uBlock Origin: Address first-party tracker blocking
github.com
github.com
[1]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780#iss...
The proposed way for content blocking in Manifest V3 is how Safari on iOS implemented it a few years ago — a declarative list of URLs to be blocked is provided by the extension and the browser engine looks that up and blocks them. The extension doesn’t see the actual page URLs or requests, leave alone block them.
This is a positive for privacy since the browsing behavior of the user is not exposed to malicious extensions. But uBlock Origin is not some-random-extension-that-wants-to-steal-information. Treating uBlock Origin like any other extension isn’t good. Since Google makes money by selling ads, there will likely not be any concessions on this front.
There is no win for privacy here.
Caveat: I was using Firefox Developer Edition... I wonder if "normal" FF would be better.
Disclaimer : I use about 6 privacy focused addons in total.
Why? Doesn't it work with Firefox?
I tend to be very frugal in my use of tabs, maybe 30 at any one time and even then very briefly and I don't have any issues.
To put this in perspective, I'm on a Librebooted T400 machine, so 4GB RAM on a Core 2 Duo and it FF hasn't been a major issue at all. Everyone's mileage may vary.
Try to use Youtube without an ad blocker. It's insane.
It's very common to see: "Ad 1 of 2", the first of which is unskippable, the second of which needs 5 seconds to be skipped (if it's skippable at all). Then you get the content which is almost always sponsored and opens with an ad of its own "this video sponsored by squarespace" etc;
A deluge of marketing, and somehow "not profitable". I don't get it.
Google is the biggest offender after all their entire business is Tracking and Ads but it seems they get a pass as being an "offender" from most people
Note that "most people" (even individuals) also happily insert Google Analytics snippets on their own blogs or websites. I see that all the time thru uMatrix. So it's far from "Google being a bad actor" alone.
Might as while pile on the bad/abusive actors for causing the scenario that makes people use captchas at all.
The key parts there are: - single - technical - authority
Watching businesses attempt an integration of a line code anywhere to download the third party tool is painfully hilarious.
Getting them to set up a DNS record to point to you is often so far off the table its playing in the forest with the faeries. Having them pull your code and serve it statically alongside their site... I couldn't imagine
What usually happens is that the marketing team signs a contract then developers copy and paste a JavaScript snippet to embed on the website and move on.
The work arounds require much more intention and the solutions can be hacky like modifying urls in a minified JS file.
If that tracking is blocked, it is invisible to the company especially if only the third party who has access to the data.
Not going through the browser is possible but requires trust between organizations; publishers have an incentive to inflate numbers, and trust has so far been lacking (and rightly so). That may change.
'normal' people are starting to run ad-blockers now, not just tech-savvy users.
https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-the-uk-2018
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/global-ad-blocking-beh...
If you're willing to get cpu/gpu intensive on the page rendering a lot can be done.
Make sure the travel to a different country between clicks. Just in case.
It's a constant cognitive drain on your mental resources. That's even ignoring the fact that almost everyone is influenced by ads to varying degrees.
We reached the point that this is the argument to avoid ads... People will go to such a length to justify blocking ads, it's crazy.
Yes, I also take the Intel Inside stickers off my laptop.
Every once in a while I get a page that buries a CPU core. It's either bad Javascript (most likely) or something mining cryptocurrency on my PC.
I can ask for a lot more, don't worry.
Speaking for myself, I've never been opposed to ads on sites (within reason - popovers are trash), because I understand that creating content costs money, but I don't like all the tracking that comes with them.
But I was actually responding to the parent's comment (this is a threaded discussion, yes?) about how actual first-party ads are less objectionable than third-party tracking.
But thanks for adding your thoughts.
It is more technically challenging to implement. If it becomes necessary, I'm sure there will be plenty of money invested in making it easier for the content providers to participate in such things.
Kind of like climate change, there are actions we all know would help but individually giving up those conveniences is difficult.
And like voting with your wallet, it will be completely ineffectual in actually addressing the problem.
> Kind of like climate change
Another area where the need for comprehensive societal solutions gets dumped on the individual instead, rendering it ineffectual.
I'm a big proponent of top down climate change policy to force change as opposed to hoping if we virtue signal enough people will be shamed into driving a bit less etc.
With regards to Ads I don't take as much a hard line approach as yourself (I remember our last discussion!). I'm very pro ad blocker use but not to go as far as banning them in any way.
Something I've been thinking about is sending a header to websites informing them I'm going to block their ads so they decide not to send me the content if they don't want to. I feel no entitlement to their content as they should not feel any entitlement to what code gets to run on my machine once it reaches me. I might expand on this in a blog post some time soon but it's probably closer to an art project than something actually viable.
I'm impressed. I don't think I ever remember individual usernames.
>Something I've been thinking about is sending a header to websites informing them I'm going to block their ads so they decide not to send me the content if they don't want to.
I've actually played with similar ideas in the past (my more moderate days). But my philosophy at this point is that they can choose to give me the data or not give me the data. And I'm free to do with it as I please as long as I don't distribute it without permission. And I'm even softening up on that limitation.
An advantage of this is we'd skip the whole ad blocker and anti ad blocker charade and gain a metric ton of performance back.
When I said basically the same thing 4 years ago[1], most people seemed to think it wasn't a serious concern or could be easily bypassed. However, after observing how certain types of businesses use the World Wide Web over the past 3 decades, it's obvious what they want: to send an opaque binary blob to the user that nobody can investigate or modify, that gives them full control over what the user sees and is allowed to do. Just like TV.
The only safe response to this is to stop allowing documents (or docs with 3270-styole forms) to embed software in a Turing complete language. Add functionality that is used declaritively, or the answer to "should this be blocked" is undecidable. Give them the ability to run a Turing complete language that renders to a canvas, and adblocking becomes a hard image recognition problem (or requires solving the Halting Problem).
People who don't want to see ads (i.e. a large part of adblock users) are also more likely to engage in toxic (to advertisers and YouTube) behavior, such as intentionally clicking on ads but never buying anything (or even writing scripts to do that), or intentionally avoiding the advertised product, etc.
HBO does product placement too, though they sometimes pretend they don't or pretend it doesn't count when they do it because they do it "pro bono" (The Pope only drinks Coca Cola™ brand Coca Cola Zero™ for purely narrative reasons, and we're going to mention the brand Coca Cola™ explicitly several times by name to drive home the point that the character you enjoy watching enjoys the cool refreshing taste of Coca Cola™ brand Coca Cola Zero™. Don't worry Coca Cola™ hasn't paid us to shill their sugar water, we do it for free! Drink Coca Cola Zero™!)
We have fire tv and Amazon has added more and more advertising to the point it’s nauseating (an ad for Shameless in the middle of a bunch of baby pictures is jarring).
I’d be happy to pay an extra dollar / month to amazon to not see ads there. Actively looking at htpcs that I can put Adblockers on (pihole doesn’t work since ads and content come from same places, I think)
The thing you can buy a la carte is twitch turbo, and that still removes all ads.
source: ex-googler
In most countries, any YouTube user can pay a subscription fee to disable ads. It's called YouTube Premium: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en
This has existed since 2015, so presumably Google employees have it on their personal accounts.
Twitch also removed the ad-free benefit from twitch prime.
A healthy internet is ultimately up to us to build and maintain.
I feel like that's not a real problem. Or, maybe only a problem for services that care more about having a ton of users than being profitable and sustainable.
There are quite a few services (SmugMug, Vimeo, NetFlix, etc.) that charge money, don't have advertisements, and are doing just fine.
It's weird that so many web companies decide to go the sleazy advertisement/tracking/malware route rather than just charge money for the services they provide.
You will find very quickly how reluctant people are to pay for anything despite a few cultural-phenomenon-level exceptions like Netflix.
I'm amazed how many people, like my own coworkers making $100k+, listen to Spotify all day every day yet will endure advertisement after advertisement in their stream of music instead of paying $10/month. If someone isn't even going to pay for Spotify despite it being a central part of their day to day experience, GG to your little service.
I think advertising has played a major hand in shepherding us into this position that divorced us from the idea of paying for content we enjoy. There is going to have to be a major cultural change to bring us back into a healthy relationship with content.
One common response to this is "well, maybe everyone should be hobbyists again making content for free," but surely we can find a better middleground than structuring things such that we depend on people toiling away in their freetime to produce the content we happen to want. For example, I'd rather my favorite content providers be able to feed themselves working on this content. We both benefit: I get to enjoy more content. Depending on hobby work doesn't get us there.
That's absolutely not true, though. People buy stuff all the time. Clothing, shoes, sporting goods, dishes, food, housewares, books, DVDs, etc.
The "freemium" approach Spotify takes is a poor example because they're not charging for their real service of music streaming, but instead to get rid of advertisements. They've moved their own goalposts, and the question isn't "Is streaming music worth $10 a month?" but "Is it worth $10 a month to get rid of this commercial?" If the options were "Pay $10 to stream music" or "Listen to nothing," the results might be a lot different.
> One common response to this is "well, maybe everyone should be hobbyists again making content for free," but surely we can find a better middleground than structuring things such that we depend on people toiling away in their freetime to produce the content we happen to want. For example, I'd rather my favorite content providers be able to feed themselves working on this content. We both benefit: I get to enjoy more content. Depending on hobby work doesn't get us there.
I'm not making that argument, and you're setting up a false dichotomy. There's no reason content creators need to use advertisements and can't charge for their content instead. It worked fine for music and movies for over a hundred years, and books have been using that model for hundreds of years before that.
I'd never pay $10 for a character in a game, but I'd happily pay $15 for a plastic toy that coincidentally unlocks something in a game I was enjoying anyway
There are people who pay for paid password managers when free alternative products available. I myself pay for a number of services (very reasonably priced) when I could have used free alternatives. The difference is the guys I pay don't offer a free edition without ads and nonsense like that. They just build a great software and ask to pay for their effort.
Why go to work, earn cash with your attention, and pay for Spotify when you can directly monetize your attention on-demand in real-time at the rate you consume? That's what advertising allows.
If you do it as a hobby, it's not toiling. It becomes toiling when you do it as work, especially if you have to please advertisers instead of making the content you love.
Also lots of people can't afford all the content they consume today, and would much rather have access with ads than nothing all.
I mean, on the whole, the vast majority of ad supported content is in fact clickbait trash.
Are those special and only run for large streamers? I never see ads on twitch, but the biggest streamer I watch has under 300 viewers.
You may be ad-free for another reason such as a grandfathered twitch prime that will expire when it next renews, twitch turbo, or a subscription to a channel that opts-in to the ad-free sub benefit. You might also just be in a region or demographic where ads aren't being bought, so you wouldn't get any then.
Now, whenever I get an ad, I immediately close twitch and find something on YT/Mixer to watch. I'm training their algorithms to leave me alone.
I get ads when I use Twitch, with the same account, on a stock installation of Chrome (which I use as my backup browser for when I don’t want to figure out which extension is breaking a website). So it’s not related to my account, location, etc.
However, I would argue that it is not actually worse for several reasons. For one, the streamer decides exactly when and how to play ads - so if the ad timing bothers you, you're going to start watching someone else, which in turn creates an incentive to keep streams ad-free or at least run ads at specific times.
The second reason is that the usage pattern of Twitch is different. I go to twitch (if it's a livestream) to actually watch the content, whereas I use YouTube in many cases like I would use an article, skipping through videos and back and forth looking for a specific part or specific information, and if the information isn't there quickly trying the next video. This workflow gets completely destroyed by ads. To the point where if YouTube would somehow force me to watch ads, I would simply stop using it except for the 2-3 weekly videos I actually plan to watch beforehand.
This seems standard: acquire users, then make the service worse for users. (and better for shareholders and/or advertisers)
The problem is that sites trying some insane techniques is a bad arms race.
Sites like the wallsteet journal made a adblock-wall, see ads or don't use the site. That's fine. They can do that. And they lost lots of traffic. But they can decide if they like that.
Websites want a have-your-cake-and-eat-it option -- forcibly show ads, no opt out.
https://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/200449744-How-ar...
Why ask a vague winky-face question when you can make your assertion instead? Now I have to wait for you to respond just for you to clarify what you were trying to say.
> our traffic estimates are based on data from our global panel, which is a sample of millions of Internet users using one of many different browser extensions. However, we don’t just rely on browser extensions. We also gather much of our traffic data from direct sources, including sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script and certify their metrics. It is this unique combination of data from our global panel, plus data from directly measured sources, filtered through our advanced statistical models that allow us to provide you with robust and comprehensive metrics.
The next anti-tracking technology should include fake tracking.
What makes you say you’re speaking for most of us?
Tracking doesn't mean anything to most people.
That's why I'm not using it personally, even though I'd love to...
then you can go mad on everything outside the container
I don't think that's true, video encoding is expensive. This is not trivial to do without investment in hardware.
Google doesn't just sell ads, they sell targeted ads. Yes, YouTube currently does some processing on every video uploaded. But they only do that once.
Outside accessibility there's also the issue of responsive design, huge SEO impacts, rendering performance... I'm probably missing a bunch.
Lifting a sedan with my bare hands is obviously easier than lifting a 10 wheeler, but it's still a massive problem. Rendering stuff is not the biggest issue.
Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript"[1] was an ominous portent of a terrifying future. Unfortunately, some people apparently saw it as development roadmap.
[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
You can even implement a WASM interpreter in JS.
WASM at least is standardized, so there will be a whole ecosystem dedicated to it. Think IDA Pro for WASM.
> although we've had Emscripten for years
We did. And I didn't see the "asm.js apocalypse" you seem to fear.
WASM is different between Emscripten was always a fun curiosity, and WASM is being "marketed" to developers as "get native app performance in a browser". "Modern" Javascript has been able to deliver this future for a few years now, but it lacked the marketing and tooling to make it mainstream. Flash and Java were attempts to move to that future that didn't pan out.
Having IDA Pro for WASM is all well and good, but doing binary reverse engineering on every single website isn't practical.
The web, as it has been, was nice. We're not going to get to keep it. I'm unhappy with it, but I'm resigned to it.
So WASM doesn't take away anything from us, because we haven't had the "nice" you mention for 10 or 15 years. Sites like HN will stay like this, sites like Facebook will get even bigger. It will happen with or without WASM.
But yes, I do see where you're coming from. You want a less bloated Web, and you're worried that WASM is not going to lead to that, which I pretty much agree with. While I'm saying that cat is already out of the bag and WASM at least has the potential to bring performance improvements over JavaScript (which will be promptly negated by the sites getting even more bloated).
I want a declarative web. I wish there wasn't a VM in my browser. I want a web where my user agent, under my control, dictates how documents are interpreted and displayed.
So much of information security relies on not letting third parties execute arbitrary code on your computer. The price to view "mainstream" websites is increasingly becoming "allow third parties to execute arbitrary code on your computer". I can sandbox that code and perhaps limit the impact to my privacy (though thanks to processor microarchitecture "features" that's increasingly difficult), but I lose virtually all ability to control the presentation experience.
To be blunt: The kind of assholes that delighted in using Javascript to block opening context menus, blocking "Paste" into password fields, etc, have won. That pisses me off. Developers with good intentions who wanted to make something "cool" end up being the architects of the tools that will be used turn the web into cable TV.
Change your `dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled` in about:config to false.
Putting a VM into our browsers, along with sufficient API support to make that VM useful, is what spells the eventual end of the document-based web. I think that future arrived a few years ago and it's just not evenly distributed yet.
That sounds like the worst future possible. I love the fact that I can go to any web page and look at all of the HTML, CSS, JS (even if I need to use a tool to un-obfuscate it). Have you never wondered how someone did something and then looked at their code to find out how they did it? I love being able to use curl and wget to grab a web page. How would that work in a non document-based web? I really think this would be a terrible thing if it actually came to fruition. I truly hope I'm retired or dead before it occurs.
You can easily generate a static document with ads, doing the heavy lifting on the server.
TVs allow the user to mute the audio, switch channels and fast forward past ads in recorded video. What publishers are doing to the web is like sending a control message that reconfigured the TV and disabled some of its functions. "You can't mute the audio, you're obligated to listen to this. Also, we're turning the volume all the way up in order to reach you even if you leave. You can't turn it off either."
Publishers simply don't want users to have any control over the experience. It's their way or the highway.
What if broadcasting companies sent signals during commercials that told the TV to disable these features? "They've enjoyed the movie, now it's time to make them pay. Don't let them change the channel, mute the audio or lower the volume". How long would it take before TVs that didn't follow these intructions entered the market?
Browsers have features publishers don't want people to have. We can download copies of "their" content. We can delete their ads. We can filter out their user tracking malware. This is possible because the browser serves us, not them.
That just moves the goalposts though. People will still deconstruct and reverse engineer the black box, or sniff the lines it uses and attack the traffic. Or anything else. There are countless attack vectors against a device in physical possession. So unless the devices are melting down into slag and can perfectly detect even passive attacks then the advertisers will always lose.
This doesn't stop them from trying. If advertising can be made more expensive then the roi the advertisers will stop. Some will irrationally throw money at the problem way past the point they should've given up but even they will taper off eventually.
I'm already seeing a big use case for having such a (opt-in) domain filtered search engine since there's soo many spammy and SEO-hacking web sites out there.
I wonder if it is also not how GDPR should have been implemented. Forcing browsers to implement a request for storing tracking data, which would avoid dark patterns in consent forms and would keep websites honest. It would also allow to remember the decision. If you delete cookies when the browser closes, you get asked for the same consent you denied on every visit.
The internet will partition: the corporate internet will be what you say, and the independent internet will be people writing and hosting their own content, like the internet of the olden days. Some of them might interact with corporate services via apis.
The independent internet will be small, but it will be enough. If you want to buy something anonymously, go to a shop and pay cash with your phone turned off.
Maybe there is a market for a proxy that converts any page you visit to bare and functional HTML with just content and navigation. No ad's, distractions, disfunctional scrolling, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron and other MITM-proxies can do that and more, although the security-paranoid may disapprove (but then again --- what are you more concerned about, what is your threat model, etc.) The recent "security vulturism" and things like DoH and other anti-user ostensibly-privacy things certainly doesn't help.
I’m not sure if it can also enable individual scripts, that might become necessary very soon if this article is an example of what is coming.
Wrap it up with an easy to install bow and easy self updating to keep up with sites (and easy fallback to original sites/links), and I'll never browse the mainstream sites again. There are a couple of things that do this, but none as well as I'd like to see.
Fetching data from such websites is the only thing so far where I've found ES async generators very very useful.
You don't even need a browser. Most of the time simple HTTP requests from node work just fine, and makes tor use safer and more effective since you're not running any foregin JS code, just parsing data. Other thing that improves privacy is that you're downloading everything, so it's hard to see from the service's side what you're actually consuming.
Actually many usual services follow this pattern. List of accounts->list of transactions->transaction details. List of categories->list of articles->article detail. List of product categories->list of products->product detail.
Simple abstraction can get you very far, even with a fairly simple DB schema.
Suppose I have an apache module (or the equivalent in some modern http server) that's (a) injecting the necessary code (b) forwarding the traffic information to my nefarious third-party tracking provider. Or, heck, just a third-party solution that consumes my apache logs. It's doing all of this without using the browser itself as a middleman, like the clumsy CNAME masking discussed in the linked Github discussion.
This could never be stopped client-side since one's web browser would have no say.
Only reason this isn't more widespread already is because a lot of web properties don't have full control over their shared hosting environments.
First-party ads are theoretically kinda sorta maybe blockable via various levels of heuristics, which of course adblockers are already doing to various extents today.
But as far as preventing your information from being forwarded behind the scenes, there's no technical solution. Legislation is the only hope to curb it.
Google still has an old help site referencing its log analysis features [1].
> Urchin WebAnalytics Software is discontinued and is no longer supported. All Urchin documentation applies only to the Urchin product as it was at the time of discontinuation, and does not apply to any Google Analytics products or services.
Ads need to know what you googled, what you did in the competitors website, 1st party domains are a huge handicap for it.
They either will need excellent fingerprinting or accept subpar tracking.
The max they can do is track you in their website, but that's terrible, they need to know more.
edit: this means the 3rd party server can't know who you are, even if they get your tracking events, they can't know what you did in the other sites.
thats why fingerprinting could fix this, the 3rd party server could find your profile with a good enough fingerprint.
I'm talking about a sameSite cookie made for the publisher, via a proxy on the server.
When a client send you this cookie (sameSite) your server forward it to the ad provider using a RPC call.
The ad provider replies to this call with new data they want you to add to the cookie.
You set the "forAdProvider" cookie on the client, using the data specified by the ad provider.
I don't think that has much value because the ad provider wouldn't know who you are to begin with.
First time you open said website no cookies would exist for the domain.
Then the ad provider wouldn't know who you are.
Ex: Access foo.com and search for shoes, shoe cookies set for foo.com Then access bar.com which hits foo.com for the ad suggestions Now foo.com knows you searched for shoes, since the 3rd party cookies are there.
Now if you do it without 3rd party cookies bar.com wouldn't have any access to the cookies which identify you as a shoe buyer, because those are set for foo.com
I'm ready to move on. In my eyes we already lost the www.
If you provide paid content AND try to track me or make even more money with me via ads: goodbye...
On the other hand: If you rely on ads only, it is doubtful that your media-outlet is truly neutral -- would you really do analysis and investigations on your highest paying ad clients (?) -- I doubt it...
There is also the option of actively attacking the business model of the ad and tracking industry. Ad blockers could simulate lots of "fake" traffic to make ad analytics harder (this is another arms race against attempts to filter out the fake traffic)
This would be awesome!
Mandatory : "Why Rosyna Can't Take A Movie Screenshot"
http://web.archive.org/web/20180919021829/https://www.alexra...
There are many videos on Youtube recommending stuff. You never know if the author has been paid. Even if you try to detect popular ad networks and services, the ad techniques will also evolve.
If ads were the only source of my income, and my content was unique, I would show the user a "quiz" every 5 minutes, asking him to answer, what is shown in the ads at the moment :D and deny the access, if the answer is wrong.
Those are some rose-tinted glasses. People on forums like HN were always annoyed that they looked like navbar links and you were only clicking them out of confusion with actual links.
Also, re: “inline” static images, there could totally be client-side ML-model cosmetic filters that recognize and remove known as images, regardless of how they got to the page. The filter could even just throw a floating rectangle over then, so it wouldn’t even have to understand how they’re made in the DOM. This is the “thermonuclear backup plan” we’ve been expecting to need to pull out for a while now, though advertisers have been lazy about getting sneaky enough to necessitate it.
Small community sites are still interesting, distributed web technologies may start to rise, or there's always gophernet...
The problem with first party tracking from the PoV of the advertisers is that the feedback they need goes through the site their ad is on so it is possible to be faked: "Yes Mr Advertiser, we really did send x000 ad impressions to {addresses} this day, honest guv'ner."
And from the site's point of view the adverts now become a little more admin to manage beyond just slapping in a reference to 3rd party JS and adding a <div> for that code to target to insert the advert.
Essentially, the ad providers would also become hosting services.
So.. Google AMP?
It also creates single points of failure that did not exist before. If the ad service is down, your content is (potentially) down too rather than just being served without working ads.
If they want to make ads extremely hard to block but reduce privacy concerns, I'm all for that. It puts the discussion back on a more even level, and if you don't like the ads, don't use the service. The only reason I'm okay with running an ad blocker now is because of the privacy concerns. If those were eliminated (which isn't the case in this theoretical situation, they're just reduced) then I'm not sure how to justify running an ad-blocker. To my eyes, it's basically stealing cable or satellite service. I understand other people don't see it the same way though.
Just because there are a lot of bad actors and massive amounts of advertising doesn't mean the entire internet needs to go down that path.
Hackers have protected users since years. It's time for politicians to protect their citizens.
I'm actually hoping it paves the way for more independent publishers that focus on quality content and charging.
Ads have ALWAYS sucked and been a horrible solution to funding news, journalism, etc.
The problem is that ads basically cause other users to defect to platforms that are free (but sponsored by ads).
Those are two separate things. You can track without code, and you can make a page terribly slow without any tracking.
Interestingly, for most people it's primarily the code size and slowness leads them to adblocking, tracking is secondary.
> I can't block it? I'll probably stop using it,
As a publisher I 'd welcome that behaviour. Of course i should be partly responsible for the ads my users see, I actually try to be but it's impossible with today's technology.
It's a total fallacy that the adtech of today is the best we can have. It has become a pissing contest about "who can give you the biggest, most complex analytics dashboard" rather than providing actual value to advertisers. There is also tons of unsold inventory due to the duopolization of ad platforms by google&FB. In that sense, i 'm thankful that adblocking is expanding to upend this ecosystem.
I visit some sites than sell, manage, and host their own ad inventory. I make zero effort to block those ads and will even click on them if they're interesting. Most of the time they're images wrapped in an anchor tag, maybe the occasional SVG animated with CSS. I don't want personalized ads, I'd rather see contextually relevant ads if I have to see any at all.
Before:
Ad providers tell you to throw an external element in your page to display an ad.
After:
Ad providers tell you to add a library to your code directly that pulls down ads and serves them front the same place your site comes from.
This doesn’t magically make the website selling advertisement space aware of what code they’re running on your browser via those ads.
Would this change any legal basis? I do not know, I'm not a lawyer, but I sure hope we find out.
This is why I love UBlockOrigin, that basic principled approach is a great thing.
They’ve been in that situation before, with the original uBlock, and they’ve learned not to trust their own team.
One way browsers try to take away that freedom is by limting what extensions can do. If that continues, at one point we would need a new browser to accomplish it.
My favorite vision of the future would be if Debian would provide a version of Chrome or Firefox that: a) is stripped of all tracking and b) gives extensions full access to everything.
Or, assuming they have a small list of subdomains that redirect to ad servers, you could generate a list with a script that checks all their subdomains and creates a block list based on that. For example, the site discussed in the OP has all their subdomains listed here: https://crt.sh/?q=%25.liberation.fr
Edit: looking at the OP case, it seems like they only have one ad domain. I'm not sure I see this as a serious issue until multiple sites start rolling out thousands of subdomains, some pointing to back to the real server, others pointing to the ad server. Maybe that will happen but it's a pretty big barrier to entry, and just short of proxying everything through the 1st party.
I'm speculating that the balance is in the reverse favor. Last night I was looking at some file on GitHub which was redirecting to what looked like an S3 bucket subdomain named with a pattern like "github-production-f7e281a2", which I simply presumed to be cache-busting via subdomain instead of appending the hash to the filename. If my assumptions were correct, every time GitHub deploys a new build, you would have to whitelist that subdomain.
And remember the time when Debian layered some changes on top of openssl? http://faq.caslavka.cz/attachments/196/randomness.png
Now, what changes does Google layer on top of chromium to make Chrome? Do you know exactly?
(Do you know that all of Chromium is in fact open source? Have you looked at the source and the build process? Are there any parts in it that are actually precompiled binary blobs?)
Also, 3rd party infrastructure could be something like aws. Are you really going to block all ec2 address ranges?
This reduces the attractiveness of adverts, which means they won't be as prevalent, which means tracking concerns are lessened.
That's a win, no?
To the site owner, they're just pointing dns at the ad company and treating it like a cdn.
Third-party requests with cookies made it easy to start tracking people across sites... but there are other ways if that is made to stop working. Given how much money flows through the advertising industry, I am sure someone will pay for the week or so of engineering to make advertising more invasive.
I already suggest people use these edge workers to anonymize-then-collect analytics (e.g. via [0]) if they can't be bothered to host their own solution. Of course we all prefer self hosted, but even this is better than third party js.
0 - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
https://git.frogeye.fr/geoffrey/eulaurarien (for running your own script)
https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/firstparty-only-trackers-hosts.... (to be imported in your adblocker)
It was fairly trivial: instead of asking for the tracking script directly I put a small service of ours in front of it, so our website asked for foo.mycompany.com/stats.js that fetched the correct script and changed all URLs inside of it from mycomp.mytrack.com to foo.mycompany.com. Our service than acted as a proxy to mycomp.mytrack.com.
A simple solution that worked out for a while, lost by now, in a server, somewhere in Ireland...
This isn't exactly a great future but we need to accept that nowadays most people don't care about tracking or ads. This might change one day, but it's the status quo.
I think that anti-ads and anti-tracking, if trying to work alongside the full feature set of the Internet, is fighting a honorable but eventually losing war. Even if someone sorts out this particular issue, you are still tracked by 1) Your ISP and 2) other subtle client fingerprinting technologies. You can use Tor/VPN/disable JS but all of these have downsides.
All we can do is to fight with our time and wallets by not visiting places that don't support our values. This is possible and not different from the world we live in already.
May be more of a challenge with trackers as they don't to show ads per se, but may be the same technique can be used with "randomly" generated URLs - train an AI to dynamically make a guess whether the sub-domain (even first party) is a tracker or not. There may not be a clear marker, but there is always a pattern...
It need not be a subdomain. Analytics could be proxied from the main domain.
Which is unfortunate, because it's already started that many places won't even render plain text without javascript.
> I think that anti-blocking and anti-tracking, if trying to work alongside the full feature set of the Internet, is fighting a honorable but eventually losing war.
For me it's less about "tracking" and more about tracking with aggregation. Self-hosted things like AWStat and Matomo (formerly Piwik) are fine in my book. It's bringing together those analytics across different sites which is problematic.
Ironic ain't it?
Can first party tracking do this sort of correlation other than through browser fingerprinting?
This is already happening with large web publishers.
It's like, a peeping Tom who just looks through a window - yuck that's gross. But a peeping Tom who spies by building a microdrone that can fly in the door when it opens and mount itself on the ceiling with suction pads - oh that's perfectly legitimate because of the work and resources Tom invested.
I mean, if it's gross to do something by accident and it's gross to do something without any investment, it's super gross to do it with resources.
It's not all that hard to track someone across the internet. I think many people have demonstrate hacks that steal legitimate functionality and get you there.
I think we'll probably have to go for a containerised internet (separate apps) and just deal with the disadvantages.
For example, you could spin up an instance of Matomo (formerly Piwik) for your own website and still see no traffic from adblock users by default.
https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
The example at the top of the thread: https://www.liberation.fr/ has a tracker from f7ds.liberation.fr, which is really part of tracking provider Eulerian.
f7ds.liberation.fr. 3599 IN CNAME liberation.eulerian.net.
Just because there are worse things to do does not make Piwik the right thing. The right thing is not to collect the data at all.
More sites could do that.
This is generally better than 3rd partyies because the sites would have to actually conspire, cooperate and trust each other, which is a huge hurdle.
And if the trust is actually there, they could correlate offline without any indication. Facebook already does that (with credit records, likely phone records and medical records as well) and I wouldn’t be surprised if others don’t.
Correlation is less than perfect this way - but e.g. zip, gender and age are enough to give a pretty good correlation, and name makes it almost perfect - if you have an account somewhere, you probably gave these details.
Can you you send me an example of both of those please?
> Can't this be "emulated" in Chromium by resolving the hostnames using DNS over HTTPS in JSON format?
> - This would require uBO to send browsing history information to a remote server, this is anti-uBO.
> - Chromium does not support non-blocking webRequest.onBeforeRequest listeners, so this can't work reliably when the result depends on an asynchronous operation such as a DNS lookup.
> - Chromium's webRequest.onBeforeRequest blocking ability is being deprecated with Manifest V3, so even without the above issues, this would be wasted development efforts.
I suspect (and suspected) that Ublock Origin may eventually be deprecated for Chrome after the V3 changes shipped the same way it was deprecated for Safari, although to the best of my knowledge Gorhill hasn't made any kind of official announcement about that -- so I want to be clear that it's purely conjecture on my end.
This thread reinforces that suspicion. I don't know if Gorhill has explicit plans to do anything with Chrome, but I suspect that in the future it will become more and more annoying to support the browser.
I also previously made a prediction[1] that within 2 years, Firefox would have clearly better tracker-blocking extensions than Chrome (65% likelyhood). This is roughly in line with what I would expect to see with that prediction -- a few rare fringe-case scenarios that creators can quickly address in Firefox, but that require more extensive work and conversations around Chrome. If this kind of issue becomes more common in the future, then I'll feel more confident about that prediction.
[0]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780#iss...
Using an A/AAAA record would be harder, you’d need to have an IP blacklist, and the trackers would probably be constantly shifting IPs, using a low TTL on the record.
This might require giving your tracker programmatic access to your DNS, not sure if many first parties are ready to go there.
there comes a point when the content is just not worth it
doesnt scale obviously
we're headed back to the "golden age" of TV advertising except via http instead of radio waves/cable
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/?src=s...
at least we've had ad blockser on browsers that work well up to now
the tracking of web ads obviously vastly overshadows what happened with TV.
they obviously want the best of both worlds "avoidable ads" and "extreme tracking"
Does Safari recognize these trackers?
https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
> Does ITP differentiate between my subdomains?
No. ITP captures statistics and applies its rules for the effective top-level domain plus one, or eTLD+1. An eTLD is .com or .co.uk so an example of an eTLD+1 would be social.co.uk but not sub.social.co.uk (eTLD+2) or just co.uk (eTLD).
https://webkit.org/blog/9521/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
ITP 2.3 counteracts this by downgrading document.referrer to the referrer’s eTLD+1 if the referrer has link decoration and the user was navigated from a classified domain. Say the user is navigated from social.example to website.example and the referrer is https://sub.social.example/some/path/?clickID=0123456789. When social.example’s script on website.example reads document.referrer to retrieve and store the click ID, ITP will make sure only https://social.example is returned.
Now it's time for standards creators to be responsible and to do something in favor of their users: the user should have the final decision about being tracked/shown ads.
But when the most used web browser is in the hands of the biggest ad vendor, then there is little hope...
I guess we can only expect for web pages to turn into a sort of dynamically-generated JPEG that cannot be parsed/analyzed.
If the publisher develops an analytics, user profile or whatever solution themselves, then it's 1st party - OK.
But outsource the development or hosting to someone, and suddenly it's a problem? How is this different to using AWS?
Now if the data from their different clients is merged to build a unified view of what you do on the web, that's different, but the place to prevent that is in the browser using cookie partitioning, not by caring about the tracker developer/hosting provider.
How have you reached the conclusion that this is okay?
Sign up, promise not to track your users and be open to lawsuits if you're found to be lying.
Granted, it would just be another whack in the game of whack a mole, but we have to keep whacking.
The UI has nothing to do with this.
The entire ad-blocking concept shows that people will do anything to continue visiting a website they are desperate to consume no matter how user-hostile it might be.
Also, this "No-Tracking" pledge seems like a thought experiment that only considers the rare website with more or less drop-in alternatives. So, maybe just general news and some brochure info sites?
But I feel like we're reaching some sort of tipping point. 200k+ people just signed up to a new social network whose only real usp is no tracking.
I don't know what a drop in alternative is so I can't answer your question, but if your assertion is that generally speaking sites need to allow their users to be tracked I would disagree.
No pop ups, fewer paywalls, less tracking, no videos (except the video site I whitelisted, like youtube). What should be static content actually stays static content. The web is a much better place when you disable javascript where there doesn't need to be javascript.
Combine it with cookie auto-delete and whitelisting, and disabled third party everything, and the web is mostly nice again.
> Libération (French: [li.be.ʁa.sjɔ̃]), popularly known as Libé ([li.be]), is a daily newspaper in France, founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968.
> For its first six or seven years it was a uniquely vibrant and pluralist publication and hugely influential. This > was mainly due to its refusal to take paid advertising which meant there was no direct or indirect pressure from advertisers.
Seems they're now helping to push boundaries of pushing advertising since their founding.
At some point, you have to admit that you just want the content for free.
The issue is data and privacy, and first-party means it's a much more direct relationship with the site you're on.
More than that, random subdomains are used to subvert adblockers.
To me, it seems that the discussion is about third-party ads which are masquerading as first-party content. It's not about first-party ads or whether the content should be free, but about third-party advertisers pretending to be first-party.
The data relationship changes with first-party serving because it's now isolated to that site.
Except that when you decide to point to someone else's domain via a DNS CNAME on your own domain, you open the door to cookies, referrer information, and more being leaked to the third party.
Whether it's intentional or not, I think it's a bad thing to do.
Oh, and opens the door for malicious cross-domain scripting if the CDN you're CNAME'ing gets compromised.
I don't think it's the same.
At least with HTTPS (or even the use of VPNs, DNS over HTTPS, and the upcoming/proposed encrypted SNI), the ISPs won't have any metadata except the IP headers, which I think is a good rebalancing.
There's no requirement for the CMS to be hosted by a third party. Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, etc. are all popular self-hosted solutions.
The CDN typically does not have all the information, either: a CDN's job is (often, but not always) to deliver media assets (images, videos, audio), large files (e.g. ISOs, executables), or to deliver things like fonts or javascript libraries. These things are (again, often, but not always) supplied from a different domain.
My browser, for example, doesn't send referer headers when dealing with these sites, and it definitely doesn't send any cookies which aren't set for the CDN's domain explicitly. Different amounts of information leak when you CNAME to a CDN on your own domain, or you load third party advertising scripts in a page.
To me, at least, there's a difference between a third party (such as a CDN or ISP) knowing what domain I was on, versus third-party advertising scripts getting their hands on my detailed browser information by (ab)using JavaScript APIs and extensive fingerprinting.
> There's a difference between a service provider and data ownership.
Can you elaborate? I don't think I understand this point. For example, under the GDPR where I live, I have rights to data which I produced, regardless of the service provider or the domain it's delivered on.
The real issue is whether your data is more protected, and with first-party serving (and all the other anti-tracking restrictions), it's isolated to each domain instead of the cross-site tracking we had before. It's basically a user-to-site connection only now, regardless of the backend tech they use.
Any serious privacy change would require regulation as you noted, GDPR and CCPA in the US will provide the real protections soon enough.
The problem is that they're ads.
> At some point, you have to admit that you just want the content for free.
I understand it's a bit of an ethical conundrum. Quality content and/or service requires compensation. At the same time, advertisement is a form of harassment and intellectual terrorism and they make content undemocratic by nature. Altering your own software in order to see NO ads of any kind under any circumstances is perfectly justifiable.
With that said, I don't buy the myth of the struggling internet entrepreneur being unable to make ends meet because of the selfish adblock users. I think that's as ridiculous a notion as the idea that Napster could kill independent musicians. Fact of the matter is that ads are a form of revenue and there are healthy alternatives out there.
For instance, instead of giving away an infinitesimal fraction of our mental health to every single internet business, we can instead enter a social contract in which everything is free, and consumers are expected to pay into the channels and services that they like best. This is, for instance, how many Podcasts and non-advertiser-friendly Youtube channels work.
> "healthy alternatives out there"
That's the real myth. You either pay for content up front (by going to work, getting paid in cash, and using that cash) or you see some ads (which convert your attention to payments in real-time on demand for exactly what you're consuming). For billions of people, ads are faster, easier, more passive and more fair.
Donations are not a scalable business. Podcasts are in an advertiser boom and are making record amounts of money from ads so I'm not sure why you used that example. Very few (if any) channels of size are completely user-supported.
None of the podcasts I listen to contain any kind of advertisement of any kind. This is not difficult to explain; prudent businesses typically do not stray very far outside the Overton window. This form of media exists - flourishes - because of listener patronage.
> Donations are not a scalable business.
True, but it's a viable business model. If you want something that scales as high as your entrepreneurial ambitions, consider that 100 million people pay Spotify in order to not have to listen to ads.
Spotify has made a profit a total of 2 quarters out of 10 years, and that's an example of direct payment as I described, which nobody has a problem with. Donations as you're talking about are completely different. There is no free and pay what you want with spotify.
The fact of the matter is that I have control over what my browser renders. If you provide it for free "with ads" then I am going to access it for free without ads; you are putting it out there free of charge and hoping to get kickbacks. If you escalate the ad-blocker arms race, I am going to lose interest in whatever crap you are peddling. You do not automatically enter a mutual agreement with me upon publishing it and you will not succeed in guilt tripping me into watching vapid and manipulative corporate material.
If you want any of my money, use one of the crowdfunding platforms out there, or sell it upfront.
But sure, some will have this position and it's relatively minor across the population, but you're starting to see more things behind subscriptions and paywalls as a result.
I don't see which part of this thread implies that I'm only against online ads.
> Call it what you want, but you know and understand the implicit agreement is ads in exchange for content.
You don't seem to get it. There are no terms other than what's on the table, which is to say the content and the ads, and both are optional. We are not legally or ethically bound by any "implicit agreement".
> but you're starting to see more things behind subscriptions and paywalls as a result.
Subscriptions and paywalls are markedly better than advertisements, for the consumer at least.
Except the ones that don't or can't pay for it. People want more options for access, not less. The extremist position is saying all advertising is bad while ignoring the economic impact and the fact that almost all businesses grow because of it.
In the early days of the internet, there was no expectation to be paid for creating content - people simply created it out of their own goodwill or because it's their passion.
If I set up a personal website, I expect that to be a sunk cost; people pay for my content with their attention. Obviously, attention doesn't put food on the table, but it's saddening to see the contrast between what the Internet could be, and what it is currently.
Originally ad networks were something you rendered out on server side hitting their APIs from the server, and in some cases dns via subdomain. Content hosts were more careful of the content of the ads because it hits their main host ranking.
First party / server side ads are actually preferred if you have to choose as you can limit the ads server side and rogue ads can be dealt with.
Ad networks from the late 90s to early 2000s were this way. Once popup ads took off they started making ad networks client side to not impact rendering on the server and ads could show progressively when inlined into the layout/script.
Today the ads/trackers are almost all client side as it is easier to integrate as more of a widget and less resources used on the server. The ad networks and trackers of today want to own all the data and not share it with content providers, plus being client-side it makes it easy to link data without the need for integration in each endpoint backend just the third party endpoints. Additionally third party ad networks may not trust that page views are organic with the api calls being implemented first-party server side, so they went client-side where they can validate actual page renders and lots of other time/click based metrics.
Ultimately sponsor ads that show up on sites/blogs/portals are usually first party server-side ads still. So as long as there aren't rogue ad networks on the server side or via DNS/subdomain then it may improve ads overall. Since first party ads are server side, unless routed via DNS to the ad network, at least the content provider incurs some cost from hosting it at least in bandwidth. If it is a subdomain that goes to an ad network that is full of dark patterns, that is not so great but it will still impact the host reputation in ranking.
Right now ads are a mess for a few reasons: so much tracking, taking up screen real estate and the marketing team pushing people to subscribe making the free content experience painful. Email/subscribe and ad popups are more prevalent than the behind the browser popups in the early days, very bad experiences.
I sometimes think the days of server side/first party ads and popups from the early internet are preferable to today's inline ads with videos that follow you down and autoplay nightmares all over the page with dozens of trackers and networks all in one. At least first party server side ads that are served up from a backend API hit to a third party or sponsors doesn't cause excessive connections, it also puts an upper limit on the amount of ads that can be shown before it hits costs of hosting and rogue ad networks impact the url reputation so the content hoster may be more of a curating check on ad quality.
<a href='http://doubleclick/adid'><img src='http://doubleclick/ad.jpg</a>
I never ran puch the monkey stuff, but I think that was something like <object src='http://hell.com/argh'>
I don't think you can categorise those as "distracting".
People will allow the tracking pretty much whenever they have to when not doing so is an obstacle to accessing a website (Or simply because they get annoyed at the popup or it doesn't allow opting out).
uBO (in the common case) prevents tracking even when consent has been given. Subverting that is not against the GDPR because for the law, the consent is the only thing that matters.
Advertisements in magazines are often somewhat interesting, well-made to be entertaining, or even useful. I used to read ads in magazines and I still sometimes do. It doesn't give me a bad feeling, at worst/best I'll just emit an indifferent "huh", and proceed to the next page.
And I've never, ever seen a single internet advertisement that wouldn't make me irritated and start gradually boiling my blood. Early Google-style ad boxes were closest to bearable so far but I still never read them nor showed any slightest interest in them. They were just kind enough to not irritate that much but merely be mentally blocked right off the bat.
I can't stand a web page with ads yet I would find a magazine boring without them. I don't think it's the ads: I think it's the presentation and the media that differs between paper and web. My eyes can wander to an ad and then back to text quite easily on paper, but my browser can't fit several columns of the article and a full-page ad on the same screen. This either-or proposition interrupts my reading and causes agitation. On paper I'm in control, on web I'm not.
When I open a magazine, even if I have a specific article in mind I want to read, I will slowly turn through the pages happy to browse through other random content. It is a very leisurely, less focused interaction.
When I go to a website it is almost always for a very specific purpose. My mindset is goal oriented - I want exactly the content I came here for, nothing more (with rare exception, like HN). And probably years of navigating through horrible websites has helped shape that mindset in me, but I have to wonder, if websites delivered curated content and ads at the level of a magazine, would I even care?
I sometimes go to a magazine to read about something specific yet I might eyeball the ads while I'm around the target content. If it's a long multi-page article that I'm interested in specifically, or a single page thing, I still might pop out of the text into an advertisement occasionally.
Conversely I do browsing (in the traditional sense) on the web as well: I often find myself looking around some website, reading this and that around here and there, trying to figure out how much of the stuff is interesting vs boring, and generally not diving deep on anything and thus I'm theoretically quite open to subject myself to advertising but I still don't look at ads, and I'm still not interested.
I sometimes wonder how would it be if web had started with good ads and I had conditioned myself from the start to expect interesting stuff in the ads.
It's just that the web went the opposite way, innocently starting with a <blink>, and going to JavaScript, Flash, and cookie-infested ad networks and whatnot to deliver involuntary injections of striking advertisements, and now I'm practically allergic to anything that moves or stands out.
Typically web doesnt have the same kind of control and advertisers have more or less free rein to do what they want.
This is in contrast to web where I'll have to start by choosing a set of ad-blocking plugins to allow me back even some of that control even before I've read a single article online.
I don't particularly even care that much about ad networks tracking me, that's more like a philosophical / ethical question that is invisible in the daily life. Web ads aren't bad because of tracking, it's just that they're mostly bad ads.
Chief among them was Ravelry, a social site for knitters and crocheters. At least as of the last time I used the site (which was admittedly years and years ago) they just one banner ad at the top of every page, hosted first-party rather than through an ad network.
The ads were far better targeted than anything I've ever seen come out of an ad network, because they were typically relevant to my interests, and also generally caught me at a time when I was already thinking about buying something like what the ad was trying to sell. Admittedly, it was an easy job that could be done with only a light application of tensor algebra, but still. I clicked on those ads. Often. And I always at least glanced at them. It was a lot like what you were describing with magazine ads.
The thing that gets me about modern Internet ads is that I really don't think they're the spiritual successors to magazine and newspaper ads, not even when they're hosted on magazine and newspaper websites. They're more comparable, in all but the most cosmetic of ways, to junk mail and telemarketing.
Really? I find them interrupting, manipulative, and vapid, as a general rule. If my magazine was "boring without them", I'd need to find a different magazine. Ads are at best blockers to the content I wanted to get, and at worst manipulative and deceptive, be that in print or on screen. (Note: There are always exceptions - ads that are entertaining, be that in print, on screen, or on TV, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule for me, and something I'd happily sacrifice to have ad-free content)
Different strokes, I suppose.
I also don't mind the ones on readthedocs-hosted content[2].
It's probably worth noting that neither of those are/were blocked by privacy badger, which I use on my desktop instead of an ad blocker.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/r-i-p-the-deck/
[2]: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advertising/ethical-ad...
I’ve purchased SaaS from his use of Deck in the past, or learned of and purchased deals from that placement this past year.
Personally I think they are the most tolerable. There isn't that many of them displayed for me (maybe one ad per 3-4 10-15min videos). One can skip it after 5s and around half the time those ads are fairly well matched.
Contrast this with web page ads that obscure the entire content until you find a tiny x in the corner to close them or worse require you to click some stupid button to disappear. With websites that display the content, but then obscure it within a split second I realised a pretty quick way to get rid of them is to right click on the ad/element-> Inspect in Chrome then hit delete removing DOM elements that obscure the main content until you can see the content.
Usually, audio ads are an ignore-able abomination, fortunately my audio is muted most of the time. However, if I'm watching a Youtube video, then my audio is almost certainly NOT muted, hence the terribleness of the ads.
Often an ad interrupting whatever content I'm watching on Youtube is enough to make me reconsider whether it's worth bothering finishing the actual video.
How many ads you see highly varies by person. Recalling Tom Scot's explanation that I fail to find, imagine when you play a video an auction is going where advertisers bid to buy your time from Google and winner shows you an ad, but Google also sets a minimum bid, so you don't see ads if nobody bids that minimum.
The ad interrupts the video, and I don't just mean it cuts in the middle of something. The problem is two timelines, the video and the ad. The ads make jumping around difficult because you switch between these timelines. Sometimes you always trigger an ad at around the same point. And you can't forward over the ads so if you're jumping forward and backward in the video, looking for something, the whole experience is choppy.
Obviously, the video creator could be asked to set N points in the video where ads would fit more naturally. Maybe they already do this, I don't know, but definitely a lot or most of video creators don't use that feature.
YouTube ads might be all right if they were just part of the video timeline, just like a tv episode with ads recorded on VHS.
I might not bother to j/l and left/right over short ads but watch them instead. And if I were seeking back and forth looking for interesting bits of the video I would spend time seeking back and forth over the ads as well which would be a point of contact to make me stop for a while and finish watching the ad too, if it seemed good.
Magazine ads don't force me to watch them for 5 seconds either, and they're worth paying money for. YouTube could very well do the same and I'd welcome a more streamlined, linear watching experience instead.
"Believe it or not!" but magazines like Creative Computing, Compute!, BYTE, Run, and other 1980's PC magazines used to be all about the ads. There was often no other way of knowing what new software or hardware was available to buy, especially for smaller companies. You would open these magazines up, and look at the ads, each ad had copy that was either inspiring enough to dream about or cryptic enough to try to envision how it was being done. You were going to buy the magazine anyway so it didn't really matter if the articles were good. A good issue was one that had both. Rarely did you find the stock photo inanity that is beautiful people in a boardroom, all super interested at a whiteboard with arrows that go up, up, up.
We can't solve a political problem with purely technical solutions. We can provide workarounds for 5 to 10 years but the core problem has to be shut down at one point.
I'm glad I'm not the only one saying it in a thread, for once.
> We can't solve a political problem with purely technical solutions.
This is something that is sometimes hard to accept for the hacker mindset, but it's absolutely true and an important thing to realize.
Seeking change at a societal level is the exact opposite of the hacker's free-wheeling individualism, but it's the only way to actually accomplish change at a societal level.
You're right, we'll never change advertising just by running individual ad blockers, and we'll never change privacy controls by trying to mask our identities; that has to happen through laws and larger society. We have to have a right to privacy and freedom from advertising be a thing that everyone wants, the bus driver, the butcher, hair stylist, etc., not just what we can foist on our immediate family and social circle.
This may just be some inevitable fact about humanity. We’ve seen this sort of regulation and ultimate centralization of every single communications medium going back to the printing press. When I was younger, I legitimately believed the web would be different. I thought it would be a decentralizing, democratizing force for peace in the world. Now it seems destined to be the opposite of those things: a centralized tool for polarization and control.
I hear that a lot but historically, we've seen a lot of the opposite, a lot of political problems were solved with technical solutions. Technology so far had an even bigger impact than politics on society.
Technology can enable a political will and can create an opportunity for change, but if the political will goes in one direction, no amount of tech will be able to resist it forever.
We could ban ads easily with a law. It would not need any tech. Scrubbing all the ads while there are incentives to develop them, however, is a lost fight.
Legislation-wise, I think the best the web can hope for is forcing websites to label ads. It doesn't sound unobtainable, especially as similar legislation already exists for political ads in many places. For example, legislation could require websites to label all ads with some kind of strictly defined watermark. In addition, some kind of software-readable indication would be required for accessibility purposes. Could be a special HTML tag or attribute. That would make ad blocking much easier.
I don't share your pessimism about the feasability of politically banning all advertising, but I agree that something like this would be the next best thing, and a great step.
Tracking technology and terrible analytics platforms that slow everything down are much lower hanging fruit.
It's like:
A: I don't like rain.
B: It's already raining.The only one I could find was related to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and of course GDPR, but that's related to handling of personal data.
If they said what they wanted to say, the law would essentially say "don't violate privacy without explicit consent." I'm relatively OK with that; that's not telling me how to build websites, that's just making certain harmful activities illegal. It wouldn't be very different from saying "don't distribute malware that attacks your users."
In its current form, I'm not too thrilled with the cookie law. And I sure as hell don't want lawmakers adding more, worse, laws on top of that. Go too far in that direction and they're turning software into nagware (I loathe cookie popups, I loathe google's "privacy reminder", I loathe applications that blast me with notifications and hints, I loathe permission dialogs, I like Unix's Rule of Silence) while making its development a legal minefield.
I want to be able to write FLOSS software (or websites) with a user interface that pleases me, and EU is looking for ways to make that illegal. In a manner of speaking, I hope they do just that, then people who want pleasant software have more reason to organize an underground software liberation movement where no fucks about shit laws are given.
>EU is looking for ways to make that illegal
I'm sorry, but what are you smoking? Willy nilly data collection is illegal, they don't say much about UI.
The legislation would have to be very explicit about the format of the label and that it be machine readable, otherwise you'll get obfuscation like Facebook is doing:
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...:
> This is not the first time Facebook has changed its code in a way that has broken our tool. For example, all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. Many of the participants in our project noticed the effects of this change because it caused some menus to pop open unexpectedly or the page to scroll to the top repeatedly. Nowadays, the disclosure says “SpSpSononSsosoSredredSSS.” Some of these changes were likely also intended to thwart ad blockers.
That said, I wish digital media stopped wholesale delegating the work of serving ads to third parties and had proper control over experience and privacy—what is delivered how and who tracks whom.
The web has taken an industry that already had reputation for deceptive tactics and have handed them tremendous powers through data collection.
Should advertising be banned because of that? I doubt that it would be effective since the advertising industry has created an environment where tracking people is the norm. Banning advertising would simply shift the focus of that data collection so that it is less visible.
It would also be incredibly difficult to ban advertising. Legislation would have to create a clear definition of what advertising is and deal with a medium and business world that crosses national borders. If you don't consider the former, such legislation would have unintended consequences of the freedom of speech. In the case of the latter, it would be far more difficult to reach international agreements than with other online regulations (regulations that are already difficult to enforce) since advertising is considered legitimate in many cases while standards for advertising will differ.
But... Ads are useful. I remember once maybe ten years ago when I noticed an ad about an event in a nearby library that was absolutely amazing and without ads I would not have been there.
(This is sarcasm. There is no reason why manipulating other people to do things should not be regulated heavily.)
Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who cannot afford content would simply go without. Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.
Restricting the legality of advertisements in general might have the nice effect of leveling the playing field, by making it harder for content providers to benefit by-generally covertly-selling out their users (or their users' interests) to such third parties.
Citation needed. I don't believe that for one moment. Already people are producing far more content for free each second than one person could ever consume in a lifetime on sites like Youtube and Instagram. The urge is there, even without any monetary reward.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information.
Now consider how much worse the world has become due to the incentive to hide wanted information behind commercial information. Simple example: there was a time before adblockers when it was not a rare sight to have a page with 80% advertising and 20% actual content. Think unskippable ads before videos. Think of the mountains of useless content that SEO spam produces that hide the interesting pages in search engines.
Marketing does not give access to information. On the contrary, it takes it away.
We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers.
Yes there would be hobbyist information for free, but WebMD? News sites in general? Any sort of resource that takes money to pay people to maintain? It will all be pay gated.
As someone who does not use an adblocker, I have genuinely no problems finding the content I’m looking for.
See? They found a way to put content online without relying on ads.
Before Youtube, Facebook and the like, internet service providers included basic means of publication. Mail/mailing lists, homepages/blogs with RSS. They could do that again.
But, even if the barrier to publishing became higher and only 1/50th of the video's were put up on Youtube, it would still be far more than anyone could ever consume.
There was plenty of free content online before ads, in fact I claim that the web was better before ads arrived, and it is getting worse by the day. Marketeers ruined it.
It happens over and over. YouTube had plenty of great content for free before monetization. Now it is becoming worse by the day, because everything is ad-related. "Influencers", etc.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.
Easy access to information is a consequence of the Internet and then the Web, both technologies having been developed by government-funded programs, respectively in the US and in the EU.
Ads brought us re-centraliztion, targeting and erosion of democracy through extreme polarization and fake news.
I know this is hard to believe for a lot of people here, but human beings are motivated by many things other than monetary profit.
This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
Yes there was. Go to archive.org and check for yourself.
> The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads.
Bigger doesn't mean better. The web is now flooded with malicious and manipulative content. The ads pay for that content, while taxpayers and consumers pay for the infrastructure that actually makes the Internet possible. Ads pay to keep the web centralized, they don't pay for what makes the web possible.
> This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
There is indeed, but notice that I did not say that "everything was somehow better in the good old days". I made a very specific comment about a very specific topic. My comment: there was plenty of quality content on the web before ads arrived. Ads made the web worse. Argue against this if you like, but not about things I did not claim.
That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true, and advertising pays for much of it. You seem to be conflating ad UX with economics.
It is the medium that makes the ads possible, and it is payed by you and me.
> We're talking about content, and ads are the subsidy that lets billions consume for free.
And I have been telling you every step of the way that there was good content before the ads arrived.
> That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true,
That is hardly surprising. There was no moment in the history of the web when the total amount of content available was not increasing. This was already the case before the ads.
Did it grown more than it would have without ads? Maybe. Is it better? I don't think so.
> and advertising pays for much of it.
And yet here you are, consuming content that someone created for free (me) in a platform without ads (Hacker News). So it doesn't pay for all of it, and even you, at least sometimes, seem to prefer the non-ad-funded corner.
> You seem to be conflating ad UX with economics.
Sorry, I have no idea what you mean by this.
Literally the only site that is better now than back then is YouTube with an ad-blocker.
Everything else has deteriorated: Google (search) is worse, Ebay is worse, Amazon is worse, banking sites are worse.
Heck, even Java stock tickers from 2000 were better than now.
The art of presenting information in a meaningful way has been lost entirely.
Before Youtube, we were sharing files directly. There was far more content online!
There are even advertisements in North Korea (for the ruling party).
This idea isn’t realistic.
Saying a thing always existed is a pretty bad argument to keep it alive.
How would one formalize what's an ad and what's not? And what about sneaky things like sponsored content or, say, amazon reviews? It's hard sometimes to tell whether a review is legitimate or an ad in disguise.
"Did you receive compensation to say good things about this product?"
Yes: corruption.
No: you're clear.
And before you claim it’s a bad ruling, think about all the times you’ve used your money. Are you not supporting the EFF in some form of speech by donating to them? Are you not supporting a product in some form by buying it? I don’t like it as it allows money in politics, but it’s a ruling that makes sense.
No, "speech" is something, that you can argue extend to written declarations and publications, but "paying someone to support their actions" is something different. It is something that can be used to promote a political expression and it makes some sense to protect some form of it but certainly not on the same grounds as protecting free speech.
Paying someone to put forward an opinion has other names: corruption, lobbying and, yes, advertisement. None of them should be practice protected under freedom of expression laws.
See, why is freedom of expression good? Because of the core philosophical belief that truth and good opinion emerge from the confrontation of different point of views. Alvin tells me why we should not bomb Eastasia, Barbara tells me why we should. Charles comes with additional facts. Daniele points out some lies and incoherence in some of the past arguments. They all make their points, then I think for myself to make my opinion.
This is how opinions of voters but also lawmakers, leaders, journalists, magistrates, citizens are supposed to be formed.
In no way would this process be helped by paying the person that is forming their opinion. Quite the contrary.
So yes, this ruling was bad. Incredibly bad. It is bad for philosophical, moral, practical reasons.
The fact that I should be allowed to donate to EFF does not rely on the 2nd amendment. And in fact I do want the law to forbid me to give 10 millions to the EFF to drop a lawsuit that would go against my interests.
For example, where is the difference between me talking about a game I like to play and someone talking about a game they like to pay that they were given a free copy to play?
I think looking at forbidding tracking is a better path to pursue. Or maybe making someone legally responsible for their ad codes as if they knowingly placed it there.
Some bad or annoying ads on the web is not cause to forbid advertisements and completely misses all the content that it pays for.
The effort spurred ASM.js & eventually the WebAssembly standard because of the discomfort of deploying a cutting edge research to billions of people on the web (the initial NaCL implementation was very large & eventually turned out to have security holes, the original research was improved upon but by then the industry had spoken).
I also really miss that Opera gave up on their Presto engine and at the same time decided to not open source it. Yes, the source code leaked, but without license no one will touch it.
it's shit and i consider changing banks because of that (and other things).
They diagnose websites broken in Firefox and reach out to website developers, fix Firefox bugs, add Firefox UA overrides (see Firefox's about:compat page), and start discussions to resolve ambiguities in web standards. For example, what should happen for a broken image without an alt value?
I almost never have issues, so maybe it is your plugins that are causing issues (or maybe android ff is different than ff for Mac?)
For the few cases where I need anything Google related, I use Edge. Basically, Edge gets all my Google related tabs, and Firefox with uBlock Origin gets the rest of my browsing.
I did have to train myself not to control-click links in Gmail though, and instead copy-link, paste-into-Firefox.
<meta id="viewport" name="viewport" content="width=device-width, shrink-to-fit=no">Binance.com had the same problem, I emailed them about it and it was fixed the next week.
Teams definitely doesn't block Firefox for me?
1) the use of the on-screen keyboard in tablet mode is iffy with Crostini apps: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=826614 . On my HP X2, I wanted to use Thunderbird to get my email while using the device as a tablet: in addition to scaling issues, the inability to enter text made it impossible for me. It seems that Google seems to be abandoning the idea of detachable Chromebooks replacing the nearly-dead Android tablet market so maybe the expectation of a hardware keyboard is not outrageous.
2) On my machine, the performance of Crostini apps does not even come close to the performance of the native Chrome browser.
That's just my experience though. Edit: FYI, my default browser on the device is Firefox/Android but again, its performance does not come close to the native Chrome plus the latter passive-aggressively brings up a 'choose browser' dialog for any pages I happen to be browsing in it. It really has been an extremely unpleasant experience but I haven't found anything better yet for my specific use case.
The list goes on and on, mozilla has a terrible record and proved multiple times that it should not be trusted.
After the pulseaudio debacle and after being a supporter since its first steps, I quit firefox and removed it from all computers I maintain to never return. There is no thing mozilla can say or do that will make me go back to firefox, apart from acknowledging their role and taking responsibility by resigning and releasing firefox to the world.
You are completely missing the point. At the end of the day you have to pick a browser, and so it matters a great deal which one is worse, even if neither is perfect.
Personally I still trust Mozilla above any other major browser vendor. They're not even in the same ballpark.
It was fixed that week. Unfortunately, this trick does not work very well on non-enterprisey sites or after you cut them a check.
Already doing that. You can call it "voting with my wallet".
Tracking does not need to provide any visual indication to the user.
Actually think about the problem the other way around, as it seems easier to do the opposite in most cases (or at least for news/articles sites such as liberation.fr): a page readability extraction plugin, sometimes called summarization. It identifies the "meat" (ie. the main article or video), extracts it and gives it to the user bare bones. No ads, no tracking.
At least that's what I'd prefer once everything else fails, and that's why I'm using Firefox's reader mode and Pocket a lot these days, and if ads take over again like in 1998 that's were I'll be surfing the readable web.
We're reaching the end of the golden era of ad-blockers where we thought we were ad-free by just blocking a banner ad.
I think however it's time to grow up and stop playing this cat-and-mouse game. Advertising is crucial to the web and should be allowed. We should be shifting towards ideas that decentralize the tracking itself (like Brave does) or allow users to completely control and explicitly switch their advertising tracking identities
Also, 95% of the time the live-chat functions on websites are obnoxious. If I have a concern, I am happy to open a dedicated chat page. Having a chat widget on every single page is annoying and unnecessary. But that's just my opinion.
Are you sure you are not able to do your website performance analytics from your server logs? More often than not, user agent side analytics end up collecting lots of unnecessary sensitive data, and sharing it with third parties like Google.
What's the privacy concern if I'm tracking on what pages my users visit? I'm not sharing those with anyone.
Small business owners like myself are hurt by these things, I can't afford to pay 4-5 figures to a developer to build a tool to analyze my server logs and won't give even 5% of the quality of data analysis Google Analytics or Mixpanel gives.
You can get this very easily on the backend side.
> I can't afford to pay 4-5 figures to a developer to build a tool to analyze my server logs
No need to bother, there are tons of easy SaaS tools like Splunk in that marketplace already.
Frankly, that's your problem, not mine as a consumer. If I want to give you feedback, I'll let you know. You could always ask me, too.
Individually maybe it's not your problem, but taking that as a larger group becomes a big problem.