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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already.

Of course we'll have the inevitable guy pop in here and talk up how awesome web tracking is because it helps sites monetize better, but that's all bullshit. At this point, all the advertising profits are sucked out of the web by Facebook and Google. The rest of the industry, including publishers are just struggling to get by while two trillion dollar behemoths throw them scraps.

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Modern ad networks are essentially the “fax machine flyers” of old: someone you don’t know using your resources and your time, denying you use of your own resources temporarily, to send you something you don’t want. Except now it’s like every “normal” fax page includes 15,000 flyers.

Some pages don't let you "Reject All" cookies, you have to uncheck them one by one, and there's literally hundreds of ad networks listed.

It's spooky, I tell ya!

Use your browser settings to block third-party cookies altogether. And, better yet, install uBlock Origin and never see an ad again.

Doesn’t Google grant itself first-party status by redirecting you through an advertisement domain? µBlock definitely is the king of ad blocking extensions — only the fork AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/) can compete, and that’s by both blocking ads and fighting back with obfuscating click simulation.

Hmm. I think it would be better if the extension clicked randomly rather than clicked on all ads. That would cause the numbers to be much harder to interpret, and ad agencies or departments would have a much harder time measuring their efficacy or justifying their existence.

Me too, and it provides a slider for the percentage to click that I kept below 100 when I used it (now I use Palemoon, which doesn’t support WebExtensions, and I use /etc/hosts).

You can change the click frequency in the settings. I guess it would be better to make that setting a part of the splash page that shows up on installation, though, as otherwise many will miss it.

> ad agencies or departments would have a much harder time measuring their efficacy or justifying their existence.

50% of adverts are a waste of money, the problem for people wanting to advertise is nobody knows which 50%

> never see an ad again

I wish that were true. Although uBlock Origin does a good job, some ads definitely still make it through. There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable it. There are workarounds for some of these, but it's still a bit of a mess.

I agree, although to add, uBlock Origin has an 'annoyances' list that does a pretty good job of stopping detectors.

Thanks for the reminder that I hadn't enabled this in my current browser :)

If a website doesn't let me in because I use an ad blocker, I respect their decision and I leave the site and find what I need elsewhere.

I have yet to come across a site that offered something so unique or compelling that I decided to turn off my ad blocker to use it.

> There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable it.

That, and when there's an email subscription popup, is when the one-click JS toggle extension comes out. Can't detect anything if it can't run any code in your browser.

It can "detect" if JS is disabled (by loading content via JS) so this doesn't always work.

Please don't. Unless you are willing to pay for the services you are using for free now, ads is what keeps them "free".

You can object to being targeted based on your browsing habits, but don't stop ads altogether.

Ad networks had their chance, it's done now.

Eh, I get where you're coming from, but no. The ad industry is insidious and has exploited every means possible to hijack the user's attention: pop-ups, flashing banners, auto-playing videos with sound, inline ads that reflow what you're reading after they take way too long to load, extensions that insert ads, paying ISPs to insert ads, talking to Alexa through your TV...

There is no level these people will not stoop to, and we're sick of their shit. They brought this on themselves.

It's my device and it's my choice what it's allowed to load and display to me. It's not my responsibility to make sure someone who provides their service for free earns money from shitting into my brain. Implied contracts aren't a thing for me. If you want to make sure you get paid for your service, put up a paywall.

Too late. They had their chance and blew it.

this. this is the way i solve this. They can use all the cookies they want, ublock tends to just eliminate all of it.

Overall FF has been incredibly user friendly making all sort of plugins that focus on privacy possible, while Chrome has been as hostile to it as possible.

Unless you get the pop-up from the site that says, "We see you're using an ad blocker. You need to turn it off in order to access our site."

Along with some marketing drivel about how its important advertisers get their ad revenue.

This is when you revoke that website's privilege to run arbitrary Turing-complete code in your browser because it didn't use it wisely.

Sites can set as many cookies as they want. I have installed temporary containers (that is a Firefox only feature sadly), 15 minutes after I close the last tab in that group all those cookies are automatically deleted.

Each tab group then has its own cookie container, so I can have multiple groups open and they don't share anything - I can login to different google (or any other service) accounts in different contains and it works like I want it to.

For the sites that I want to use logged in, I either create a special container for that site only, or I just use a password manager to log me in each time I need to visit it.

The added privacy is great, the peace of mind in just clicking I agree is great.

How do you circumvent browser fingerprinting? If every container has the same user agent, canvas, screen resolution, JS benchmark test results, etc. then no matter what but you are uniquely identified, bingo!

I really feel today having different devices with different browsers, connected to different providers is only working solution.

I seem to always have this handy snippet in my dev tools history:

document.querySelectorAll('input[type=checkbox]').forEach(el => el.removeAttribute('checked'))

https://github.com/oblador/hush if you use safari :) Basically the regulations say that if a user doesn't respond to this popup, by default all the cookies are rejected except the ones the site needs.

This app hides the popup :)

I wonder how many people reading this comment are thinking, "what's a fax machine?" :o)

I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under the age of what, 35?

You might be surprised how many of us under-35s still have to use Fax machines on a regular basis ;)

Especially anyone who works in law, government, banking, or healthcare.

or Microsoft

Counts as government.

I love that some of the most-sensitive information users are the ones hanging on to a completely-unsecured transmission method. Sure, tell me again about all those HIPAA and SOX requirements when we still have fax machines.

You have to keep in mind the time when these requirements to "use fax" for security came about.

There was a single telephone company (or it was shortly after there were plural "baby-bells") and the telephone network was a completely private, isolated, network that only the phone company (or baby-bells) even had access to. It was also a network that was heavily regulated such that the possibility of a random attacker from half a world away being able to tap into a phone call as it happened simply did not exist.

In that environment, placing a phone call was considered "secure" (or at least as secure as network isolation and regulation could cause it to become [I'm ignoring NSA style 'state secret' taps, those have likely always been available to NSA style agencies]). So it would have been seen, at that time, as reasonable to use fax machines for document exchange, because the "phone network" was considered to be secure against having a man-in-the-middle tapping off one's communications.

Wind the clock forward thirty years, and have the once isolated and highly regulated telephone network more or less become just another packet protocol on the general Internet, and the choice of using "fax" for secure document exchange sounds ludicrous.

The issue is that the regulations those environments operate under have not been updated in the ensuing thirty years to account for the fact that "phone network" is no longer the once isolated, mostly secure, network it once was. And if the regulations don't get updated, no lowly clerk at the front lines is going to lose their job by _not_ using the comm. system called for by the regulations.

Especially in Japan.

> You might be surprised

This is such a meaningless statement.

This below 35 yr old discovered a fax machine. You won't believe what happened next!

Better?

My bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ...

There are online services that let you upload a PDF, and they'll fax it for you.

Even in the 90s a lot of folks didn't send a "physical" fax, you could print it thru your modem. Or something similar, memory fuzzy, only did it once I think.

Or going to a shop like Kinkos or a local print/copy shop. They offered sending/receiving faxes or FaaS before _aaS was a term of "endearment".

> My bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ...

On linux you can use [efax](https://linux.die.net/man/1/efax) and a modem and... ooops, good luck finding a modem.

I did this for real ~10 years ago when a stupid company didn't accept a scanned PDF by email and required a fax of the actual document "because security". The difference is that I had a modem in an old laptop at that time, so I just send them the same scanned PDF.

Now I'm wondering if there is a provision for sending faxes somewhere in the GSM/3G/4G rabbit hole of standards.

I’m not sure if it required anything from the network, but my Siemens C35 could send faxes

GSM yes, but once phones went digital that capability was lost.

GSM phones are digital and include a special FAX mode.

One of my previous employees had a Kofax server with 6 ISDN lines for faxing. D in ISDN stands for Digital.

Try this online fax service: https://www.faxrocket.com/#!/start

I have bookmarked them from long ago.

There are quite a few multifunction printers with fax.

That assumes a land line to plug the fax machine into.

We have two.

Unsurprisingly Equifax requires you communicate with them through snail mail, fax or a telephone call.

Every other credit agency had no problem with my SSN + address then Equifax throws a flag, locks my account and says I have to validate my identity by faxing them identity documents.

Fat chance, idiots.

In the Apple store you can find apps that send fax to a physical location. That's what I used the last time I had to send one.

I had to use a Fax machine in 2018. In the United States. As the only acceptable way to submit certain documents.

I should also point to non-Unitedstatians that checks (that physical paper worth as much money as you write and sign on it) are still in use in the USA.

Checks still in use in Canada as well. I had a person today tell me they had 3 checks stolen and cashed and my response was “people still use checks?”.

The demise of checks is greatly exaggerated. I've written about 70 or so checks in the last 5 years. Mostly: Property taxes, home improvement contractors, dues for various clubs and social groups, kids activities, and some mail-in retailers who simply don't take credit card.

That's leaving out the "automatic bill pay" function of my bank's web site, which, for most payees, at the end of the day results in physical paper checks being printed and sent in envelopes.

> The demise of checks is greatly exaggerated.

That varies a lot by jurisdiction. I'm 50 and I haven't written a single check in my entire life. (Sweden.)

Yeah, only cashed in checks from US and U.K. Each time I need to find out how to do it! Think three checks in 40years ain’t bad

I have only ever paid once with a check here in Denmark. I won't ever do it again, because no bank that I know of will issue a paper check.

In Canada it's spelled cheque, I have no idea why. </pedantry>

Still in us but much less than the US. Interac bank transfer has cut on a lot of that usage.

For the SS-4 form, to get the Employer Identification Number, you have to either make a phone call (fairly long, half na hour in my case), send a fax (and get the EIN in 4 days) or apply by email and... wait 4-5 weeks! [0]

[0] https://www.irs.gov/instructions/iss4

I still use checks because in the US there are certain things you can't use a credit card for, e.g. loan payments.

I pay contractors with checks because almost none accept credit cards and cash gets cumbersome once you start getting into 4 and 5 digits.

My local utilities all charge a "convenience fee" of a few dollars when paying online or with a credit card. Sending a check in the mail costs me only $0.50. (Even though it costs them some employee's wages to handle my envelope and cash the check. Go figure.)

Checks are also convenient for transferring small amounts of money to friends and family. Yes, there is Paypal and the like and some of them don't even charge fees but I trust my bank way more than I trust a random company with direct access to my bank account. (Paypal in particular have proven over and over again to be untrustworthy in this regard, which is why not only do I have two Paypal accounts--one for buying and one for selling--but I also have a special "firewall" account between PayPal and my main checking account. This is so that the most they can grab is a couple hundred dollars on average, rather than some arbitrary fraction of my life's savings.)

Checks are sometimes the easiest (or only) way to move large amounts of money between my own accounts. There was a time where most online bank accounts would let you make ACH ("electronic checks") transfers to any other account, but they seem to be moving away from this, I presume due to its high use in fraud.

Can't you use a wire-transfer or an ACH transfer? All those use cases are easily solved with electronic transactions in most of Europe, Asia and even in Latin American countries like brazil. They are usually inexpensive or free and instantaneous.

Wire transfers from my bank in the US require me to call up and make a request.

Writing a check is the fastest way for me to transfer between two accounts. :(

Australia too. Electronic transfers here are free and instant. When I used to rent I just set up a recurring payment through my bank’s website (free and easy, with any bank to any bank). Now my mortgage gets taken out each month automatically via a direct deposit authorisation. (ACH equivalent).

ACH in the US is not simple to use. Companies that accept ACH payments are using a payment processor that comes with a fee (usually less than credit card fees); contractors aren't going to set that up. Consumer to consumer transfers built on ACH have increased in the last couple of years, but with low limits, inappropriate for contractors, and generally with terms of service prohibitting business use. It's easy to move money between my accounts with tools based on ACH, though. There's nowhere at my bank where I can say send $x to a routing number and account number, it takes a bunch of setup work.

Wire transfers are expensive here; my credit union which doesn't generally have high fees, charges $29 to send a wire (they don't charge for incomming wires, but some banks do). I've had some brokerages with free wires, but usually that's tied to a balance requirement or in connection with a company sponsored account (for stock based compensation or retirement accounts).

In the US, wire transfers can incur fees for both sender and recipient. ACH is more often used by medium to large businesses transferring money from or to consumers, but the ergonomics are pretty bad for one-off person to person transfers, to the point that if you hire a plumber who owns their own business, they'll probably accept check, and sometimes accept credit cards.

The US does have some electronic networks for instant, no-cost p2p payments. https://www.zellepay.com/ has a large number of participating major banks with some major exceptions. A lot of people use https://venmo.com/ or https://cash.app/ which are not directly integrated with banks but then offer electronic transfer of funds to bank accounts.

what on earth is banking doing over there in the US? I wouldn't know how to write a cheque these days if I wanted to, and the only cheque I've seen in the last 10 years or so is from my (now deceased) grandmother in-law sending birthday money to my wife.

I'm guessing this is why several US payment companys and start-ups just don't make any sense to me: "make payments easier!"

but it's hard for me to understand how to make it easier than just typing in someone's phone number or email and sending them money, or purchasing via tap and go with your card/ phone. Don't you at least have electronic transfers if not those other newfangled technologies? are you (seriously) suggesting you can't transfer money between your accounts?

Banking in the US has first mover disadvantage.

Because of how and when it got computerized, it's hard to move it forward again. There's no desire for sweeping changes, everything has to move slowly now.

There are several personal transfer services (PayPal is ancient and fits the mold), but none have a lot of penetration. I think Zelle? is deployed through bank integration, and may end up with a lot of users as a result; possibly critical mass.

There was a lot of backlash on rf payments the first go round, a few issuers gave me cards with it, but then they removed it. Then they started issuing cards with chips, and now most of them are putting rf payments back in. A lot of payment terminals have the hardware for it, but a lot of them also have signs that say don't tap to pay.

I can easily do electronic (ACH) between my accounts, as long as I've gone through setup, which takes days for test deposits to show up. But to transfer to a friend or a relative is tricky.

The first digital computers were used by banks within years of each other - 1955 for BoA in the USA, 1958 for BNP in France and 1959 for Barclays in the UK. And those machines merely took over from existing calculating systems that had been in place for a good couple of decades.

US banks suck for a lot of reasons but part of it is that culturally and regulatorily the entire financial/banking/commercial environment in the US is very conservative. And there's not much in the way of pressure to make changes either - whether internally from competition and regulation or externally from the need to interact with other countries. Like broadband, consumer banking is basically an oligopoly that will quite happily plod along providing the same service as long as it can.

New Zealand is phasing out cheques.

Many shops don’t accept them, some banks have already stopped using them altogether, and the rest of the major banks are phasing them out this year.

A cheque is a rare thing to see (I haven’t handled one for a decade or so?)

I maintain a legacy service at work (I originally wrote it back in 2014) that is responsible for sending eFaxes from our various other services and platforms. It's one of the most internally trafficked services we have. We're in the healthcare space. Almost every document created on our different platforms results in a fax being sent.

I'm old enough to remember (like New Coke) ZapMail by FedEx where you would send documents by FedEx and FedEx would Fax it on their equipment to a location near the recipient for physical delivery. Obligatory Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail. Hey, most businesses didn't have one of those newfangled FAX machines.

Newfangled? It will enter its third century in a decade or so.

So just fangled

I think it's sufficiently geriatric to be considered oldfangled.

I’m in the age group you mention and although I’ve only used a fax twice, I can totally understand the analogy.

Easy enough to just use "text messages" since it was not very long ago that you had to pay to receive them but had no ability to block them without disabling them entirely.

At least for those of us that were late adopters of text messages.

This also depends on where you're from - I had a cell phone for the past ~20years and only learned that you pay for receiving texts in the US when I first visited, ~9 years ago.

Pharmacy, nursing, and medical students will find out soon enough.

A small business owner I used to work for got sued for fax blasting people when the marketing company he hired was sending out some 2K faxes per day to unsuspecting business owners.

I still laugh about how he got several cease and desist letters and still continued sending the same businesses stuff.

Ahhhhhhh yeah, the good old days.

I'm 21 and I know what a fax is.

i started working at a place that would get stacks of flyers across the fax machine every day , they would just toss them in the recycling bin all the while wasting tons of paper and ink .. i started calling all the removal numbers and got it down to zero .. they thought the fax machine was broken haha.

If people didn’t want ads it wouldn’t be a multi billion business. Also your analogy is wrong. Your browser won’t execute code unless it requests it. Fax machine spam you don’t have do anything except have it connected to a live telephone connection.

It’s more like complaining that your sole of your shoes is being worn out more because grocery stores put the milk in the back forcing you to walk past items you don’t intend to buy. You can always go to a different store just like you no one is forcing you to browse websites that are ad supported.

People don't want adds. how do you infer that people want ads because the ad industry is profitable?

It's profitable because a few people want to influence and spy on a lot of people.

Most people don't want ads they just tolerate them for getting actual services. Most these people don't even know how much tracking is involved and how nefarious this industry really is.

Why do they work? Why can I go start a business and scale it to millions of paying customers by using ads?

Because there are businesses and politicians willing to pay through the nose to get their message in front of those that they want to influence, and you are then the middleman that gets our irritation and ad blockers and pushback for contributing to the proliferation of the most invasive, unscrupulous segment of our entire society.

Because you’re infecting people with mind-viruses to force them to buy your crap. Advertising is about exploiting human psychology, taking advantage of people with weak impulse control, and outright lying.

Often something is a multi billion dollar industry that people don’t want!

Perhaps you’re invested in the ad industry. No one else wants ads buddy.

Not in ads but I know they are quite effective. Most startups can attribute their growth to the effectiveness of digital advertising. Robinhood was driving app installs for $10 each while E*TRADE and Ameritrade were paying $1000 per customer.

Most of that VC cash startups raise is spent on marketing. I don’t understand why people have such negative perception of ads especially on a VC run news site. All the ycomb companies drops tens of millions on digital advertising.

Thanks for your considered response to my snarky comment. Personally I don't mind plain ads which are simply a commpany advertising their product/service on a billboard etc, what I find unbelievable in the digital era, is the extent of the intrusion now on finding out everything about people to market to them better (which I'm not even sure if having more data on someone has been proven to produce better results). Its really the data broking side of it - if that went away I'd have no issues.

This is a terrible analogy. Nobody forced you to go to the website that voluntarily decided to include the trackers.

I can't tell if this argument is meant seriously but it is incredibly specious. If every single website operates in this fashion and modern life is nearly impossible without them, then consumers are presented with no option and it amounts to coercion.

It’s inconvenient for me to have to pay for things, that doesn’t mean stores are obligated to let me shop for free.

It is still not a nice thing to do. Can we at-least agree on that?

If that website doesn't ask me if I want to allow those trackers then it's forcing them upon me without my consent. How am I supposed to know if a website has a tracker before I visit it?

They also don’t ask you if you want whatever specific content they are rendering that day to be rendered or not. Caveat visitor.

We're trying to build an ad network that doesn't track users: https://www.ethicalads.io/

We talked a little bit about how these ads still work, even without tracking you. You might be losing 10-15% of revenue, but if you never had that revenue to start with, you don't miss it: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-w...

I think the real secret is just to not become dependent on the additive revenue. All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.

Presumably if your adverts don't do tracking, they don't need to slow page loads down the way current advertising does either which should be a big plus.

Fundamentally serving an advert should be a light process adding only a tiny amount of overhead to the site.

Yea, we are planning to do a blog post on it, but the total overhead is in the 10's of KB. Just a single JS file, and an image. All open source: https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client

I totally read it as ethical lads.

And I read your comment as "ethical ads" and was wondering what I got wrong from the GP comment, ahah.

These are some of the only ads I see online these days (on Read the Docs, mostly). I don't use ad blockers, but I do use tracker blockers, and those block pretty much all ads, for obvious reasons. Not these ones, though. And that's how it's supposed to go.

Can you elaborate on your setup?

I'm not OP, but I have my browser setup to block trackers only, nothing that's billed as an ad-blocker.

I use Firefox with Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection [0] and Privacy Badger [1] as an extra layer of protection. Some sites, mostly news orgs, complain that I'm blocking ads, but inevitably these are the sites Privacy Badger reports 20+ trackers blocked. I'm happy to see ads online, I'm just not willing to sacrifice my privacy for them.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote... [1] https://privacybadger.org/

Why not just block ads, too? Do you really think advertising is ethical at any level? Because I do not. If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is like junk snail mail: a waste of my time and your money.

The short answer: I am not anti-advertising, so I don't block ads that respect me.

I don't love advertising in many of it's forms, but taken from the viewpoint of those who make money from ads (i.e. content creators), it is one of the best ways out there for them to make a living. Platforms like Patreon are great for some folks, but not everyone can make a living off of sponsorship from their viewers. But, I am not willing to sacrifice my own privacy to allow someone else to make money, especially given that we have tonnes of examples of non-privacy-invading advertising that works.

I listen to 8-10 hours of podcasts a week and I generally find the ads on them, usually where the host does an ad read and includes a discount code, to be far more useful and relevant to me than the hyper-targeted ads backed by 20 tracking scripts I see on news sites. Another example, many of the indie tech news sites I read (e.g. Daring Fireball or Six Colors) will have a weekly sponsor that will have an advertising post or two interspersed with their regular content. I'm happy to take 2-3 minutes out of a 30 minute podcast episode to listen to a couple ad reads or see a brief write-up of a sponsor's product as I'm scrolling through the week's tech news. What I'm not happy to do is have my web browser load a dozen tracking scripts in the background when I open a news article and have flashing pictures deliberately trying to distract me from what I'm reading.

Which ones? I think I would like to try your setup, since it sounds like a good compromise between having my data harvested and being kicked off of sites for blocking their ads.

This is great. How are the ads paid for though - is it billed per click or per impression, or is it billed per an approximate amount of time the ad will be displayed for?

The problem with charging per click or impression is that you're vulnerable to fraud which means you either lose money/trust or you have to do invasive tracking to detect & prevent fraud (which you'll be unlikely to achieve as well as the big players - Google & Facebook - do). Charging per amount of time (regardless of actual impressions or clicks) doesn't have that problem.

We are doing CPC & CPM pricing. I don't believe anyone has asked us for "time seen" pricing. I don't even really know how that would work, and why it wouldn't be open to fraud in a similar fashion.

Do you have a good example of how this is priced, and how it would work in practice?

By time seen I don't literally mean time displayed on screen but more like TV/radio ads, as in this ad will be part of our rotation of X ads for an entire months across X publishers. I think The Deck used to do this.

Determining the price will be a bit tricky (and I would expect that you'd have to lowball yourself until your platform builds credibility in terms of good ROI) but in the long run it should mean your advertisers pay a flat price to be included per week/month regardless of actual impressions or clicks (thus there's no fraud potential as only the raw profit from the ads will matter - the only "fraud" potential would be to literally buy the advertised product en masse).

Gotcha, that definitely makes sense. We are looking at doing that for some of our larger sites, similar to Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ -- which I believe is based off the old Deck model :)

Thanks for following up.

There is no such thing as an ethical ad.

Advertising is a cynical deployment of our knowledge of crowd wisdom, media manipulation, and statistics to make people part with their money for things they wouldn't think they needed. Our economy can't handle this kind of reckless consumerism anymore.

Worse yet, we don't need advertising to bolster our media. Unfortunately, the media execs don't realize this yet.

All your metrics are fuzzy, your standards ridiculous. We have far better practices we can deploy than the ones the advertisers use.

Please, stop advertising to us. If that's all you plan to do with this new company, can you please kindly go away?

If you'd like to suggest another way to make OSS sustainable, I'd be all ears.

A bit more color here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...

Rather than open source, let us return to Free Software. The point of our labor is not to ensure that we are paid; it is to tear down the systems which create inequality and scarcity in the first place.

I'm working on https://snowdrift.coop for that.

We could use help, particularly from anyone who's good with css.

You've obviously thought this out extensively and decided to advertise. Who am I to offer a better solution? You know your business domain, revenue needs, etc better than me or anyone else.

However, that does not mean I have to agree to advertising -- whether it is labeled ethical, green, sustainable, cage-free or whatever. If you're lucky, you won't have a lot of extremists like myself visiting your site; i.e. the advertising will be successful.

there is no such a thing as an ethical comment.

Comments are a cynical deployment of our knowledge of crowd wisdom, media manipulation, and statistics to make people part with their opinions for others they wouldn't think they agree with.

Sorry, there is such a think as "more" ethical ads. If you want to be pedantic and argue they should use "more" suit yourself. But things are not black and white, your comment is in itself "manipulating" the reader trying to convince them that ads are all the same and that they cannot be put on an ehtical spectrum which is not true: tracking ads vs billboard, I'd much rather a billboard (which I hate in and on itself as they are usually just making the place they are in uglier).

I'm not trying to manipulate anyone. I'm voicing my opinion. I don't buy anything from advertisements. Period. When I need something, I shop for it. And if you think I'm alone, you're kidding yourself.

that's totally fine. I prefer a world without advertisement, ideally. I disagree with you that there is no spectrum of ad ethics.

And while you are not "trying" to manipulate anyone (maybe), I also disagree that you are not effectively influencing your reader thoughts to some degree.

The analogy I made is: even an internet comment does, on a smaller scale, less maliciously, use persuasion techniques: should we get rid of discussion forums too? I don't think so, and while an ad-less world seems like a nice experiment, sounds pretty unrealistic, regulating (outlawing would be nice) tracking in ads? More realistic and fixing 80% of what's wrong with 20% of the effort if you ask me

You're right that an ad-less world is impossible. Advertisements existed before you and I were both alive and they will exist when we're gone.

But that does not mean I have to partake in them, watch them, or allow them to consume my attention and time. I also don't need to spend my limited time on this planet trying to "fix advertising". I can simply block them and ignore the ones that slip through, and get on with my life. If this is an issue that is dear to your heart, that sentiment undoubtedly feels dismissive. I'm sorry about that.

That may be the case but you can’t discount the possibility that when you are shopping for something, your choices are influenced by advertising that you have previously been exposed to whether you are aware of it or not. Your decision to go shopping for something in the first place may be influenced by it too.

I am really confused by this position.

How do you propose that companies should promote their products and services, if not through advertising?

Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted?

You say "people part with their money for things they wouldn't think they needed, Our economy can't handle this kind of reckless consumerism anymore": Surely you don't think you speak for everyone?

You certainly don't speak for me.

I am not some blind sheep who is suckered into buying things I don't need. I am a grown adult who can make informed decisions with my money, including sometimes buying frivolous or unnecessary things.

I hate these arguments that assume everyone is stupid except for the person making the argument. It feels like there's some weird savior complex at work.

People have free will and are allowed to spend their money as they wish, and I think YOU are the cynical one if you think otherwise..

> Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted?

Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

And how do you know about the existence of a product to go shop for in the first place, if not through advertising and promotion?

Or do you have infinite time to go browse every single store in your city on the odd chance that you'll see something you want?

There are these wonderful things now called search engines. And they existed before online advertising was tied to search, so before you say search engines would not exist without advertising attached to search queries, think again.

How do you know to search for something if you haven't heard about it before... via some kind of... promotion?

I get the point you're making, but I hope you realize you're just backpedaling from your original "no advertisements ever!" statement.

I believe in giving people better control over how they receive ads (I personally run an ad blocker in my browsers and a Pi Hole on my network), but you position that there should be no advertising at all, and that all ads are unethical is just silly, and you're proving that point yourself here..

It must be hard to be this naive ^^

I assume you meant to reply to sbarre

You’re proving my point.

> Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

So, for direct to consumer companies who only ship online, SEO?

Here's the thing: ads can be useful.

Awhile back I got a, highly targeted, ad for high protein sugar free cereal. That's awesome! I am 100% the target audience for that product, and until I saw that ad I had no clue it existed! To find a product like that I'd have to search for it, but I would never search for an entire new category of product that I didn't know about.

Same thing for the fitness app I am using (BodBot, it is amazing!). I am quite literally healthier right now because of a targeted advertisement.

Was I aware of fitness apps before then? Sure. But the ad for BodBot was informative about what features differentiated it from the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of other competing apps.

Do most ads suck? Sure. Should ads be highly invasive? Nope. But interest tracking and basic targeting actually help me find products and services that I want to buy!

Facebook in particular, for all the things wrong with it (long list!) has some amazingly relevant ads that inform me of products that I never knew about.

So let's designate .biz as the place where advertisements live, and turn it into the online yellow pages (plus all the other scum to be expected) and ban anything resembling advertising from every other TLD.

Those who want to shop know where to go. Those who don't, know where to avoid.

hey man, that's great and i'm happy you're healthier because of advertising. My experience has been the opposite (yes, advertising making me and my family UNhealthier -- mentally and emotionally). I don't want targeted ads, but I can understand that you do.

Perhaps there is a way we can both enjoy the internet in our preferred ways. Perhaps not, I don't know.

Look at how much of a web you have to spin for yourself, just to conclude that it is indeed fine to have others tell you what you need to buy.

The false dichotomy you pose is ridiculous. People seek out information on what to buy all the time. But when I am listening to music, watching television or film, or reading a fucking news article, that is not the time I want to be given that information. It is unsolicited and I don't care about it.

Hey, I'm not sure why you're answering me from 2 separate accounts (I know it's you because you accidentally(?) replied to another post from your other account with this one, speaking in the first person about the other message).

People seek out information on what to buy because at some point they found out about it via (perhaps indirectly) the provider's promotional efforts (i.e. advertising).

We can certainly talk about the appropriateness of when an where to advertise, but that's a very different topic than your ALL ADS ARE UNETHICAL screeds that you've posted in like a dozen threads on this topic from 2 different accounts..

Never mind continuing to believe that somehow those of us who engage with advertising are lying to ourselves or somehow less in control of things than you?

Now who's spinning a web..

I like what that guy is doing, but I still have to agree with you. To me ads are just money focused propaganda, abusing human psychology to make people spend money they on crap they don't need.

It would be nicer if no tracking would mean no data sent to ethicalads unless user engaging with ad because we know what happen when we trust advertising companies. So a step in the right direction but i would still block impressions when hosted on another domain. Also ads should not distort users perception in order to sell but that's another debate.

We support a backend API, but it's much more complicated to implement, and the client gets more complex as well. We started out with a vision of all backend integrations, but it was impossible to sell to most publishers.

To me, there is no such thing as an “ethical ad”. You are trying to steal my attention, my time. You don’t get to do that. My time on Earth is limited and you don’t get a millisecond of it if I can help it.

If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is a waste of my time and a waste of the advertisers money.

I long ago decided to throw out every piece of physical ad mail I receive without even glancing at it more than long enough to recognize it as an advertisement.

I don’t know why you expect me to treat your digital ads any differently?

You can call my perspective extremist, but is it any more extreme than the methods used by advertising networks to steal my attention?

Great morally charged argument, but I am not sure how you expect content creators to monetize.

That's not really my problem, is it? It is the content creator's problem.

Well, to be blunt, in my humble opinion more than 90% of "content creators" trying to monetize their content with ads currently produce content of so low quality, that world would be a better place without their content. So if my ad blocker helps any of those to change their career, I am happy.

Even with ad monetization, if their content is of no use, they will disappear if they survive on said ad monetization. Content creation on the web is hard enough to suffer from removing the major monetization avenue without a suitable alternative.

Charge money, either directly for the content, or indirectly in the form of patronage or a service or other business you run.

Yep, these exist as alternatives as of now, but require an explicit payment step which might cause more friction than ads.

I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting. I can see a decentralized crypto application evolving around this usecase

> Yep, these exist as alternatives as of now, but require an explicit payment step which might cause more friction than ads.

Payment from one user produces more revenue than showing ads to hundreds of users. That should be multiplied in to any analysis of friction.

> I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting.

There have been many attempts to do that, none of which have succeeded. One major problem: they tend to track all your web activity, and the kinds of people interested in services like this are very much the kinds of people who don't want to be tracked. Another problem: it's easier to convince people to pay for a specific source of content than to amorphously pay for "various content".

I'm pretty frustrated by advertising too, and some of it is particularly egregious, but at the moment, there is really no other way for many publishers to get paid.

I'm curious, how many services do you subscribe to and pay for content? I pay for a few ad free resources, but certainly a lot of the sites I enjoy don't get my $$.

Just as an example: I read some dev newsletters, they include a block of paid-for job postings. Highly relevant with the content. Together with the occasional sponsored post link (also still relevant content) this appears to fund them just fine.

This isn't "ad free" but it's close enough in my opinion. There's a huge gulf between contextually relevant content curated by the creators and the kind of shite that ad networks push.

I appreciate that you're trying what you're trying, but I wanted to address this:

> All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.

The great bulk of advertising is built upon a conflict of interest and is essentially manipulative. Consider, for example, an article. Both the writer and the reader want the reader's maximum attention on the article for as long as the reader cares to give it. The goal of advertising is to distract from that in hopes of extracting money from the reader. Generally, ads are constructed without much regard to whether the reader was intending to buy or would really benefit from the product. The goal is to make a sale. (If you doubt me, look at how many people who create or show ads, say, test a product before putting the ad in front of people. Or just look at tobacco advertising, a product that has killed hundreds of millions.)

So I think there's an inherent lack of ethics to ads as an industry. It could be that you'll find enough people who are worried about privacy but not about the other stuff to build a business. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's no accident that this security hole is being closed not because of random miscreants but because of industrial-scale exploitation.

I think the big problem in adtech isn't just targeting, it's also fighting ad fraud. Do you have a good plan for when you become big enough to become a target for ad fraud?

I run a network ad-block dns (pihole) and consistently 25-33% of all my network traffic is blocked as ads. It's much more than I ever imagined. Now I'm used to a different internet, when I'm using internet off the network it's like WTF is this?

I just have a decent set of ad blockers and the experience is similar. Unfortunately, it often results in weird experiences or I get sites which don't work at all if you have ad blocking.

Well that's interesting. For me 99.5% of websites work perfectly using ublock origin. The only .5% remaining are websites that actively refuse to serve any kind of adblock users, not because it breaks functionality on their site. I don't think I can recall having visited a single website that would have features break unintentionally because of ublock in the past few years.

Can't agree with you, Dynamics 365 is one of them (it's shit but I've implemented it at work). EDF (French main electricity provider) also breaks for me. That's one example from a big company, and one example with a big user base.

It depends on how many privacy lists you have added, probably.

Normal display ads all being blocked is generally fine 99% of the time, but if you care about not being permanently tracked across the internet then there are a couple more domains you have to add - except some sites make it mandatory that those invasive fingerprinting scripts and port scanners run and report back a session, otherwise you're refused login or banned.

I don't think my experience is vastly different from yours. I do get some sites where pop-overs or cookie notifications are blocked but it's not clear and you just can't scroll. I could turn off those blocker settings, but the notifications are annoying enough it's worth it.

The Denver Post just lost my business over this. They have one of those things that scrambles all the words for any user with the audacity to not want to see video+audio ads while reading their newspaper.

Is it their content to do what they want with? Sure.

Does the same logic apply to the $9 I used to give them each month? You're damn right.

Hard agree. If I'm paying for content, I'd accept a small number of discrete advertising. Video advertising on a text/ photo site pisses me off in general and if I was paying for it? No chance I'd let that fly.

Question about pihole: is it possible to turn off blocking for a website? Do you have to log into the pihole web interface to do that? I often go to websites where some crucial functionality is blocked by my adblocker (ublock origin), where I have to turn it off for that site.

Yes, you can do that via whitelist/blacklist: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/misc/whitelist-blacklist/

You can whitelist yes, or there's an option to disable the entire thing temporarily for x minutes.

Yes you have to log in to the interface unless you engineer a way around it

On iOS there is an app called piHoleRemote that had a nice widget that allows you to disable pihole for x minutes.

Can be nice to use to quickly disable pihole to get through to a particular website.

Yes, you have to login to disable but you could easily use the API. For instance, pihole.disable(60) with https://pypi.org/project/PiHole-api/

I just stop using sites that gimp themselves when I use an adblocker. There's tons of alternatives for most things.

How do you use the web when you can't click on links?

I can't effectively keep a mental black list of all the sites which I don't want to click on.

Very few sites are broken with ad blocking. If you click on one, you just press the back button. No need for a mental blacklist.

I don't. I mean, if it's a news site just search for the title in a search engine and you'll find other articles. If it's a web application I search for an alternative and bookmark that. If you really want to avoid even loading it, you can just block the whole site with your adblocker but I don't go that far.

That is what I currently do. It turns casual browsing into a frustrating scavenger hunt. The whole point of the web was to make links effortless so you could browse sites. This breaks that whole model.

There aren't always alternatives - think shopping for certain items, government forms.

Why would a site that hopes you'll send them money in exchange for product, refuse your traffic if you have an ad blocker enabled? That just costs them money. Same for government forms, why would they refuse your traffic if you're blocking ads?

I wonder, too. Yet I still see these issues.

It might not be intentional to break the site experience for adblock users - but there is a number of sites that has implemented link tracking in a way that overrides the normal click (though sometimes not keypress) events, to let the tracking code do its thing. If the tracking code is blocked or fails to load, that means a lot of actions break.

Best part? Trying to convince the operators of such sites that users they cannot see in their "analytics solution" are worth fixing their site for is not exactly a straightfoward job - from their narrow view, these users simply do not exist, because the tracking does not show them!

You have adds on your government forms?

Ad blockers have false positives.

It is not what GP asked.

An no, there isn't "tons of alternatives". In theory there is. But in practice, they can really make your life harder. Some may say that Signal is an alternative for WhatsApp, but if people you communicate with don't want to use anything but WhatsApp, then Signal is useless. I hate Facebook but when I want to plan an event, I found nothing better, simply because that's the platform that reaches the most people. Network effects... But also, your favorite show may not be on "alternative" streaming platforms, sometimes your job, or worse, the government may require a specific website.

There are extremists who are ready to find alternative friends, shows or jobs just to avoid using some website. It is a good thing these people exist, that's how progress is made. But for most people you have to make compromises.

> I hate Facebook but when I want to plan an event…

Ah! That's why I haven't missed Facebook. I am old enough that I don't plan events any longer.

(Or maybe I have no social life. Actually, that's right, I don't. ;-))

My solution to this is using Cloudflare Warp (Cloudflare's consumer-facing VPN).

When I need to access ads.google.com or analytics.google.com for my company, I turn on Cloudflare, and pihole is bypassed.

I map the command below to a keyboard shortcut to disable all pihole blocking for 60 seconds via the pihole disable API call.

wget --quiet "http://PIHOLE_IP/admin/api.php?disable=60&auth=YOUR_API_TOKE..."

You can find the token in the pihole Web GUI at, Settings > API/Web Interface > Show API token

I run Pi-Hole on my network as well; it's wonderful. I'm terrified that it will stop working soon though, as companies start to use their own DNS servers, which I've heard is happening.

Interesting. I would think though that the move to their own DNS servers could extend to their own ads as well — that is, cutting out the middle man that is Google/etc.

I'm all for news sites, for example, hoisting ads if I knew they were getting the money from those ads, knew the ads were actually coming from their site.

Sorry, I didn't mean their _own_ servers, I just meant hard-coding 8.8.8.8 into the DNS settings, for example.

I wonder if you could hijack those requests at your router and send them back to your Pi-Hole? But then they just switch to DNS over TLS...

I just have my network block outgoing DNS queries that aren’t from the gateway. But you’re so right that DoH is going to throw a wrench in this.

If an ad can use DoH to sidestep a firewall, so can an employee. If Google and Facebook were cunning (and nefarious, but that much is presumed), they would be aggressively developing a product that solves this problem for corporate networks, but at an enormous cost. Otherwise, when corporate networks solve this (and they will), home users who hate ads will just follow whatever pattern they settle on.

Encrypted DNS is going to upset a lot of corporate network management/monitoring... But the switch to HTTPS for everything caused similar frustration for IT admins awhile ago.

In the corporate world, I think the future is managing your network by managing every single device on your network. Only let authorized/corp devices in and all those devices must be enrolled in an MDM solution that enforces all sorts of policy and includes monitoring traffic/DNS queries. Of course that's a lot more work than just monitoring things at the network level.

This is pretty much why Google are a huge proponent of DoH.

I'm not sure I understand how this is related to pi-hole.

Your computer sends the raw domain name to pi-hole (e.g. ads.google.com), and pi-hole returns 0.0.0.0 if it's on the block list.

There's nothing Google or anyone can do to make pi-hole stop working.

IoT devices are starting to use hardcoded DNS servers instead of using the one provided by DHCP, which negates the benefits of Pi-Hole on those devices.

For now, I've configured my router to force all UDP port 53 traffic to my Pi-Hole which overrides what I mentioned above.

But, in the future we may start to see IoT Devices hard-code DoH servers which will be harder to force over to the Pi-Hole.

> I've configured my router to force all UDP port 53 traffic to my Pi-Hole

Oh wow, how do you do that?

25-33% of requests? Or is this a percentage of bytes?

Because I wonder what percentage of bandwidth (in terms of bytes) trackers/banners/ads account for.

Need to set up a pi-hole ... just too many other projects....

Pi-Hole is a DNS solution so it's just blocking DNS lookups. Mine is currently blocking 43.9% of all DNS requests.

It's a percent of DNS requests. It might be quite difficult to see what percentage of bytes it translate to, since HTTP requests aren't actually sent.

My pihole is showing 18.7%-23% of requests blocked :)

I set it up recently. It's about as much effort as buying and setting up a new laptop with ubuntu if you get a kit. I'd imagined it as a project beforehand, but in reality it's super easy and trivial (assuming you're comfortable using linux and ssh at a noob level).

Yep same. I'm a mere web developer that mostly works on Mac. Getting Pihole setup only took me like an afternoon after having an RPi sitting around doing nothing for months. They make it really easy, just follow the instructions. Also I'm lucky enough that my router has a friendly interface where it's easy to set the router DNS to pihole.

How would you measure bytes if the requests are blocked?

Some people are good at thinking a process through to the end. Others are not and ask questions at the first unknown. It's a large part of why I'm not a teacher.

Run the same requests throught different end points. Each through pihole & unfiltered, while monitoring the traffic on both.

Doesn’t that defeat the point of pihole? Though I suppose if what you want to do is measure things it makes sense.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Just to get a sense of how much bandwidth I am saving by in fact blocking the request.

It would be nice to know how much we're wasting.

Pi-Hole/NextDNS also blocks adds in most apps. I used NextDNS (which has a limit on the free tier), and recently switched to pihole running on my home server. I also use ZeroTier to connect to my server directly even when I am not on my local network to still use it as the DNS server. Works great.

I paid them, $20/yr is quite good and I can add my parents' house, my in-laws' house, etc on the same plan and manage them all centrally.

You can get even better coverage with the NoTracking lists (dnsmasq/unbound or dnscrypt-proxy) https://github.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists

They focus not only on tracking but also malware prevention, where possible via dns filtering.

Pi-Hole still does not properly support wildcard filtering, only via regex but that is not really efficient (requires tons of resources).

I added this to my /etc/hosts

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

What is the advantage of having DNS on a separate device other than that it provides ad blocking for multiple devices?

That’s the main benefit.

But also you can have more flexible block patterns. I run DNSCrypt-Proxy and my block lists can have wildcards. With /etc/hosts you have to enumerate each origin. It can also do things like IP blocking where if any domain resolves to a known ad network IP, then that request is blocked.

But mainly, DNSCrypt-proxy encrypts all my outgoing queries and round robins them across resolvers. (Also hi dheera!)

Mine was that high, until I ditched all the family Android devices. It's now around 2-3%. It's quite an extraordinary difference.

I use NextDNS for this, it's brilliant. (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.)

Same. I got tired of Pihole breaking for one reason or another (although I certainly adore the project). NextDNS works extremely well, provides a native app for every device, runs on my router, and is dead simple to maintain.

Hear hear. The only problem I’ve had was when I set it up on my router and my IKEA smart lights stopped responding after some 30 min or so. Turns out the gateway phones home and those calls were blocked, so for some reason or another the gateway just stopped responding to commands. Restarting it or resetting the network made it fly again, but only for the set time before it phoned home again. I was very disappointed by that, after having read some article here on HN arguing that IKEA had actually done IoT sort of right. Oh well.

Obviously not a NextDNS specific issue, it’d happen with anything that blocks the call, but just putting it out there for the next sucker that tries to google why their IKEA gateway suddenly stops responding.

Would you mind sharing the blocklists you use? I have gotten to a ratio like that, but I have noticed that it was causing more issues with regular websites for my guests, so I removed many of the custom ones. I'd like to try some others if you have suggestions.

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 59896 domains

  [i] Target: https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains
  [] Status: Not found
  [] List download failed: using previously cached list
  [i] Received 26854 domains

  [i] Target: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking.txt
  [] Status: No changes detected
  [i] Received 34 domains

  [i] Target: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt
  [] Status: No changes detected
  [i] Received 2701 domains

  [i] Target: https://dbl.oisd.nl/
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 1167690 domains

  [i] Target: https://phishing.army/download/phishing_army_blocklist_extended.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 21379 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deathbybandaid/piholeparser/master/Subscribable-Lists/ParsedBlacklists/AakList.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 5 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deathbybandaid/piholeparser/master/Subscribable-Lists/ParsedBlacklists/Prebake-Obtrusive.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 3 domains

  [i] Target: https://gitlab.com/quidsup/notrack-blocklists/raw/master/notrack-blocklist.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 14724 domains

  [i] Target: https://gitlab.com/quidsup/notrack-blocklists/raw/master/notrack-malware.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 412 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/data/adaway.org/list.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 9182 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/data/disconnect.me-ad/list.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 2701 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists/master/hostnames.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 209608 domains

Would Pihole affect latency in online games?

I use the noscript extension that uses a scripting whitelist. Bit of a pain at first, but pretty soon your browser will be flying. No extra hardware needed.

Kid's computer has dnsmasq as a similar solution.

Noticed that some apps on iOS spammed the DNS server if they couldn't connect to their ad networks which should affect battery negatively.

My issue with pihole or any other DNS adblocker is I can't whitelist some website that I love. As evil as ada network, but I still want my favorite site to get some revenue.

Maybe your favourite site would welcome a direct contribution, instead of an ad click

I'm going to be inevitable in the opposite direction: I don't think cross-domain requests were actually saving that much bandwidth. The common use case I could think of that would be JavaScript CDNs. The problem with that is that JS libraries update frequently - even something really common like jQuery has hundreds of releases, all of which get their own separately-cached URL. So the chance of two sites using the same jQuery version is low. Keep in mind that public JS CDN URLs are rarely refreshed, too - it's more of an indicator of when the site was developed rather than the latest version the site was tested with. So you could hit hundreds of sites and not get a cross-domain cache hit.

Even if you did share a URL with another site, the benefit is low compared to what you can do with same-domain requests. Most sites should be served with HTTP 2 already, which means even unoptimized sites should still load decently fast as requests aren't as expensive as they used to. You can get almost all of the same bandwidth benefits from a cross-domain cache by just making sure your own resources are being cached for a long time.

Mozilla ran the numbers and it's not a huge penalty.

It's just frustrating that it's one more optimization that is getting turned off. And makes the internet just a tiny bit worse as a result. It's like death by a thousand cuts.

A much more significant performance issue with web tracking is usually the absurd amount of JS loaded.

It's almost impressive how they manage to load so much crap. Just visit a site like mediaite.com, the list of trackers is damn long.

Yup.

The really frustrating thing about this bit is that because it disables optimizations, it potentially impacts sites where they don't actually use tracking.

Note that this particular change does not apply to non-third-party resources. That's why performance impact is minimal.

For more than a decade I've been campaigning (to any of my employers that utilise adverts on their platform) to drop adverts with the primary factor being that of performance for page load. The last time I looked, adverts were adding an additional ~35% load time to the page. Anywhere from 5% to _60%_ (!!) of vistors were navigating away before page load completed (Varied depending on company/product of course) and a staggering 80+% of those vistors would have had a full page load if the adverts were not there.

I often wonder incredulously whether developers responsible for particular sites really comprehend how bad performance has gotten. Browsing threads like this on HN makes it clear that they are probably well aware, but have no choice in the matter. In a way that's even more depressing because only a tiny minority of people are happy with the arrangement.

I walked away from one project. 3rd party scripts were not the only problem but were the last straw.

I have a community site I want to build. If it stays small I can probably run it for $20 a month all in and not pester anyone. But I’m still keeping my eye on some of the saner ad networks that use subject matter instead of user tracking to target ads. That might be an option.

Linus tech tips has a video where he gives us a peek into their finances. Among other things the merchandizing arm makes them about a third of their revenue, and no one advertiser is allowed to pay more than that, so they can maintain a degree of objectivity. I think a lot of us don’t want to approach sponsors so we feel sort of stuck with ad networks.

And I’m not much of a materialist but I’m a tool nerd (you possibly don’t need it, but if you’re gonna buy it, get a really good one) so I’m not sure how I’d do merchandizing, since I’m more likely to recommend a brand than have something made for us. That leaves what? Amazon’s “influencer” BS, which is more money for Amazon? Discount codes, which are untargeted consumerism?

> I often wonder incredulously whether developers responsible for particular sites really comprehend how bad performance has gotten.

For every site I've developed and have been tasked with adding adverts, and every colleague that I have worked with that has done the same:

- Yes, we are aware.

- Yes, we doth protest.

- No, we were not successful.

What was their rationale for not doing as you suggested?

Sunk cost is/was my conclusion. At one firm in ~2013, advertising was bringing in $600k revenue per annum - we estimated a loss of potentially triple that (!) - but the response was apathetic. There was very much a reluctance to accept that the "advert management team" (yep, they had a team dedicated to managing the adverts, who had the duty of "managing" Google Ads) would need terminating, too.

It's the chain of analytics.

You load one ad and they want their own analytics or they try to stuff multiple ads into the same slot so you get multiple analytics.

We clocked one ad at 800Mb loaded once.

I worked a contract where we slaved to get our load time down to some respectable number, and then they launched the site and load time was multiplied by just the analytics software (it was a company website, they weren’t running 3rd party ads).

How demotivating. It was time to start thinking about moving on anyway, but I basically stopped trying to pursue contract renewal at that point. All that work (and uncomfortable meetings) so Google could triple our load time.

This is akin to the whole class of CPU vulnerabilities we've seen (Spectre/Meltdown/CacheOut/...) where performance optimizations are at odds with security.

It is remarkably similar. If it weren't for the assholes trying to steal from us, our whole computing experience would be faster.

Browsers need to own tracking, and it's clear that Firefox and Safari agree.

I don't object to (silent, low resource, banner) ads, even targeted ones, as long as the targeted ads aren't building a comprehensive profile of me.

I think my ideal would be telling my browser a list of a couple interest areas (prosumer tech, sci-fi, dog peripherals) that the website could target on to serve ads. They'd get targeted ads, I'd get privacy, and I'd get ads that actually match things I care about.

Due to cache abuse I have all caching disabled on firefox and this is a nice move (even if I will continue to use it without cache).

Anyway one more thing that I can observe on Ubuntu 20.04. Firefox has become noticeably faster. I dont know if this is due to the fact that is not from ubuntu repositories or some serious optimizations were made.

"On Linux, the WebRender compositing engine is enabled by default for the GNOME desktop environment session with Wayland. In the previous release, WebRender support was activated for GNOME in the X11 environment. The use of WebRender on Linux is still limited to AMD and Intel graphics cards, as there are unresolved problems when working on systems with the proprietary NVIDIA driver and the free Noveau driver."

(Fax machine enthusiasts, please stop abusing the thread and move to Ask HN or something)

Blocking ads and installing some sort of cookie auto-accepter/deleter[1] is the best and mopst optimization saver which you can have without disabling javascript.

[1] https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

Or just add the filter list [1] to uBlock Origin

1. https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/

In many parts of the world, data still costs, and it annoys me that if you pay for 10Gb a month, the sites you surf to are a few kb, and then up pop the ads which are Mbs and steal your data allowance. You're actually paying for ads you don't want.

>but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already.

Indeed. The brave move would be to firefox to include built-in adblock, but I don't think Mozilla has the cojones.

>Of course we'll have the inevitable guy pop in here and talk up how awesome web tracking is because it helps sites monetize better, but that's all bullshit.

I think if adblocker usage became widespread we would in fact see the death of a lot of websites, but to be perfectly honest I kinda want that to happen because advertising is cancer.

Security in general is a performance and usability killer. If “attackers” were not a thing your internet would be much much faster, hell your smartphone wouldn’t need to encrypt itself or paying in a shop wouldn’t need a chip & pin.

What I’m saying is that a lot of applications have many attackers in their threat models, but advertisers have so far been out of scope.

Advertising destroys everything. If something is based on ad revenue, it goes to shit ultimately.

The latest casualty was podcasts. It's revolting.

Ad-based businesses need to be boycotted until this disease is in lasting remission.

> The latest casualty was podcasts. It's revolting.

Hmm?

Yes, there are adverts on all the podcasts I listen to. Many of my favorites offer members only ad-free versions. Usually I suffer through the ad supported versions because the adverts are easy enough to skip.

Some podcasts have too many adverts or annoyingly inserted advertising. Those are pretty 1 and done. No point listening to them.

IMO the (current) podcast market is a good example of how we can enjoy content and know the producers are compensated without having to deal with obtrusive marketing crap.

It is getting clear some podcasting is getting sucked into things like Spotify, but there is still enough good content I don't think it's a problem.

I absolutely don't respect having my weir podcast-friendship relationship with the host exploited by fully integrated ad pieces whispered to me in a trusted voice. That. Is. Sick.

I respect that podcasters are spending their time and effort putting together a program which I enjoy. The price I pay for that is listening to them talk about some product I don't give a shit about for a few seconds until I can hit the skip button. To me, there is a clear cut deal with no deceit.

Do you feel people should volunteer their time gratis to entertain you?

What Hacker News does with adverts slipped into the newsfeed is essentially the same as what podcasters do.

Please don't take offense in this, but your "advertisement doesn't influence me" take is quite silly and naive. Not being rational about the effects of advertisement is the whole point of these product placements. It is not information, but manipulation.

> Do you feel people should volunteer their time gratis to entertain you?

No. They can do as they please. I'd prefer them to do it for the sake of it, or charge in a direct matter like a subscription model. However they should not, never, try to manipulate me for their profit.

I merely said the scene dominated by enthusiasts/hobbyists changed to a predominantly revenue-focused environment. You see the same dynamic at play, which made youtube the signal:noise hell it is today.

Mind you, the German and American podcast scene were very different in that regard, as in America monetization of every possible creation seems to be much more common. I assume this is down to a different set of factual constraints and values.

With data caps you are paying to be advertised to.

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