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Comment by Flammy | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. If you haven't been following adblocking news in the last few years, Adblock Plus has been charging advertisers to get on a whitelist, as well as a few other less-than-ideal moves from a privacy perspective. There has also been issues with performance impact, which uBlock Origin seems to pretty consistently beat Adblock Plus on.

uBlock Origin is my recommendation as well.

Links:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/ublock/

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From a hustler perspective its genius. People install your add-on to block ads and then you SELL advertisers the right to get whitelisted. Genius move.

That being said, I also switched to uBlock and I owe Adblock plus nothing.

protection rackets are not really a novel invention..

Yup, and not new... In the tech space, that is what Yelp does (Pay $, suppress bad reviews). I'm sure there are other examples out there...

I don't think this is true. This may have happened in the past, but I don't think they do this, at least currently.

https://www.yelp.com/advertiser_faq

It may no longer be happening. Googling "Yelp extortion" will get you plenty of news hits, but this may have caused them to change their practices.

It's actually extraordinary how many "Yelp extortion" claims I've seen without a single bit of proof. It's not at all difficult to record a telephone conversation with a Yelp representative.

I've seen some thoughts about this:

- Some of the businesses claiming "Yelp extortion" actually deserve their bad reviews.

- Some of the businesses claiming "Yelp extortion" posted fake positive reviews. Unbeknownst to them, Yelp bots automatically detected and removed the fake reviews. Later, after rejecting a call from a Yelp rep asking to advertise, the business owner decides to check their Yelp page and sees that their fake reviews are gone, incorrectly deducing that Yelp is extorting them.

It's not at all difficult to record a telephone conversation with a Yelp representative.

I was at Radio Shack just yesterday looking for a way to do this. They didn't have a solution. Also, it's illegal where I am unless I advertise it.

So if I were to get a call right now from somebody and needed to record it I'm not sure what to do. Any suggestions?

I personally use an app called TapeACall. You could also just put your call on loudspeaker and record it with another device.

Google "chemtrails" you get lots of hits too.

Most of the people who read HN are probably knowledgable enough to also find uMatrix very useful (from the same author): https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

In short, it allows for much more granular controls over what does and does-not load from any given domain. By default, it breaks a lot of websites. But with about 30 seconds of work, you will generate a policy for the domain, you hit save, and then that domain will be unbroken on every subsequent load. I find it useful as a noscript replacement.

+1. uMatrix is a bit of a pain the first few weeks, but once you get it configured for the sites you frequent, it's quite nice – and a nice side effect is that in general, pages load faster as you're not waiting on fifteen extra tracking scripts to load.

uMatrix is just the perfect union of script controls and ad blocking, and honestly even without knowledge the point-and-click interface would probably be very forgiving.

> Adblock Plus has been charging advertisers to get on a whitelist

For anyone interested, more details here: https://adblockplus.org/about#monetization

TLDR: it's for "unintrusive" ads only and you only pay if being on the whitelist gives you >10M extra ad impressions/month

The whole acceptable ads thing has an opt-out checkbox in the extension.

I'd definitely prefer to use uBlock Origin for that reason, but Adblock Plus just seems to work better - I still see some ads using Origin, where with ABP I don't..

> I still see some ads using Origin, where with ABP I don't

Given that both Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin ("uBO") uses EasyList to block ads, this is a dubious claim, requiring at least some evidences.

Now add to this that uBO supports filter syntax not available on ABP[1], this makes your claim even more dubious. Feel free to provide actual examples.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...

It's not a dubious claim, just his personal experience. I switched to uBlock for a few years ago and had the opposite problem, it just seemed to break a few websites. I didn't really dig into it, but from memory it seemed to be blocking a lot of requests it shouldn't resulting in things like Facebook Messenger breaking. So it's interesting that you point out they both use EasyList.

Perhaps I'll give it another try, but honestly, i don't notice any adverts with ABP so i tend to forget it's even there. I definitely noticed when uBO was installed.

That sounds quite atypical, I can't imagine UBO/UB causing problems with FB Messenger of all things.

> It's not a dubious claim

The claim:

> still see some ads using Origin, where with ABP I don't

... is definitely dubious. I still have to see such vague claims to be substantiated, with actual examples of where this happens.

Once in a while someone will provide a URL in support, but it turns out upon investigation that ABP also suffers the issue. I can readily provide URLs where it's actually the opposite, uBO works where ABP does not. For instance, try:

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Internet

    http://kissanime.ru/Anime/Demi-chan-wa-Kataritai-Dub (click on an episode link, start the player)

I absolutely don't mind if people prefer ABP (or whatever else blocker) over uBO, but I will dispute vague baseless claims made about uBO. Surely one can prefer ABP without resorting to spreading misinformation.

if someone is concerned about privacy they sure should not use Opera browser

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