Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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I am moving towards the much more radical solution of blocking advertising supported sites entirely.

I am not against advertising in general. It doesn't bug me that there are ads for car dealerships on TV, but the flood of personal injury lawyer ads damages the perceived legitimacy of the government and social system. (As well as the many other ads that are not aimed at getting people to spend their own money but instead to get benefits such as the "Medicare Advantage" scam.)

Web advertising and other distractions (pop ins, "will you let this site make notifications?", Taboolah, Outbrain, "This web site uses cookies...", 20 email messages a day about IBM Cloud outages that didn't affect me, "GDPR is here and our policy has changed...") are immediately harmful in terms of cognitive load (lowers effective IQ,) stress, mistakes, missed appointments, opportunities, bills not paid on time because you had to delete 200 spam messages and accidentally deleted something important. That and the phone that never stops ringing with somebody who wants to lower my interest rates...

I think long term you are training your brain to not accept the cues that "something is important". After 20 or 30 years of that who knows what that will do you? (Whenever I show my wife something from a porno site she can't see the content in the midst of all the lurid and animated advertising.)

It is like Milo Yiannopoulos; it looks like communication but it is better to think about it as noise, static, or nerve gas.

I blacklist any site that is anti-adblocker. You should grab an old computer and install pi-hole on it and you will be able to blacklist sites and just stop the ads from getting into your home. https://pi-hole.net/

This is a great solution for hacker news types (I run pihole at my home - love it!) but it's not a feasible solution for most people.

We need a hard brake on adtech and a restructuring of business models, not a band-aid that only 5% of the population bothers to apply.

You mean like the GDPR?

The GDPR is a huge step forward and it would be wonderful to see something similar happen in the States.

GDPR is a disaster. Already I am getting overwhelmed by requests from people who don't want people to know that they are running a business at such and such an address and I can only assume they are running a criminal business.

There are two ways that "privacy" can be violated: (1) somebody exploits your data, or (2) somebody violates your space. Something like GDPR addresses (1) and might put an end to those shoes from Zappos that keep following you around, but it does not stop the disincentives that destroyed the world wide web.

> Already I am getting overwhelmed by requests from people who don't want people to know that they are running a business at such and such an address

Huh? What does this mean? I've been getting the usual "Please consent to let us continue spamming you" emails, but I have no idea what your sentence above means. Can you elaborate as it's not clear what you're talking about.

(sorry for out of sequence reply but I could not reply directly to the message in question)

I run a business directory site, or at least used to until this morning. If I was like many people I would blame GDPR, but really I figured I rather spend the money I was spending on AWS on something else.

I'm still not getting this... did people get in touch and say "I don't want people to know I'm running a business at this address"? Or did they say "Please remove me from your business directory which you added me to without asking"?... and how does your mind jump to "must be criminals" - are there intermediate steps in your logic or is it just: doesn't want me to have their business address on my database = criminals?

My directory was generated from public information (the Legal Entity Identifier)

The EU has been making moves towards financial transparency largely driven by the UK getting on the open data bandwagon. (Ten years ago they were much worse than the US in terms of seeing government data as a revenue source, now they are far ahead of other countries.)

This is endangered by Brexit and GDPR.

One part of the global governance crisis is that legislators have been captured by a "one dollar one vote" situation and in turn cannot maintain tax rates that produce sufficient government revenues. Thus the bureaucratic sectors have focused on keeping the lights on by trying to get people to pay what they owe. Given massive tax evasion by the rich that has to be a priority so general transparency around cross-border financial transactions has to increase.

Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever.

Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever.

This seems like a slightly modified version of the old, “if you have nothing to hide...” saw and I don’t like it.

I will put it this way.

I have an aunt who has a nursing degree, burned down a barn with horses in it and attempted to kill two people (her mother and her sister) by injecting them with insulin. At some point in between all of that she drove a school bus and for some reason decided to slash herself up with razor and claim that she was assaulted.

We heard that she'd gotten a job as a nurse and we we wonder how that happened. My father-in-law was in the hospital (not where she worked) and she changed his IV bag when it ran out and started beeping.

A week later we read in the paper that she was raiding the medicine cabinet at the nursing home she worked at and found out she was also stealing ADHD medication from her grandson.

Turned out she failed to tick the box that asked if she'd ever committed a felony and the employer was too busy to run a background check on her SSN.

Dangerous people are out there.

That kind of behavior is a direct threat to life but I think tax evasion, corruption, rent-seeking, a lack of responsiveness to problems such as global warming, homelessness, and affordable housing and similar behaviors threaten our civilization and one thing we know is that when a civilization goes down the people left behind turn their back on everything that civilization stand for. (Ex. look what happened when the Christians took over Rome)

The main thing our civilization stands for is individualism and if you like the idea of being able to decide anything at all for yourself (or people 50-100 years) you should have been helping turn the ship around 20 years ago and it might be too late now. (Eg. Listening to people like Frederick Hayek is the real "road to serfdom")

An Iranian physicist living in the UK threatened to sue me under the UK libel laws because he thought I brought attention to him that might lead Iranian grad students to come around looking for job. Well, I was chewed up and spit out by that system and I was not going to be intimidated by that -- if you are sitting pretty on a tenured job on the back of young people in an unfair situation you deserve to hear the voices and see the faces of people who are harmed by your privilege. It is not such a big thing.

Somehow your domestic intelligence service, foreign intelligence services, organized criminals, rip-off artists and other people are going to steal your information and the more that information is pushed underground the more impunity that they are going to operate under.

(To paraphrase Heinlein: a transparent society is a going concern)

This is one of the principal reasons the EFF opposes the Right to be Forgotten. It's more often used for censorship or crimes than anything else.

Dangerous people are out there.

Yes, and psychopaths like your aunt exist, but if we design society around authoritarian ideals designed to totally eliminate their ability to do harm society breaks every time. A balance has to be struck that acknowledges the presence of a significant minority of criminals, while protecting the rights of the majority. A thousand anecdotes will not change that.

Just as a meta note, if you click the timestamp of the post, you'll be taken to a page with a comment box. HN has some rate-limiting where it hides the comment box for some period of time, but you can get around it by clicking the timestamp next to their name.

I'm not following you here.

(Loved your initial comment on this thread though.)

GDPR doesn't do anything about all of the advertisement issues the OP highlighted.

It does a lot to curtail the invasive tracking that is one of the worst parts of some of these ads.

> This is a great solution for hacker news types

How is it a great solution when hacker news has ads that most ad blockers can't block?

HN has ads?

Hiring notices, by Ycombinator projects.

news.yc has job ads for YC portfolio companies

it probably does have a certain degree of astro-turfing

Job ads being one. Also, HN has behind the scene deals to peddle certain news organizations ( nytimes, wapo, wsj ) and certain ngos with certain agendas.

What do you think HN is? What do you think dang, sctb and the mods do?

HN has no such deals. Please don't make things up.

Got a source on that you'd be willing to share?

HN does not have tracking ads (for all we know, at least).

HN does not have tracking ads.

Also if you run OpenWRT/Lede there is a package called 'adblock' that does roughly the same thing as pihole, without the extra hardware requirements.

The company in the source article also has a DNS service (adguard dns: 176.103.130.130 & 176.103.130.131) that blocks ad domains.

It works pretty well, but requires trusting them to follow their privacy policy (which is good) as with any DNS provider.

I've found it useful and lower maintenance than other approaches, but you trade power and flexibility. And is presumably less performant than preventing the lookups in the first place.

That's what I'm also thinking of.

I'm in very early phase of the development of a search engine. I will _not_ index ad serving pages maybe sometimes even whole hosts. Adblock rulesets like easylist will help with this.

I know about Million Short, but it's not that comprehensive and AFAIR uses Google's index.

Also I'm expecting it will result with a significantly smaller index, so maybe I will be able to finance it from my pocket. Small index will enable offline use - download via torrent the whole index and use it offline. With some incremental updates afterwards. However it would still be in the magnitude of tens of gigabytes, on the condition it would really be small enough.

The next level for me would be a HTML-only web browser that would offer permanent reader-mode like behavior. But I have too many projects already.

Hey, I am in exactly same shoes. I am also in early phase of development of a search engine with only free, non-auth walled content, apart from blocking ad serving platforms. I would like to discuss and see if we can work together. Care to talk? Email in profile.

Allow me to join you both. I've never done this but I always wanted to. Email in profile as well.

What tech do you guys plan to use exactly, for a start?

Just because you don't like Milo doesn't mean he doesn't raise legitimate points. It's better to think of him as a standup comedian. He's really no different than any other politically-charged standup act.

I've actually found some of his critiques insightful. I mean, yea he's loud and says a lot of crazy shit, but overall he is challenging people, getting them to think about unpopular opinions.

Just because you like him doesn't mean he does raise legitimate points.

He's an awful person and I'm glad he destroyed his own celebrity.

> It is like Milo Yiannopoulos; it looks like communication but it is better to think about it as noise, static, or nerve gas.

You surely don't have an agenda. /s

So much HN comments are also just noise, static or nerve gas as well. And I highly doubt you have a wife.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like that again.

What personal attacks? I responded directly to the guy's comment. It was an attack on what he said, not who he is.

"I highly doubt you have a wife" is a nasty swipe in more ways than one.

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