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Comment by unholiness | Hacker News Reader

In browsers, ad blockers are being used more and more commonly for even non-technical folks.

In native apps mobile apps, there are some okay ad-blocking solutions.

But when the ads are baked into the operating system itself... I have a hard time seeing Microsoft or Apple losing the ad blocking battle.

So, instead of getting ads somewhat sandboxed inside a browser, in the future we may be getting ads inside the start menu, inside spotlight, on the toolbar... and instead of semi-directly funding content providers, the ad space will only ever be funneling money to the these same huge companies to spend as they see fit. Bleeech.

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When companies think their business is to monetize their customers to the last penny instead of making a product people want, it is the beginning of the end. True for Microsoft, true for Apple. I think, long term, we will look back at 2016 as the turning point.

Serious question, where do you see Apple monetizing customer data? I can't think of any way they monetize customers beyond hardware and app sales.

Removing the audio jack to sell more dongles or proprietary devices. Shoving down our throat all their paying services: icloud, apple music, apple pay, etc.

It used to be that I would be eager to buy a new iphone because I was keen to get the new features. Now I hold on to my older model because it has less of this nagging and new "features".

The potential silver lining is that this resuls in FOSS operating systems getting more users, which in turn will mean even better support/stability in FOSS options.

Blocking beaconing at the network level would be good next step.

DNSCrypt DNS resolver with a sinkhole that blocks ads and telemetry for any device is fairly easy to setup, I've done it for myself.

Searching for "ad blocking smart DNS" shows there's a ton of such services already. I expect a lot of them will be placing Adwords against "disable windows 10 ads" now.

Next in the arms race, however, Windows will start ignoring your DNS settings and use their resolvers, like some applications do today.

>I have a hard time seeing Microsoft or Apple losing the ad blocking battle

At the risk of hijacking your comment, what's the present situation with regards to running Linux on Apple hardware?

I quite like my Macbook and am generally tolerant of MacOS (mostly because it's POSIX-y enough to feel familiar), but would definitely consider installing a Linux distro depending on how well it worked.

It works well, using an alternative boot menu. http://lifehacker.com/5531037/how-to-triple-boot-your-mac-wi...

Your only real issue would be with Broadcom drivers(they aren't too bad though). I tried Fedora a while ago and everything worked from my first boot up(including keyboard backlights). Honestly, I'm not too worried about Apple and privacy/advertising for now, after they made photos.app do image processing on decide, and the lack of current iOS exploits in Vault 7.

Advertisers get things so terribly wrong :(

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