Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

I am allowed to read articles at work, it is tangentially part of my job, but independent.co.uk just put me in an awkward situation, and not for the first time.

My boss walked by and made a joke about what I was reading. The physics of carbon is a perfect valid thing for me to read, but what caught his eye was the plethora of sidebar/sponsored content on independent.co.uk. Does every add have to involve sexy models? I've got a blonde schoolgirl pushing something about investments, a redhead with something to tell me about kindles, and a athlete in bathing suit pushing some other clickbait. Sure, this is a work computer and I'm sure the advertising spies know I'm male, but I don't want this crap on my screen at home either.

My mistake: I just tried to highlight one of the sponsored content headlines ... which was actually part of the underlying pic. So I just 'clicked' the redhead with the kindle. My bad. I guess I'll need to cover my screen every time I want to read about graphite.

Delete the entire sidebar in dev tools. I know it's not a fool-proof solution, but for the occasional article you want to spend more time reading it is a quick way to remove all those distractions. I do it on sites like that just for my own sanity, because they are constantly finding ways to get around my ad blocker.

I use a plugin that lets me selectively disable javascript on sites. I have most (all?) news sites with their JS disabled. Means I lose out on pictures.... but also all the annoying ads. Along with the rest of the ads.

Why don't you use an ad-blocker?

"Secure" work computer. Security settings. Windows. We have a very short list of available software. I cannot even clear my browser history without first emailing IT.

can you edit your hosts file or get it changed by IT?

Latter may be possible but it is not specific to one instance, it is required to applied to all available instances.

Weird... using an adblocker would be the easiest and most efficient way to improve security.

I can understand the reluctance to install things that have the ability to read and modify all webpages read though.

In that case, a hosts file can go a long way.

That is indeed a big downside of adblocker plugins. You are giving a lot of permissions/trust to a third party. I assume uBlock Origin is safe, but in that I am trusting not only the author but also that the Firefox AddOns "store" is uncompromised. Those are things I probably could not verify on my own.

can't clear browser history - lol, what? plenty companies with sane work environments are hiring :)

Lol. I'm in the military. But our work environment is 1000% better than anything I ever saw in the civilian/tech world. Every assumption people have is wrong. We are more casual and friendly than any startup. Food is better too.

There's a reason why Gene Roddenberry based his version of utopia on the US Navy.

Well, I would say that 1950s/60s USN is a far cry from our culture. They didn't have casual fridays.

Last time I worked on base with a "secure" computer, every IT policy I read was silently appended with "...but your computer also has Visual Studio installed on it, and you have permission to run anything you can compile." But it was also airgapped from the other computer in my cube, that could reach the public internet, so not much point in writing my own ad-blocker. Mostly, it just made it a pain in the ass to use third-party GUI controls and data visualization libraries, and open-source was effectively banned.

There's also a pretty wide divide between the work environment of the genuine government employees and the contractors' employees. Anecdotally, there's still a bit of a good-ol'boy network pulling on the purse strings in the industry.

If you have the choice, and you work in tech, prefer to take contracted jobs from Navy and Coast Guard customers over other branches. I won't say why, but you'll probably be happier if you do.

Wouldn't disabling javascript, preferably selectively, be an /improvement/ to security?

How about using outline or similar to remove unwanted content? https://outline.com/nRwFNF

Does Firefox reader view work on this site?

If it does try that.

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