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Comment by oarfish | Hacker News Reader

Off-Topic: Can we ban links which redirect to advertising domains? When I click this link, due to uMatrix I see that it redirects to https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_... Which doesn't sound like something I would want to visit.

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Didn't happen to me (but it has before). Instead I got a huge modal popup about something, which I didn't read, so I hit `back` immediately.

archive.[is,ph,li,fo,vn,md,today] is like a condom for crappy websites like that.

https://archive.ph/agh5m

archive.* has some really strange dns-based tracking built in

Elaborate? Are you talking about the whole cloudflare ecs debacle?

if you load archive.<x> it will load a cache-busting specific-to-you dns name

your.ip.address.foo.lots.of.stuff.pixel.archive.<x>/pixel.gif

that gets by most blacklists including umatrix and others

and they have a new domain name dujour so that too.

Anything on Archive.* fails to resolve for me for this reason; I just don't bother clicking their links anymore either.

uMatrix also blocked the link for me. I'm at the point now where I stop bypassing it for links like this, and just don't read the article. The information in the comments is almost always more interesting/useful anyway.

Outline link: https://outline.com/wrUYpZ

This site would be better if anyone who submitted an article to Engadget (or similar) was prompted to instead submit an outline.com link.

All properties owned by Verizon Media (formerly Oath) redirect through the domain "advertising.com" (which is one of the domains they own) for their GDPR consent popup (shared consent cookie set on one central origin across all properties owned by that company).

This is a really bizarre decision tbh as "advertising.com" is not a well-known brand and not something their users would implicitly recognise or trust.

For other users saying it doesn't happen to them, I'm fairly sure the redirect is region-targeted to Europe.

I'm in Europe but I don't get this redirect when using a VPN.

I'm in India and I get this redirect without a VPN.

So, I run uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, and with this combo, I got no redirect.

When i see guce, I simply dont visit the site. Voting with my wallet, if the site is so sleezy that it takes tactics like this on its users, it is not worth beeing its user.

I’m assuming the HN rules ban linking to spam and malware, so why is this malware (or more specifically spyware) allowed when it literally redirects you through a malicious link forcing you to provide consent (which is in violation of the GDPR) and probably collect a bunch of data considering the URL is named “collectIdentifiers”?

For anyone replying with "you can just bypass it or block it", that isn't my point. We know how to do that but the majority out there will just accept the privacy invasion because they have no choice. My argument is that we should be blocking nasty behaviour to force sites to change if they want to keep HN's readership.

The primary difference between this spyware site and others that HN users don't object to is that it doesn't take your consent to be tracked as implicit.

As in: others are doing the same, just in a more subtle, UX-friendly way that doesn't bother people as blatantly.

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