SAS/EuroWings problems would be explained by some version incompatibility with either the Tor Browser (as a Firefox derivative) or my version being too low.*

   *Many web-sites, in the year 2018!, still fail to make browser-agnostic implementations, insist on very recent versions of browsers, and similar—usually with no indication to the user that they do. (And visiting an eCommerce web-site without JavaScript on is more-or-less bound to fail.)

   First attempt, SAS: Everything seemed to work, but the web-site was now even more visually annoying than before. The choosing of dates, for some reason, worked in a different manner than before and was highly counter-intuitive. Seeing that there also (not entirely unsurprisingly) were no good flights prior to the New Year and that prices were unnecessarily high, I decided to look elsewhere first.

   Second attempt, Lufthansa: Still did not load…

   Third attempt, EuroWings: To my great and positive surprise, everything appeared to work perfectly, showing me timely and much-cheaper-than-SAS flights. Things kept working as I began my purchase, entering name, address, and whatnot—and I even found the alternative to pay by invoice!* Alas: As I tried to confirm the last step, I was met with an uninformative error message and the request to start again from the very beginning. There was, in particular, no mention of factors like the last few seats on that flight having been suddenly snatched by someone else, or invoice payment not being possible on so short notice**. Before starting over from the beginning, I gave just the last page a second try. I re-entered some (inexplicably deleted) information and re-submitted. Same error message—but now followed by an intrusive pop-up suggesting that I start a chat with someone… I clicked the dismiss button—but, instead of disappearing, the pop-up did a weird and time-consuming animation and kept blocking a significant part of the page even after the animation was finished. At this point, I had had enough, closed my browser, and decided to find other means—which will likely amount to going to a physical travel agency and visiting at some point after the New Year…

   *Thereby removing one of my last doubts, namely the risk that I would be forced to pay with a combination of credit card and 3D-secure—which I (a) have never attempted with my new bank, (b) fear would involve the idiotic use of SMS (I do not currently have a cell provider), (c) had found to simply not work at all with my previous bank (the to-be-avoided Norisbank).

   **For which I would have had some sympathies–but, in that case, invoice payment should never have been offered in the first place.

   These events are the more annoying, seeing that there actually was a time when it was reasonably easy to handle tasks like these over the Internet—it really is not that hard to implement a decent search–choose–pay UI. However, year for year, the usability of various Internet shops and whatnots grows worse and worse, and appears to make more and more specific demands on the browsers. Much of this goes back to the obsession with Ajax. Credit-card payments are also not what they used to be, being much more laborious and likely to fail than in the days before 3D-secure and similar technologies. Worse, from the customers point of view, they likely lead to a net loss of security, whereas the stores and involved payment entities see the gains.* Then, if not relevant above, we have the inexcusably poor efforts of various delivery services, notably DHL, which often make it less of a fuzz to go to a store and pick up a purchase in person…

   *For the customer, the risk that someone will manage to fake a payment is reduced, but if someone does, he has very few options to prove that he was the victim of fraud. Without 3D-secure, the burden of proof was on the other party, and the customer had very little risk at all (short of additional work). The merchants and credit-card acquirers, on the other hand, can have large costs and losses when a fraudulent purchase is followed by a charge-back—and 3D-secure helps them, not the customer, by reducing this risk.

2. Installing and setting up Firefox proved to be a PITA. Apart from the issues of the next item, I note that any version of Firefox has tended to come with very poor default settings, including default UI behavior; and that the “new” Firefox is highly reduced compared to the “old”.* After installation and prior to my attempts at finding tickets, I spent at least five minutes going through and correcting settings—that were then, obviously, only even valid for that one user account**…

   *The changes would be enough for a long own text. For now, I will just note that (a) that the GUI-configurable settings have been reduced to a fraction of their previous scope, (b) the general attitude described in e.g. [1] is continued.

   **I have a number of user accounts for different purposes, in order to reduce the risk of and damage from security breaches and whatnots. This includes separate accounts for eCommerce (the current), my professional activities, ordinary surfing, porn surfing, and WordPress.

   To boot, a new dependency was installed: libstartup-notification0. I did some brief searching as to what this is, and it appears to be just a way for an application to change the shape of the cursor during startup… (Beware that my information might be complete.) Firstly, why would I want the cursor to change?!? Secondly, even if this was seen as beneficial, it certainly is not reason enough to add yet another dependency—there already are too many useless dependencies, many of them recursive (also see portions of a text linked below).

3. The idiotic Debian “alternatives” systems and the “desktop nonsense”.

   Disclaimer: Some familiarity with Debian or similar systems might be needed in order to understand the below.

   When a Debian user installs an application, e.g. Firefox, /usr/bin/firefox (or whatever applies) does not contain the Firefox binary—nor even a link to the Firefox binary. Instead, it links to an entry in /etc/applications, which in turn links to the actual binary (unless a certain setup has even more indirections involved). To boot, this system is administered by a poorly thought-through tool (update-alternatives) and/or configuration; to boot, it is vulnerable to applications arbitrarily overriding the status quo, as well as adding pseudo-applications (e.g. x-www-browser) that at least I simply do not want polluting my system.

   In fact, these pseudo-applications are likely the reason why this system was added in the first place—because e.g. x-www-browser can be “provided” by a thousand-and-one different real applications, it would be highly complicated to work with straight links, let alone binaries (especially when one of the “providers” is removed). For real applications, there is a much better way to solve such problems—namely, to just link e.g. /usr/bin/firefox directly to the usually sole instance of Firefox present and give the user an explicit choice of the “default” Firefox every time a new Firefox version was installed or an old removed.

   Why do I not want these pseudo-applications? Firstly, they bring me and most reasonable users, at best, a very minor benefit (for which they bring the cost of the indirections and the greater effort needed when looking for something). Secondly, the “providers” are usually sufficiently different that unexpected effects can occur.* Thirdly, they are often used by other applications in a manner that is highly unwanted: For instance, one of the alleged main benefits of x-www-browser is that any other application, e.g. an email reader, should have an easy way to open an HTML document, without having to bother to check what browsers are installed—but I absolutely, positively, and categorically do not want my email reader to even try this. In a saner world, this would be something configurable in the email reader (and only there), and those who want this endangerment can configure it, while those who do not want it simply do not configure it. By having x-www-browser, the user no longer has such control. Worse: Since the real application behind x-www-browser can change without his doing (be it due to presumptuous applications or an administrator with different preferences), the effects can be very, very different from the expected—e.g. that a known browser with JavaScript, images, and Internet access disabled (appropriate for reading e.g. HTML emails) is replaced with an unknown browser with everything enabled. (Which, in combination with email, could lead to e.g. a security intrusion, leaking of data to a hostile party, activation of unethical tracking mechanisms of who-read-an-email-when, and similar.)

   *For instance, there are many highly specific tool families, e.g. awk, whose members will superficially appear to be and behave identically (much unlike e.g. Firefox and Chrome/Chromium, as x-www-browser candidates), but will have subtle differences that can lead to a failed execution or a different-than-expected result in certain circumstances. Such problems, especially when undetected, can have very serious consequences. It is then much better for the user to, depending on circumstances, pick the specific awk-version he needs by explicit call (=> the alternatives system is not needed), make sure (for a one-user system) that he only ever has one instance installed and use the generic “awk”-name (=> the alternatives system is not needed), or restrict himself to only the common base of identical features. In the last case, the alternatives system would have some justification—however, it would place a very high burden on the user in terms of not making mistakes, might still fail due to undocumented differences or bugs, and is vulnerable to other differences, e.g. regarding performance. Obviously, this would also reduce the available capabilities of the tool in question—in many cases, quite severely.

   Similar remarks concern the “desktop nonsense” (which would deserve a long text of its own; a partial treatment is present). In this particular case, there are at least two* further mechanisms (/usr/share/applications, /usr/lib/mime/packages/) that cause similar problems, including allowing e.g. email readers to launch things that they should not launch. I have used the tool chattr to forbid additions to these two directories; however, due to the incompetence of the apt implementers and/or package builders, this is only a partial help: Despite these entries being unimportant for the actual functioning of the system/the installed application, the chattr-setting leads to a hard error from the apt-tools. I know have to “de-chattr” the directories, re-attempt the install, manually delete the added files, and “re-chattr” the directories … Effectively, I do not prevent the directories from being polluted—instead I trade an increased work-load for the benefit of knowing when I have to manually clean them up after pollution.

   *Proof-reading, I suspect that /usr/lib/mime/packages is not strictly desktop related, and might better have been treated as a third area. In the big picture, this does not matter. (And I do not have the energy to sort out “what is what” at the moment.)

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