All good things come to an end…

The I don’t care about cookies extension was, until now, one of those wonderful cases that illustrated what developers can do when they want to solve problems that confront themselves and everybody else: simply, it freed us from absurd EU legislation that obliges websites to warn us that they use cookies.

Given that almost every website uses cookies, even if it is to run simple metrics, a password reminder or a shopping cart, this means that every time we open a page, we have to get past this useless warning, and if we care about our privacy, learn how to avoid as many cookies as possible, and accept the so-called “deal” that some ignorant politicians decided is a good idea.

Then, one day, a Croatian developer, Daniel Kladnik, fed up with this tiresome routine, developed an extension that simply avoided those ads by removing them. He wasn’t interesting in capturing anybody’s information, he just wanted to eliminate the ads. You installed it in your browser, forgot about it, and if you wanted to, you made a donation to its developer, who didn’t even ask you to. The extension worked well in almost all cases: the ads disappeared, and you forgot about something very annoying and of no practical value.

People started to use the extension, and were happy with it: I would quietly recommend it to my students, as I do with some others. But a few…