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Comment by rdslw | Hacker News Reader

Please, do NOT link nor read techcrunch.com on hackersnews or elsewhere. It is harmful.

Techcrunch is using double redirect trick via https://guce.advertising.com/ to plant cookies in your browser as first party ones.

That's right, thats a reason of mozilla firefox ETP 2.0 which you read about today, WHILE most of users and us are currently NOT protected from it: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll...

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I wondered why that has been happening to me too, all techcrunch URLs redirect to advertising.com/* and then stop (extentions / pihole blocking the domain, I guess).

Why would any self-respecting website redirect everyone through a domain called advertising.com on each visit? Who thought that was a great idea?

IIRC Techcrunch is owned by Verizon Media, same as advertising.com.

Probably the overlords mandating tighter integration.

> advertising.com

they didn't even put in the effort to obscure their platform even a little bit, huh? not even trying to hide it.

They probably acquired that domain at the time when advertising wasn't an offense.

"advertising.com" sounds a lot better than "surveillance-and-behavior-modification.com".

The term "advertising" has become a euphemism for a much more insidious group of activities which, as it turns out, are useful for advertisement (among other things).

HN should just block techcrunch and associated oath/verizon domains. There are always alternative sources that don't use these flagrant dark patterns.

Thanks for explaining this!

I have that domain blocked at the firewall so all I see is

    guce.advertising.com refused to connect.

I wondered what it was about and how a techcrunch link could go straight to guce.advertising.com

Can someone please explain this in a bit more detail?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Pri... has a detailed explanation.

This is made worse by the fact that browsers don't show the intermediate domains in the address bar during a redirect. They used to, but stopped after attacks were found where you could make the URL in the address bar different from the contents of the page. For example, you could show a phishing site, then redirect to some URL on google.com that takes forever to load, and that would show in the address bar.

Thankfully uMatrix blocks this, so that I don't have to remember.

With uMatrix installed I don't ever even see this redirect, I don't think. I suspect whatever script is causing the page to redirect is also getting blocked. Does this normally happen to everyone?

The redirect happens at the HTTP level - if you don't see it you may already be cookied.

So the mechanism is, I send HTTP request to domain x. If my request doesn't have a specific cookie, I get sent to domain y, which has the cookie, then sent back to domain x?

I don't know how I could have gotten it, uMatrix would certainly have blocked advertizing dot com for me. I'll check on that computer and then edit this post.

Edit: I'm definitely not sending this cookie, in fact I have cookies completely disabled on this domain via uMatrix. I notice that a guce.js is blocked by uBlock origin. Since I'm not getting redirected, either this is a regional thing, or else they're redirecting using JS as I suggested previously.

> most of users and us are currently NOT protected from it:

available in Safari since 2018. it's part of the ITP feature.

Also a pain for people with adblocking tech installed

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