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Comment by r3bl | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering for quite some time how these scammers find their way to less experienced users.

Turns out I've been using adblocker for so long that it didn't even occur to me that the scammers were purchasing Google ads.

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I didn't use adblock on my phone until recently because until Brave came out, it was such a pain in the ass (root, vpn, etc). But eventually I couldn't take it anymore. I got regular reminders of how badly ads have ruined the modern web. Any small to midsize blog had a 1-in-4 chance of crashing the browser with fake "YOUR PHONE HAS A VIRUS" ads that pull you right out of what you were reading. Extremely irritating and it's no shock to me why Brave was conceptualised.

Ehm? You can just install firefox from the playstore and then ublock origin. (Privacy Badger is also recommended).

Did just that for a long time but recently switched to brave. Chromium just feels way more snappier on Android and I prefer its UI much more over Firefox which does many things that annoy me (e.g. ignoring theme-color tags).

What options are available for iphone?

iOS has a built in “content blocking” framework. Third party Ad blockers basically submit blocking rules to iOS in JSON format and the ad blockers work both in Safari and in apps that use the newest WebView.

The advantage is that the third party ad blockers aren’t able to intercept your web browsing directly and can’t invade your privacy.

I use 1Blocker.

1+ for 1Blocker, although I also run Adblock Plus in parallel.

Firefox Focus is free.

Even with an adblocker, you can still see Goog's ad results in search. Amidst the ubiquitous Amazon & Ebay results, or in lieu of, many results are scammers... who pay for top results in other ways(SEO).Ever search for Windows Licenses pre-10? If I didn't know better I would think $25 was the normal price for genuine COAs.

I wonder if Dregslist will ever have a similar 'drain the swamp' moment w/ their scammers...

No idea which ad blocker you tried, but uBlock Origin will happily take care of those ads.

Heh, my not-so-obvious implication was search results are in essence ads themselves. I use NS & uBO, I wouldn't use the web w/o them.

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