China forces Mozilla to remove adblockers from its store | Hacker News Reader

China forces Mozilla to remove adblockers from its store

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35 pointsShowalkKama23 comments

Sidenote: Why does the west allow China to run a social media app like Tiktok globally whilst China itself blocks all external apps within its own borders?

Arguing that if we block them we are just as bad as them is niave to me. Like giving away all concessions in a trade negotiation to gain the high moral ground.

Seems like such an obvious question to me.

Agreed, they probably laugh at us from time to time and rightfully so.

>Why does the west allow China to run a social media app like Tiktok globally whilst China itself blocks all external apps within its own borders

I never understood why can CCTV, CGTN, Global Times etc. freely upload and stream on Youtube. Same level as RT or even worse.

inb4 "FrEe SpEEch" + "they are a private company and they can do whatever they want"

Not to disagree, but if we go down this direction, we need to then ask [1]:

- What about search? (Baidu vs Google or Bing)

- What about news agencies? (CGTN and Xinhua vs BBC and The New York Times and The Guardian)

- What about the Internet itself? (Great Firewall vs effectively none)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... "List of websites blocked in mainland China"

What you're suggesting I think is a tit-for-tat strategy, which has game theoretic advantages, though I'm not sure what the eventual result would be in this case since it seems unlikely that China would allow Facebook, Twitter, NYT, etc..

It would put some constraints on Chinese surveillance and influence operations.

I'm much more worried about USA and NSA than China. One is well known with murders around the world with support of it's populous.

This is precisely the way China would like us to view things. "Hey the US is worse, access for China should be open slather.."

I can't imagine a similar kind of view (China bad!) doing much for your career in China.

This might be a reason why China wins....

Because some people see multiculturalism and melting pot environments as a good thing that improves society by moving our own culture forward. From this position mirroring the behavior would make no sense because the solution is misguided and self-harming.

China are doing it and by all objective accounts are doing very well.

Mozilla should just stop operating in China then, it's not a business

As I understand it, Firefox VPN extensions are popular in China for getting around the great firewall.

I know it is not popular opinion, but it wouldn't bother me if all add blockers were removed. No web site has an obligation to serve pages outside of their intentions regarding advertising. If a website is too annoying and in your face with adds, I just move on and find a site that is more accommodating. Some sites only exist for the purpose of pushing adds using stolen content and they are fairly easy to identify, so I avoid them.

It's a threat to http & services everywhere to take a simple static piece of content & words & insist that access must come with tracking far and wide by hundreds and hundreds of parties.

The alternative to ad blockers are alternate transport mediums, is users sending raw static html bundles to each other directly.

It sucks that we rely so heavily on this hostile monetization model. Agreed that sites have a right to not serve to folks who disable trackers. Yet... outlawing user agency, denying the web's nature as a medium for the user, that we have power over- that top down authoritarianism, is, however, completely bunk & stupid.

The medium is malleable & that's such a huge feature versus the rest of computing. The Internet Is For End Users (rfc8890)[1] and the web is the most positive living breathing technology on the planet we have towards this end.

Using the heavy dumb fist of the law to bludgeon the web into being a much lesser medium, into stiff rigidity that is apathetic to the user is such a stupid act for/by suckers. Absolutely 0% sense or morality in forcing top down desires onto the web, denying the user agency: this medium is a 2 way street and that's it's most hopeful, humanistic, positive aspect, so starkly visible in contrast to all the other shitty controlled proprietary unflexible experiences we are forced into unwillingly in the rest of computing.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.html

No client has an obligation to let a web site have control over their machine. The way I and many other got into our careers was being able to fiddle around, explore, and customize our own experiences (aka blocking stuff like this, fixing UI issues, etc.)

>No client has an obligation to let a web site have control over their machine.

Web sites do not force you to load their content, so I must assume you feel entitled to what ever you want in this regard.

> Web sites do not force you to load their content

Indeed they do not - you can choose to load whatever content you like. You can choose to load images. Or JavaScript. Or video. Or ads. Or not.

> so I must assume you feel entitled to what ever you want in this regard

Users should absolutely be entitled to decide what data they want to download over their network connection.

It's essential for many reasons, including saving on metered data, saving battery life, improving performance, improving security, and improving privacy.

Adtech is extremely detrimental in a variety of ways including data use, power use, speed, security, and privacy. For those reasons alone, it makes a lot of sense to block it whenever possible.

They do if their URL is misleading or is otherwise disguised. Also, it is common to click links without knowing ahead of time what the full content of the page is. That may not be ideal, but this is what it is. Ad blockers give users a layer of protection against malicious, lazy, or overeager websites. You seem to suggest users should just take it all or not visit, but that seems to only make sense if links advertised what users would be getting into (ex: visit this link and let us cryptomine you for content!"). Maybe that would be better and more honest, though I don't see how it would work with how people use the web today.

With that attitude we wouldn’t just have ads but the pop-up hell of yesteryear, combined with unstoppable seizure inducing eardrum piercing video ads and all encompassing tracking with no way out. And because it’s a race to the bottom, on every site.

If people would simply not visit sites that are toxic, they would change or go out of business. I would be all for a site that tracked the toxicity of sites as a method of shaming them.

This is exactly what i do, your site forces me to disable the adblocker? Goodbye.

By this logic we should ban earphones, as those let people evade audial ads at gas stations, and also ban deaf people (the latter are bigger offenders). Otherwise how does it make sense, that the gas station is selling gas at a discount, hoping to recover the difference with ads, and those deaf freeloaders come over, simply grab what they need and leave, without paying their moral duty of watching ads?

I didn't say anything about banning. People should be able to use any mitigation method that they want. I just personally don't care to use any myself, hence my statement.

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