Ad blocking is under attack (2017)
adguard.com
adguard.com
Here's a short update on what happened since then:
1. DMCA takedowns did not destroy ad blocking (thank god), but there were a couple more times when it was tried, nothing huge though.
2. Streisand effect is a thing and the domain in question was blocked by everyone and everywhere. There was even a special filter list and later a browser extension which only purpose was to block such domains. It got some traction but later got abandoned: https://github.com/paulgb/BarbBlock. If something like that happens again I am pretty sure it can be revived very quickly.
3. The corporations still try different angles to prohibit ad blocking. The last example I know about is something like this: Axel Springer claimed that the web page and all its content (including subrequest) and ads is subject to copyright law. So when you modify the web page with adding new styles or blocking a web request you violate the copyright.
If you take a scissor to a reproduction of a piece of art you have not created yourself (and for which the protection timeframe has not ended yet), create snippets, and rearrange them, this can be considered an Urheberrecht violation[1]. No one would consider doing the same to a newspaper the same.
[1] The distinction here is relevant: German copyright is not like US copyright - it can't be sold away, you can only license out individual derived rights, and it also allows for protection against "abuse of a work", e.g. doing something with it the original creator disapproves of[2]. If that always applies to the removal of ads has not been decided in a final decision.
[2] "The author has the right to prohibit any distortion or other interference with his work that is likely to jeopardize his legitimate intellectual or personal interests in the work." Art 14 UrhG
In answer, I should probably invoke accessibility laws, asserting that ads make my blood pressure rise and induce vomiting.
Also, since parodies have been deemed fair use since about forever, what I’m reading is fine parodies, which are exactly the originals except they don’t have ads.
Also, good luck with that clause against Links, Lynx and Dillo.
Isn't it? https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51a.html
That seems absurd. I just reject their request to fetch some _additional_ information, I don't modify the "text of their request" as such. If that breaks their sites (as it usually does), that's their problem - not mine.
I had a neighbor who was sent an invoice, he had cancelled his internet connection 3 months ago and was later told they need a cancellation request in writing. so he sent an equivalent invoice to them asking for rent for their modem which was consuming place in his house. he did not have to pay in the end.
It's the same reason US privacy regulation is doomed to failure unless it frames consent the same way the GDPR did. Not merely as something that is given once (and then vectoralized/sold), but rather something that needs to be given on an ongoing basis and can be withdrawn at any time.
A bit more nuanced: not loading in the ad on a news site is akin to ripping out and throwing away the subscription card in the magazine. The contents of each might be subject to copyright, but that doesn't invalidate my right to separate them once delivered to me.
Copyright is about distribution.
"A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”."
Suppose it's true and that they are copyright holders for all these ads (they are not). Now, when the publisher gets a newspaper out, the content is just as they wanted. But when I take that newspaper home and decide to tear out a page or whatever fragment of it, it's none of their business. The filtering is being done locally, EasyList is not publishing an adless version of their websites.
This exact thing happened with Nintendo decades ago, and it turned out to be a nothing burger.
Large adtech companies are coalescing and supporting a single browser framework that gives them a modicum of control around how adblockers are integrated into the extensions, while also funding directly or indirectly realistic browser competition through Firefox (sorry Brave and Vivaldi... still a ways to go market share-wise). The economist in me thinks there is formal and informal coordination to make this ad "market" exist (no one wants ads, really, they want search engines with relevant results) and there is exercise in market power to the detriment of businesses purchasing advertising (and waste to society writ large).
Brave is already at 60+ million MAU. It's already 1/4 of the market share from Firefox. Brave's market share is rising, Firefox is declining.
If there is one horse to bet here, it is Brave. Sticking with Firefox is just playing "controlled opposition" right now.
It would be nice to see innovation in this space but web standards implementation requirements may make that bar too high? I'm not a browser dev, just an armchair techie.
Attempting to convert Firefox users is not a long term strategy, and doesn't do as much or anything to create a better web.
I like Vivaldi on mobile with built in adblocking and some bit of control for text size (aging has not been kind to my eyes, mobile text is too small most of the time). Vivaldi hasn't made it pass evaluation stage on desktop for me as it often crashes when I try it (linux distros). (ed: tried it years before)
Browsers are going to continue to be a central part of our OS -- no stopping that. I hope the companies can be taken to task for colluding and that innovation is not stifled.
I happily use Vivaldi on Linux Mint for more than two years without any issues!?
The last time I evaluated it in Fedora (maybe 3 years now?) it was crashing under moderate use, and haven't had time to check recently. Perhaps when some time clears up I should give it another go.
I'm currently using Edge with uBlock Origin Lite. I can't tell the difference between uBO and uBOL. AdGuard MV3 also seems to work fine but I've used uBO so long that I'm sticking to it out of comfort.
That said, I keep Tor installed for as close to perfect privacy as possible. It feels academic though, as everything I do is pretty pedestrian and I generally avoid Google's services. I do prefer Edge to Brave, there's many features that I like here, but it's my backup plan if somehow Edge's adblocking doesn't work as well as it does today.
Even though I don't use it daily, I promote Brave to anyone that would normally be inclined to use Firefox. Otherwise, I push native browsers for all the inherent advantages they have. For me that's Safari on iOS and Edge on Windows. There's no doubt that built-in adblockers like Brave has is the future, they're just ahead of everyone in many ways. For me, Brave is what Firefox should be by now, in all regards.
Now you don't have to abandon Firefox because of their dumb UI decisions anymore.
Have you read the blog post by AdGuard about their MV3 adblocker and, specifically, the limitations of that addon compared what we had before?
https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-mv3.html
I wouldn't call it "blown things significantly out of proportion", not unless you're okay with compromised ad blocking capabilities, which some people seem to be in the name of security which is oxymoronic.
Ad measurement companies have no incentive to accurately report the incremental sales (i.e., that which would not have happened, had the ad not aired) of the ad they are measuring. Why not? Because their clients, the marketing function at the advertiser, don't get their bonuses paid based on the accuracy of the measurement firm's work product. They get their bonuses (and ultimately salary) based on the success of their marketing efforts. If a company like mine reports that an ad on TikTok for Dran-o didn't sell any Dran-o that wouldn't have been sold anyway, Dran-o's marketers will just find a different ad measurement company.
Furthermore, as a platform, TikTok has to prove to potential advertisers that TikTok is a good platform on which to place ads. So TikTok also has no incentive for accurate measurement.
So, what does a company like mine do? Juice the numbers. Because the company leadership is judged not on accuracy of measurement, but profit.
It's a lot like the bond rating agencies that lead, in part, to the 2008 housing crisis, getting paid by the people whose homework they were grading.
This is an entirely true story, btw. Apparently if you advertise Dran-o to kids on TikTok, you get something north of a $2.00 ROI. Completely ridiculous.
In another anecdote, we measure advertising on YouTube. Google would only let us implement changes to our measurement software if they "improved" the software. (Again, I don't mean accuracy. Neither did Google.)
How do you solve this? Well, you can start by letting the CFO at the advertiser own the ad measurement responsibility. The CFO actually has incentive to understand if the marketers are just pissing away money. The shareholders do too.
Perhaps there's also room for an industry watchdog, paid for by advertising platforms and advertisers, that certified the practices of measurement companies?
Anyway, shareholders are getting fleeced. All so the Valley can rake in beaucoup bucks at the expense of shareholders. With the added benefit of a layer of surveillance apparatus suffusing the internet.
Fun times!
There's actually a lot of scholarship on how advertising's effects are a lot lower than the ad measurement and advertising industry thinks they are. (Go figure that the people who profit from advertising think it works.) Freakonomics Radio episodes 440 and 441 are a good place to start, for those who are interested.
I definitely remember asking my mom to buy liquid plumber when I was about 13 because I had a slow drain in a bathroom she never used. I only realized that slow=clogged from the commercials I saw.
As a side note, I must say I feel this conversation took on a negative (and condescending?) tone.
I can confirm that point on a small scale; it's something I repeatedly mentioned on HN for years. I used to work literally next desk to a small social media marketing agency, that spun out of the company I was employed by. I knew the people running that agency, I got to see how they work, even read and commented on the reports they sent to customers.
It was as GP described, with a twist - the people working in said agency weren't exactly good with numbers. They understood, however, the idea that a graph going up and to the right is good. Despite the numbers having little connection to reality, they wrote reports that highlighted how successful their campaigns were. Those reports were read by customers equally proficient in mathematics, and similarly good at tracking sales on their own side. Bottomline: money changed hands, both sides were happy, the whole thing was still completely untethered from reality.
You probably didn't see that ad at the super bowl.
There's a book on this topic that explicitly draws the parallels to the housing market meltdown, "Subprime Attention Crisis." There is also a professor at Columbia, Kinshuk Jerath, who has written explicitly about these misaligned incentives.
When your solutions are "juicing the numbers" how are they addressing the miscorrelation between third party tracking tools for both impressions and clicks on the platforms, but also what would come through in analytics in the site or app?
Without once mentioning a pixel and how that all works, you claim that numbers are being inflated, how so? Are you talking about over-reporting, mostly caused by impression conversions?
If you are "getting a $2 ROI showing Dran-O ads to kids on TikTok" there have to be sales occurring in the first place in order for TikTok to claim credit for them.
Can you also go into more detail about what tracking solution for YouTube you needed to contact Google about? That is confusing to me.
I've been in the ad world for almost 8 years now. If a platform is over-reporting conversions I have other ways to audit that.
If you look at a distribution or histogram of ROIs from our thousands of studies, you will see that it approximates a gaussian distribution...right up until the left hand side hits $1.00, where it looks like the distribution hit a brick wall.
Same thing for a distribution of incremental lifts, except that the brick wall is right above 0% lift.
It's a discontinuity that shouldn't exist, like the Polish high school exit exams. See if you can guess what the minimum score to pass* was:
Except, unlike that distribution, there is virtually nothing to the left of the discontinuity at my company.
Without talking about the tech behind it, what I can say is that the fraud is not occurring on the impressions and tracking side. It's in the statistical tools that infer the incrementality of the purchasing behavior. Seriously, I urge you to listen to the Freakonomics episodes I mentioned.
*The minimum score was 30. This is pretty damning evidence that teachers were juicing the tests of kids who filed by one or two questions.
I think this is probably where you get the room to juice the numbers like this. If you were tracking online conversions, people would easily be able to compare with an incrementality study run by the provider (say Google) and see that you are lying/wrong.
It is impossible to actually observe what would have happened, had there been no advertisement, because there in fact was an advertisement.
Thus, the estimation of incrementality must be inferred statistically.
I can see how you would have that perspective as a third-party analyst of conversion.
It's actually easy to do if you are the exchange/sell-side provider of the advertising space. In your logic, where the advertiser requesting the incrementality study would have won the auction, just randomly remove their bid from some won auctions, have the second highest bidder win, and then track that user as the "control" for conversion purposes vs. users you did display the ad to. Voilà!
This is how Google in-house incrementality studies are run, for instance.
I can see how you would have that perspective as a third-party analyst of conversion.
It's actually easy to do if you are the exchange/sell-side provider of the advertising space. In your logic, where the advertiser running the incrementality study would have won the auction, just randomly remove their bid from some won auctions, have the second highest bidder win, and then track that user as the "control" for conversion purposes vs. users you did display the ad to. Voilà!
That's not observation. That's statistical inference. I am referring, strictly, to direct, empiricial observation. With any kind of statistical inference, you get into a pissing match about assumptions, model quality, etc... Is the "control" a good stand-in for the behavior of the "test", etc.
Incrementality is able to be estimated, but unobservable. And therein lies the potential for fraud.
You can observe the results of the experiment and then make statistical inference about the "true" incrementality. You don't even have to perform inference necessarily, you can just provide the direct results of your experiment to the advertiser and let them do the inference.
But I do fail to see how a third-party could possibly infer this measure, given that they have no capacity to do a true incrementality experiment on the platform.
To riff off the average height example - you can get a pretty darn good estimate based on sampling and good statistical practice... unless the people doing the sampling have a reason to bias the measurement, or - if you're sampling on your own - people who control where you go and who you meet...
I think my usage of "you" was confusing because I work in sell-side advertising.
Frankly the number of dots that have to be connected between different systems in order to make that stuff work is too difficult for me to trust the data. If I'm going to trust a black box, I'm not going to trust programmatic exchanges and attribution vendors. I'm going to trust platforms that have vertical integration at as many stages as possible.
So, Google basically.
Not sure how you get this data if you are not the supplier.
You just mentioned in another comment that the key data needed to measure incrementality is impossible to get, from your perspective. [0]
How do you get the data if you're not a supplier? You contract for the supplier.
I actually don't care about ads. I use an ad-blocker because I am concerned about everybody in the industry tries to track and profile me.
I share your dislike of tracking and profiling.
So ad blocking is and always will be "under attack", that was always expected, "small" players, like individual news sites for example have been fighting ad blocking for years, now big players are feeling the heat too and since ad blocking is an "existential threat" ( Meta just learned that ), they no longer ignore it or "kinda deal with it".
It always has been a war. And like every war, there are endless philosophical theories and discussions about the "sustainability" of the Web "without ads", the tracking, etc.
But the reality is: It always has been a war.
Even though some folks would like to make it illegal to crack phones, they can't. They are, however, allowed to release patches and updates that "crack the crack," so to speak. As long as these patches don't violate the law, then it's a simple, perfectly-legal arms race.
For myself, I don't run an adblocker. When I go to a site that's overrun with ads, I don't return. Hasn't happened too often. I also have Reader Mode, which works on most sites.
I refuse to project my own values onto others. I really don't care whether or not anyone else runs adblockers, as I don't profit from ads, and I don't run them, myself, for my own reasons, which no one really cares about.
Most of the folks I know that use them, refer to them as "cracked" phones.
More hypocritical than that is that I know many such people who then go to create their apps and as soon as they have enough traffic, they'll add adsense to their apps but keep blocking it in others. There's also the argument that you block ads due to privacy, again here I'd say, don't use those websites. If you know there's a security camera at the bank branch and you don't want to be recorded, you don't go to the bank branch, no normal person would think to put a hood on their head to still go.
I bet this is going to get downvoted to shit, because I've been in HN for a few years and it's predictable where the crowd goes, but it seems very odd to me how we so easily deny other developers of creating free to use tools just because we think we have some moral higher ground.
However, if you get downvoted, it might also be because complaining about being downvoted (even before actually receiving downvotes) is pretty annoying
I would gladly do so, except google is also stealing my data and now these thieves have it tied to my CC#.
Paying just makes your attention even more valuable. If you have enough disposable income to pay for this, they can only imagine what you'll pay for if they manage to get ads in front of your eyeballs.
This a poor argument, no HN crowdthink required.
Ads pay for websites.
So yes, your misunderstanding aside, billboard ads do pay for roads in a clearly understood way.
The point is this, ads directly fund websites. Without ads those websites do not exist.
Bill boards do not directly fund highways, our taxes do, and those are collected 99.9999999999% from not bill boards.
Anyway the entire idea is flawed.
If ads pay for websites, then how is that so? Ah, by manipulating the user into buying stuff they don't need.
Ads are showing relevant items people want/need.
Who are you to tell others what they need?
There is no manipulation, that is such a weird POV. It is awareness, are you so easily convinced you buy everything from every ad you see?
I dont love ads but they pay for a lot of sites i love.
I don't want to be aware of which company has the biggest advertising budget.
If I want to be aware of products, it is because of their quality.
Anyway, I don't want to be distracted while working, so implement a different payment method for your website or accept that adblockers exist.
I have no problem with ad blockers.
Distracted while working? What work do you do that requires reading websites with ads?
Ads are basically everywhere.
Fox news manipulates... ads sell.
Sell not manipulation
The dictionary says that to manipulate is to 'control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.' If you want to tack on 'when they're not selling products" for your personal use, be my guest, but then 'advertising isn't manipulation' is tautologous. And you really should have brought up that you have a special, secret definition when you told someone point blank that advertising wasn't it.
I'm the guy who tells everyone about uBlock Origin. Seriously, they love the ad-free web.
But, if you want to support the websites you use you should think about what you are doing. What is frustrating here is the lack of respect for people who create a lot of the web you use, and then you don't pay them. Ads are a way to fund websites, not all of them, but a lot.
The problem with ads is that people don't want to pay with their attention and personal data.
Another problem with ads is that website owners can not directly set a price, and they cannot set the price above a certain threshold where ads simply don't work anymore. It doesn't scale.
Website owners def can set prices. It is super easy.
You gotta be kidding me.
My attention is mine. It is part of me, a part of my mind, my consciousness. There is not a single person on this earth that is entitled to it. It is not a currency they can pay their bills with. It is not something that they have any assumed right to.
So it's funny to see you talk about respect. Advertising's inherent property is its complete lack of respect for me, my choices and my attention. They don't ask if I want to see this crap, they just show it to me. They insert their noise into my mind without my consent. I block them and they double down on it by finding ways to get past my blocker. And to you this mind rape is okay just because it funds your site?
Attention is not something you actively control, its a very complex issue between your subconscious and conscious. That is a much bigger discussion.
I got nothing against you or anyone else getting paid. I'm complaining about the general lack of respect. People act as if they own my attention and can sell it off to the highest bidder. Blockers are merely self defense against these hostile websites.
> Attention is not something you actively control
It's still mine and nobody has any business selling it off for money. If they try, I'll stop them.
Why dont you build a better model then replace it?
A lot of jobs depend on ads, dont shit all over people :)
I do not know if you are serious or sarcastic. Assuming serious, that was feasible 30 years ago. Now trying to build anything competitively different gets you bought out or deplatformed. Neither Brin nor Zuckerberg would stand a chance if they started today.
> A lot of jobs depend on ads, dont shit all over people
A lot of jobs depend on mass calling people at dinnertime with spam donation requests. That is not the reason not to challenge this business model.
I dont hear you challenging a business model. I hear you calling to tear down a system that you do not understand with naive statements.
Would you have protected those jobs instead?
I don't think celebrating the destruction of that institution makes me an extremist...
Where is wasted time? Do you find yourself mesmerized by ads and find yourself staring at them for hours :)?
Since 20,000 people seeing a 30s unskippable ad in Youtube amounts to 167 man hours used, maybe I should have said "hundreds of man hours wasted for a few measly dollars?".
And, life is not a quest toward perfect efficiency. Are you a human or machine? Having fun and enjoying life are not something to be scared of.
You sound like you have your day scheduled down to the minute?
A good reason to block ads. I don't enjoy ads.
Don't worry about the few people who use ad blockers, just be ready to follow new ad practices when they come.
In fact, If I find a website useful, and it doesn't push aggressive/tracking ads, I purposefully whitelist it. Complaining about people blocking ads on your website might not encourage them to whitelist it, though. Your best advocate is your own work.
In our modern world of user generated content and incredible hardware, any nerd could host even the most popular sites as a relatively cheap hobby. The only thing making them non-trivial is... all of the infrastructure for the ads, spying, and control. That and image/video hosting, which could be done through something like ipfs if it were integrated into browsers.
Hosting a forum that gets the traffic Reddit does at higher availability than Reddit does (Reddit returns error pages all the time) is absolutely trivial on modern hardware (except for images/videos, as I said). I've known several people that have unmetered connections/servers in datacenters as a hobby.
The entire history of every text post/comment ever on that site could fit on 2-3 SSDs now. The traffic is nothing. It doesn't take a lot to host a site that can fit on one computer with plenty of room to spare.
Sites relying primarily on user generated content really shouln't have a business side of things. Its just grift.
I don't lose sleep over that. Those companies ain't playing by the rules
there is no agreement
in legal terms, there's no offer consideration or acceptance
if they want to lock it behind a paywall with an actual contract where they forbid me from doing that, then fair enough
if it's offered anonymously then I will render the page using my equipment however I want
1. If someone doesn't want their content to be publicly available, they should not put it on a public web server.[0]
2. The question should not be whether ad blocking is ethical, but whether it is a moral obligation.[1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew
[1] https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-...
Why is digital attention morally a big problem but attention in real life not? I get it, the world would be prettier without ads, but you'd also be able to afford way less things. Maybe you want to live that life, but most of society over time has gravitated to this mode of selling goods and services.
Honestly, yes, I often do. I intentionally do not look at billboards when driving, I skip ad pages in my woodworking magazines, and I listen to local public radio without ads. In the rare times I watch live TV (wife watching football) I mute the TV during ads. Obviously it's impossible in every situation ever, but yes, I genuinely do try to avoid ads off the Internet, too. I find most of them really bothersome and offensive.
I kid i kid
Speak for yourself. Or at least don't presume to speak for me.
It is more accurate to say that without ads people would want way less things.
You think humans were just sitting around since the inception of the species thinking "Gosh, I wish I had a Swiffer™ sweeper to make cleaning more convenient"? No, some marketing asshole came up with the idea to convince people they needed a disposable mop so they could sell more mops. Multiply that by some trillions and you get the marketing industry.
Do you work for a living? How does the company you own or work for sell its products or services? How does it find customers to pay your salary?
Word of mouth is actually the results of effective branding. Advertising is typically spam and a waste of resources. Branding <> Advertising, though they can have overlap.
How does your company find people to sell its products to?
In the real world, there is no such option - if you, I don't know, vandalize a billboard, you are affecting everybody else, not to mention damaging someone else's property.
Apples and wheelbarrows.
Actually, yes.
Specifically the video screens that some gas pumps have. If it start's spamming me while I'm pumping gas, I literally cover my ears and walk about 10 feet away until I can't hear the ad anymore (you are not supposed to walk way when pumping gas, it's unsafe!).
I'll then mentally take note that this is a gas station to avoid and never shop there again.
One interesting thing I have noticed, ads that existed when I was a kid (billboards, magazine ads, commercials on an actual TV) don't bother me the way new tech ads do: on websites, gas pumps, and especially YouTube ads. If i'm watching Youtube on a laptop I will always mute the volume and focus on just the bottom right corner, waiting for "skip ad" to appear. I absolutely F*cking hate YouTube ads on a computer. If I'm watching YouTube on a large TV via Roku, they don't bother me nearly as much and sometimes I even watch them.
Maybe it's just things that used to be ad-free and now aren't....
I don't know how common it is elsewhere, but the stations I use that have at-the-pump advertising all have those features (and doing so on those pumps silences the audio at the pump).
[edited to mention the audio being silenced when the weather or traffic tab is selected]
Because we can fight against the former, whereas the latter is much more difficult. Despite this, we do consider both problems.
>most of society over time has gravitated to this mode of selling goods and services
More accurately it was the path of least resistance. Most individuals did not enjoy increasing number of commercials on TV and it shows in the alternatives.
There will be open-source AR projects to block those, too, one day
I think most people would just walk by without looking. You'r analogy would be that people walking past your store should be forced to look at your ads or not walk past your store.
It's often framed as if putting up ads is just a way of getting free money out of thin air, as you do when you say "without ads [...] you'd also be able to afford way less things". But that money is always coming from somewhere.
> Do you close your eyes walking around town any time you go by a store front, you see a roadside ad, a bench covered in ads, a taxi backseat, public toilets, any sports events and jerseys, TV, newspapers, magazines, radio... Are you morally obligated to get rid of those too? If you truly believe this, how do you function in society?
I truly believe it, I hope we'll one day be able to outlaw at least billboards and the like not related to any business storefront. But I try not to let it get to me too much, because as you rightly say, you can't really live that way..
The majority ads are garish, visual clutter that do not respect individuals, ruin our surroundings, and we’d be better off without them.
Case in point, magazines are more ads than content these days and I don't read them.
Actually yeah, sort of. I avoid looking at the advertising in my town as much as humanly possible.
> Are you morally obligated to get rid of those too?
Absolutely. I'm trying to organize support in my neighborhood in order to get them removed by law or something. Nobody should be subjected to this crap. There's even precedent for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
> If you truly believe this, how do you function in society?
I function pretty well, thank you. I'm gonna function even better when I'm free from this visual pollution.
> Why is digital attention morally a big problem but attention in real life not?
Who said it wasn't? You're the one assuming that.
> most of society over time has gravitated to this mode of selling goods and services
I couldn't care less what society "has gravitated" towards. I will not accept this and I will do everything in my power to change it.
When was functioning in society the point of displaying advertisements? Advertisements are a form of speech. Speech I have every right pay attention to or disregard as I see fit.
If someone wants to feed ads into that content, that's their right. If I want to change the way that content displays, that's my right.
I don't think they were saying there was a legal agreement, just a moral and social one.
It's like taking all the eggs from an honesty box outside someone's house - you didn't sign anything saying you wouldn't, but it's pretty clear you're in the wrong.
Yes the understanding isn't legally enforced, but socially that's what they're expecting.
Since you know that's what they're expecting (unless you're an idiot), the more moral thing to do is to respect that and not engage with them if you don't agree, rather than continuing to take while knowing that it's not what they wanted.
If you think the current state of online advertising as a business model is actively immoral, as I do, then I'd argue violating that expectation is at least morally neutral if not actually the moral thing to do.
Why not avoid the businesses instead?
I don't think these replies are the clever 'gotchas' that you think they are.
Websites with ads are funded by the expectation that some will click through, make a purchase, and justify the free distribution of those bits.
If you eat samples with no intent of making a purchase, you are subverting FoodCo's expectation that samples will lead to sales. You are making their business model unsustainable.
Why do you think the free taking of bits (which cost much less to serve, and is much less tangible) is less justified than the free taking of food samples? In both cases it subverts the business model expectations of the party offering the free stuff.
I think individuals are not obligated to support the business models of companies that give them free stuff in hopes it will make them money - so have no moral concerns with either case.
> By your own logic, ...
And didn't explain why OP is being hypocritical with their arguments. It seems you are misunderstanding their position.
I personally don't find ad-supported content objectionable. But it's still my browser running on my computer and I'll do what I like with it.
Well yeah that's how society works.
Unless you want written code for all social interactions? Most don't.
Is it that I'm only in an implicit social contract with the person serving the content I want? Then it would be morally fine for me to block ads as long as I trick advertisers into thinking I didn't- the host only cares about whether they get paid. And what about on YouTube or Instagram, where the advertiser is the host? Google expects me to view their ads, not just render them, and I'm definitely in a social contract with them.
Or is it that they are allowed to stake a moral claim on the content of my browser, but not on my attention? Then I'd be allowed to block full-screen ads that force me to find an X, or autoplaying ads with sound, as they are forcing me to give them something they have no right to. And if I had an attention deficit disorder or a shopping addiction, all ads would be in that category. Even without such things, every ad accesses my attention without my consent, even if it's just the attention required to ignore them.
Morals are not defined by capitulating to the wishes of others. If it was, the moral thing for advertisers to do would be to not try to show people ads who don’t wish to view them but do wish to consume content. Your argument here falls apart the second you consider any symmetry.
Furthermore, there are decades of history of advertisers being perfectly aware that most people would prefer not to see the ads, given a choice. They do not, in fact, expect people to just watch the ads. As evidence of this fact, they have come up with dozens and dozens of legal and technical mechanisms to force people to view their ads despite their preferences.
Respecting, not capitulating.
> If it was, the moral thing for advertisers to do would be to not try to show people ads who don’t wish to view them but do wish to consume content.
No, if the website and user don't have a common understanding, then both can go separate ways.
> perfectly aware that most people would prefer not to see the ads, given a choice
And I'd prefer not to pay the bill in a restaurant, but that's not the expectation.
> they have come up with dozens and dozens of legal and technical mechanisms to force people to view their ads
And restaurants come up with legal and technical mechanisms to make me pay the bill.
Restaurants are a false analogy. There is an explicit agreement known in advance by both parties, a legal contract with a restaurant when you order, and leaving without paying is a crime. There is no such expectation with ads.
This is cringey and goofy. It’s not a moral issue, you’re really stretching. Even if it was a moral issue, the global known public expectation of ads is that they’re sometimes tolerated and on the whole not preferred. You’re choosing to prioritize the viewpoint of advertisers over respecting the wishes of the public, while if you look at it from the public’s perspective, ads have never been the “moral” choice.
Your argument, of course, is also wearing blinders to the many ways that ads can be actually immoral, for example as a soft bait-and-switch, by offering one thing to entice while delivering something else with an agenda, and the ways ads are often directly immoral by using misleading or untrue information, selling goods and services that are overall harmful to the public, from excessive sugar to payday loans to expensive pharmaceuticals to politics.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that the first request is a gimme. As soon as you see that there are ads being blocked, however, the moral thing to do would be to close the browser and go elsewhere.
> As soon as you see that there are ads being blocked, however, the moral thing to do would be to close the browser and go elsewhere.
False, because that’s not the actual public expectation today. The common expectation that would define what is moral in this situation is that blocking is reasonable because ads are intrusive and annoying and often get in the way of the reason I’m on the site. I’d be fine with saying it’s “nice” and it’s “supporting” the site to not block the ad, but hard disagree that blocking is immoral, that’s just hyperbole.
That’s not really the advertiser’s wish either, they don’t want the result to be less traffic, they just want you to watch the ad. So your suggestion isn’t actually respecting their wishes.
I think they are - it's moral to respect other people's reasonable wishes, or not interact with them if you're not able to respect them.
If I know someone expects that I'll bring a bottle of wine to their party, I should either do that, or I should decline to come to the party. If I know that's what they were expecting and I turn up empty handed and eat all their party food then I'm just a bad person even if no laws were broken.
'Nah nah nah no laws broken, agreement was never written down, no money changed hands' isn't a kind way to interact with people.
No I wouldn't agree with that. I think it's moral to show adverts, but not to be subversive about it, and I think it's moral to offer a way to turn them off such as paid plans, which I often use.
Err that's exactly what my comment was about. I was sharing my opinion on what I think is moral. If you don't want to hear my opinion on it why are you reading the thread?
I'm not threatening to codify this into law and enforce it on others if that's what you were worried about lol!
The ultimate purpose of ads is getting money from us, why can't we have a say about how the request is presented to us? Ads are not a privilege or a right, they're beggars posted at every corner of the Internet.
Yeah by not visiting sites with bad adverts.
By not consuming intrusive ads, and by not buying products promoted with unethical practices.
You can't possibly defend the current state of private spying and surveillance, it's dystopian. The data collected is sold (directly or indirectly) to bad actors, and is ripe for abuse. You can't just say "deal with it or GTFO", ad blocking is the only recourse we as consumers have to voice our opinion.
It's not - you can prefer paid services over advertising-supported services. Buy a physical magazine rather than a digital subscription. Etc.
But a website could cover the marginal cost of serving me content with simple image adverts, sponsored content, donation mechanism, subscription or otherwise. They may decide that having X% of viewers block ads is a ‘cost of business’ and is worth it to increase viewership.
Modelling the situation as ‘honest’ to accept ads and ‘dishonest’ to block them may undermine the chosen business model of the site, and not visiting again models the monetisation strategy as static, which it is not.
HN lets you see who wrote a comment - it says above each one.
> If that’s not putting moral and social burden onto tracking blockers, I don’t know what is.
I mean you don't have a burden to visit their website if you don't want to. If it was a government organisation then yes.
But they don't, they let me in despite me being very clear that I am entering on the condition that they don't track me, so here we are. They don't get to pull the surprised-face card when I then proceed to not let them track me.
Adjacent to that, I think a "I'm not going to display your ads" or bluntly "don't show me ads" header would make perfect sense and yet I'm quite sure that webmasters would treat it the exact same way that they've treated do-not-track.
"Akshually there's no law saying I need to behave morally" feels like an adroit sidestepping of the problems here.
And if we really want to speak about morals there is an unacknowledged moral issue here in that most websites using ads are hooked up to someone else's ad network and do not vet them for accuracy or safety. The website owner has seemingly no responsibility for the portal they opened to shove someone else's content into my face.
Until such time I can demand payment for damages when that negligently opened portal serves the latest zero day or scams my family or employees and tracks me all over the web while violating my privacy, I am forced to conclude the average webmaster wants the benefit without the responsibility. And with that, the blocker stays on, with a clear conscience and an eye to safety. Your business model that demands I sacrifice safety and privacy so you can make a few pennies is not my fucking problem.
First party ads are an entire different issue and do not have any of these concerns. They are also very rare.
Tip to ad companies, don't turn the displays 90 degrees, they are meant to be used in landscape mode for a reason...
Please define these morals explicitly so we know what it is we have to do instead of just berating people for arbitrary violations.
Or more aptly, switching and/or muting the tab when an ad comes on a Twitch stream.
The parts I choose not to download are designed to psychologically manipulate me into buying something I likely don't want, they run code on my system I don't care for them to run, and they grab what data they can in order to profile me. I don't feel like I'm the one that should be feeling shame here.
If the advertising companies showed any kind of restraint and respect, maybe I'd feel differently. From what I've seen, it's been getting progressively worse since the "punch the monkey" days of the web.
If the person or entity hosting the content can't support the creation and hosting of their website without trying to manipulate me and track me and without opening my system up to potential malware, then good riddance, I guess. If all they did was show ads as text or static images without any of the tracking nonsense (basically the old print magazine or newspaper model), then I wouldn't care that much. But they don't, so I do.
Nope. Find another business model or go bankrupt. If you send me ads, I'll delete them. No exceptions. I don't have to justify myself either, "I don't want to see ads" is more than a good enough reason.
If there was a moral ad network, I might take pause, but the industry has leaned into the rottenness and embraced creepy surveillance and thought manipulation.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Now that we have a coordinated oligopoly on content distribution "if you do not like it do not use it" does not work anymore. Today, if someone wants to say something using the web they will see that content monetized via algorithmics and attention grabbing ads.
I feel no moral constraints on pushing back. My 2c.
That's not hypocrisy, at least not with only the facts presented. It would only be hypocrisy if they actively speak out against other websites that include ads (or against people that use adblockers on their website).
> No normal person would think to put a hood on their head to still go.
That's actually a pretty rational decision if you need to use the bank but don't want to be on camera.
But the problem isn't the presence of ads. It's that the ads are served by advertising networks, that track users across multiple websites and build profiles of users.
And that the original websites have very little control over the content of the ads, which may be irrelevant or contain malware.
The ads are often animated images, sometimes with sound, which are distracting.
The ads are often deceptive ("Your computer is infected. Install this program now!") or clickbait.
Some sites don't distinguish the ads from the content, which makes it confusing.
If you want a blast from the past, disable the popup blocker on your web browser and see how many sites still fill your screen with intrusive popups and notifications.
Also, people have used video recordings of live television to skip commercials. Some devices even have a commercial skip function. Or people just mute the television while commercials are playing. If this is acceptable, then why not block ads on websites?
The makers of my favorite shows have already been paid. My favorite small blog has not.
The commercial television network that broadcasts the shows is paid by commercials.
And TV networks don't like commercial skipping, e.g. https://www.techdirt.com/2012/05/25/tv-networks-file-legal-c...
That said, I do disagree with you. The fact of the matter is that most content on the web is monetized by ads. Applying your argument would effectively limit you to a very small fraction of the web.
Content providers choose advertising as a business model because it's easy to integrate and, given enough traffic, pays well. If they would prioritize user experience and protecting their users' privacy, they would choose different, and perhaps less profitable and more difficult to integrate, revenue streams.
Besides, ad blockers don't only serve the purpose of blocking advertising, but tracking scripts in general. Web analytics and user monitoring scripts that track the user to feed data brokers and the shady multi-billion dollar market that exists because of it, is particularly evil.
Also, I'll choose how I want to consume the content that is provided on the open internet, control the bytes that I download and the programs that are allowed to run on _my machine_. If the content provider absolutely wants to get paid for their content, they're free to put up a paywall and block access altogether.
If content providers have the freedom to choose how to monetize, then I have the freedom to choose how to consume.
For internet content, the people who create the content I want and the people adding the advertisements and profiting from them are rarely the same. For physical content, it's often a necessary evil due to ethical (non-advertising) products being unable to compete effectively with unethical ones.
I entered no such agreement. I asked your server for some data and it gave it to me. What happens beyond that is up to me. I might be using lynx, for all you know, or have javascript or even image rendering off for reasons of resources or bandwidth. Are those classes of user also freeloaders?
But in the interest of transparency, how about I set a header, let's call it "WontRenderAds" and tell you ahead of time, then you can decide whether to even serve the page. That sound fair? I'd be perfectly happy to do it.
I don't use websites with ads! I use just the websites, without the ads.
> Otherwise you're breaking the agreement that the people hosting what you want to use have to make a living.
They are breaking the agreement of not filling proper content with ad junk. You know, the agreement everybody in society is implicitly part of because I believe it's the right thing to do?
> You think the people that created what you want to use are bad people, infringing on your rights, why would you still use their stuff?
That's like saying if someone published a poem with an ad slogan on the last line, I'm not supposed to skip it, because why am I using their poem without the ads.
> how we so easily deny other developers of creating free to use tools just because we think we have some moral higher ground.
Developers should definitely create free tools (to modify and redistribute, as well as to use). But they should not spoil them with ads.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1984/01/22/t...
> (1984) "Several Hollywood studios sued Sony, a manufacturer of VCRs, seeking money damages and an injunction against sales. The studios charged that Sony was responsible for copyright infringements. A lower court held that there was no infringement in recording material broadcast over public airwaves. An appeals court reversed, holding Sony liable for "contributory infringement." The Supreme Court has reversed that, saying that Sony is not liable because Congress has not spoken clearly about this practice."
See also, this 2012 discussion of that case:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-c...
There were even technologies introduced to automate the process, and IIRC, some were able to automatically skip over the advertisements when auto-taping the shows (1991):
https://buffalonews.com/news/vcr-plus-will-make-taping-shows...
In general, I think most people would agree that your right ends when my begin. The moment I send the request and the wheels start spinning to get all the information in, I should be able to decide whether or not something is filtered out. Why do some developers ( and frankly, I do not even think its developers -- its their management ) feel entitled to being able to serve whatever they want on my machine?
What if I just one this one tiny little snippet here?
Because black hat SEO has made it very hard to find the non-ad filled stuff.
They’re being shown on my computer, which I control, so of course I make changes to it that enhance the experience for me. If you don’t want me to have the ability to do that, it is unwise to send me the content in the first place. I haven’t agreed to look at ads; the website owners put the content in a public place.
I wish this was a tenable solution as if this were practical it’s exactly what I’d do. As it stands I can’t even use basic web search without ads, or even my banks online banking service!
Even services which I pay for are increasingly getting greedy and showing ads, which is unacceptable.
I do find advertising offensive, but I’m not fundamentally opposed to the concept. In reality though online ads are heavily abused by almost company/individual and I will opt to control my network traffic as I see fit.
Also, by blocking ads and still consuming the content you signal to the content owner/producer that you do in fact value the content. The subtext is that they might have better options to monetize your visit, perhaps through a better layout and ad experience.
IMO the average content publisher would not want a purely binary experience of "browse my ad ridden cotent, or avoid my site altogether". What they want is a monetization strategy that retains enough viewers to be viable. As viewers/readers, we only have so many practical feedback options to tell them what is acceptable or what is not.
Also, you are acting like all web browsing is by choice and ignoring the network effect that essentially forces people to use certain sites to participate in the society that they belong to.
The ads are part of the their monetization, By this logic I'm not fulfilling my social contract by not diligently watching the ads?
The reality of advertising on the web is something you need to account for when building your site and content around an ad based payment model.
There is a burger place.
The burger place offers free burgers.
They are able to do this because Big Lettuce pays the burger place to put lettuce in their burger.
When I go and get a burger from the free burger place, what I do is I remove the lettuce from my burger. I just don’t like it.
I made no agreement with the burger place to eat lettuce.
They assume I will. They try to convince me to. They might even try to make the lettuce hard to remove from the burger.
But what has not happened, unlike you are implying, is an agreement that I will consume the lettuce.
I’m not going to stop going to the free burger place. I really like free burgers. And I won’t stop removing lettuce from my burger either. I deeply dislike lettuce.
So, instead of telling me to stop going to the free burger shop because I like removing lettuce, how about you tell the shop to stop giving away free lettuce?
If people really like their burgers, they will pay for them.
If their burgers aren’t really that good and people consume them just because they’re free, maybe the burger place should go out of business.
Maybe it is too late?
As I said before, in your hypothetical you would be undermining a business model that is letting a lot of people eat burgers for free, and that would be selfishly making the world worse.
Here’s something that sprang to mind.
A slaver to his slave: Your attempts at achieving freedom are undermining a business model that is letting a lot of people enjoy cheap clothing, and that would be selfishly making the world worse.
What’s your thoughts on that one? Genuinely curious.
The way I see it, I’m not “making the world worse”. Waving away the can of worms opened by the notion of “making the world better/worse”, I genuinely cannot understand how refusing to consume something makes me selfish.
I’m not selfish for removing lettuce from my burger and I’m not selfish for removing ads. The problem is not with me. The problem is with the business model.
People not liking something drives innovation. Instead of doubling down on something that is not working and telling people “stop being a bad person and consume the ad” perhaps the business should find an alternative way of monetising.
This ignores harm of slavery to the slave, but in both the online ads case and your burger hypothetical there are no analogs to the slave.
> I genuinely cannot understand how refusing to consume something makes me selfish.
The argument is pretty straightforward. In your hypothetical, hunger has been mostly solved: everyone can eat as many burgers as they want. But this solution is fragile, and rests on people consuming the lettuce that comes with the burgers. By choosing to remove your lettuce, you increase the risk that this falls apart and we'll be back to the status quo where some people are hungry, and others spend a substantial portion of their income on food.
(I still think this is a silly hypothetical)
But that’s just me. Other people are harmed way more! Maybe you can wave away my ad inducted anxiety but can you wave away people with epilepsy? Can you wave away people with ADHD? Can you wave away people with accessibility needs? Can you wave away people unwillingly outed as lgbt by the ads they are served? Can you wave away predatory ads? Can you wave away “making the world worse” through ad enabled miss information?
As for lettuce I am allergic to it. I will literally die if I don’t remove it.
Your move.
If you're allergic to lettuce, it's very risky to eat a burger that has previously been contaminated by lettuce. Perhaps consider eating anything else?
I think the ad situation is much more complex than your hypothetical, and blocking ads for accessibility reasons is fine. But calls for everyone to block ads, even if they aren't "allergic", are calls for an end to free ad-supported things online, which includes the website we're currently using.
That lettuce company is making revenue somehow, or it will go out of business anyways. In which case the world ends up in exactly the same spot.
So lets make the analogy closer to real life - the lettuce company funds the burger making because everyone MUST eat a salad at least one a day, using lettuce they have paid for with real money. This company wants it to be their lettuce. So they fund the burgers, and make up for it by charging more for their lettuce.
You see my point? Some small subset of folks might end up getting a free burger, but it's at the cost of many other purchasers choosing to buy lettuce with a higher markup.
The lettuce company (ad companies) aren't some fucking fairy tale good guy handing out free stuff - they're very carefully adjusting the habits of shoppers to make MORE money. They are not good - the world is not less good by avoiding them.
Given all that, they put effort into requiring that their lettuce makes its way to my mouth with a free burger. Fine, I'll pay for the burger: Big Lettuce is still adamant about getting their tracking lettuce in my body. One has to go to great lengths to find a burger place that doesn't have a deal with such a lettuce-provider. Whatever, I'll just take the stupid lettuce off.
(I agree, it's a weird analogy.)
Anyway, the stakes are different with free food vs. free content, so to the point that one is selfishly undermining the ability for others to get content for free: that decision is not what makes the world worse. If the content is truly worth seeing, it's likely that someone will be inspired to make it as accessible as possible[0], regardless of the lack of potential profit, and other content will become less available. (Maybe I'll sing a different tune when Khan Academy is overrun with ads.)
Also, don't forget that big lettuce is not subsidizing the burgers out of the goodness of their hearts - they are doing so because they believe it will allow them to capture more wealth overall. Wealth that people could have used to pay for food.
* another monetisation scheme for your website, or
* a different line of business than a website.
The race-to-the-bottom that is ad-supported websites is nothing more than a massive failure of imagination; pure laziness; a grift of the first magnitude.
[1] Admittedly it could be the case, the people using ad blockers could be a very special group of people that would also see very special ads and buy very special products. But even then, the ad budget in the products I buy has to go somewhere. Therefore I would assume that at worst there will be some distortion in the prices of ads, how ad budgets are allocated and so on when I am blocking ads but no complete freeloading on the backs of others.
If I were hyporcritical enough to run an ad-supported site, I would hope that my site visitors would do the same thing to me.
We live in a world where THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE. Not withstanding the negative environmental, social and psychological effects that advertising can have .. I simply don't care to live in a world where I'm sold products and services 24/7.
"Then pay for the content!" .. fully subscribing to every publication I read isn't viable; financially or practically.
How is anyone expected to navigate a world where there is no alternative?
More importantly, if we follow "don't use websites with ads" logic, we could also logically end up with "don't live here if you don't like the politics".
The way the world is shaped, should be a conversation .. I categorically refuse to put up with a world view that's been put upon me by a bunch companies I had no part in choosing or guiding.
No need to abstain from anything, we have the technology to fix the websites instead. It's called uBlock Origin.
Here's the deal: websites are rendering and running on our computers, and we alone decide what code runs and what elements show up on screen. If you don't like it, then don't send out web pages for free to any user agent that requests one. All you have to do is return 402 Payment Required.
> you're breaking the agreement that the people hosting what you want to use have to make a living
I don't remember "agreeing" to anything.
> If you know there's a security camera at the bank branch and you don't want to be recorded, you don't go to the bank branch, no normal person would think to put a hood on their head to still go.
Yeah, just opt out of society. Every single bank everywhere has cameras so if you don't like to be tracked just don't go to banks at all.
You gotta be kidding me.
If you don't want me to block ads - pick a different model. Preferably one where I'm a customer, and you're catering to my needs instead of selling me off to the highest bidder.
Second controversial opinion: Ads should be banned entirely, legislatively, because the industry is a breeding ground of misaligned incentives, data abuse, corruption, and generally scummy behavior. Will that remove a lot of free services? Sure - I don't care. I think the net will be a win.
Third controversial opinion - your "controversial opinion" leads to a dystopia where people are forced to view ads everywhere. They are manipulated non stop for the benefit of someone else. I don't just think you're wrong - I think you're malicious.
But my ad blocker's primary purpose is to keep me safe and sane when I stray from my regularly-visited sites. I often do this while checking references at Wikipedia. I have no obligation to feed those sites ad revenue, and they have no right to run/download unwanted content on my system.
Sure as soon as they stop capturing users and content that would have otherwise been on ad-free sites.
> Otherwise you're breaking the agreement that the people hosting what you want to use have to make a living.
There is no agreement. Someone making a living off it is one of the worst reasons to keep a shitty thing around.
> If you consider ads to be psychological assault or other characterizations like this that I've heard before in this forum, stop going to those websites. You think the people that created what you want to use are bad people, infringing on your rights, why would you still use their stuff?
See the first point. Ad-supported websites still affect you even if you don't use the because they compete with and thus influence what other options are available.
They want to deny the control of some parts of the system to the user, and that as much as possible.
The worst case is video game consoles. Here, it is related to the "web", namely via ultra-huge complexity and size of web engines (with their SDK) with obfuscation of script code.
$15 solution. I'm sure HN readers can tackle this.
Wonder how anybody even uses the internet with the horrible state of online advertising today.
> Using a VPN is a responsible, respectful, and safe way to access your Pi-hole's capabilities remotely. Setting up a DNS server has become a simple task with Pi-hole's automated installer, which has resulted in many people knowingly--or unknowingly--creating an open resolver, which aids in DNS Amplification Attacks.
> We do not encourage open resolvers but there are always people wanting access to their ad-blocking capabilities outside of their home network, whether it's on their cellular network or on an unsecured wireless network. This article aims to provide a step-by-step walk-through on setting up a server running Pi-hole and OpenVPN so you can connect to your Pi-hole's DNS from anywhere. This guide should work for a private server installed on your private network, but it will also work for cloud servers, such as those created on Digital Ocean.
... and the wireguard approach: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/wireguard/overview/
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking
It seems to work quite well— I think my only complain is that sponsored links on Google searches show up but then blackhole when clicked. This is a negative user experience because by the time I've seen it, I sometimes find it relevant and want to go there.
Anyway,
1. PIs have been oddly hard to get lately. 2. Threat has evolved significantly since 2017 ( pihole by itself is just a portion of a network hygiene now )
And #2 this is the important part. The article talks about almost the entire foundation of pihole ( and I personally think it is a great tool ):
A list could be disrupted for reasons that have little to do with your adblocking needs.
The only thing I still need chromium for is google meet :/ (and huddles in slack)
I suggest you give it a try again!
...just found the additional separation mentally helpful too in switching tabs.
If the adblocking in chrome is broken (manifest3 sigh) then will have to move.
Oh and one more thing: there's an option to "share" video from the YT app or YT webpage to AdGuard. This is probably the only possible way to get rid of ads when you're using the YouTube app.
Also, what is a good media size threshold to block? Zero seems to somehow let through things i don't want and block things I do. Really i just want to block gifs and videos. Very distracting.
What DNS adblockers like PiHole see is only a request for the domain (example.com), they can't see whether it is http or https nor can they see /ads.js or the rest of the path, port, query parameters, etc. They may not even see the second attempt at loading the domain (the /ads.js request) because the browser and the OS have probably cached the request.
uBlock Origin and other adblockers can see the whole request and modify it[1]. They can see whether it is http or https (that's how https everywhere knows what to redirect and where) and they can see whether you are loading /video or /ads.js and if they see /ads.js they can tell the browser to not load that.
[1] Google is going to remove the "modify" part of functionality in manifest v3 citing privacy and security concerns (while ironically keeping the "see" part) in an attempt to kill or limit the functionality of adblockers. Since YouTube uses an ever changing list of domains for serving videos and ads this change will effectively unblock ads in YouTube because adblockers can only keep a static list of what to block and when instead of doing it dynamically, and said static list can only be updated (as far as I know) by pushing a new version of the extension to the store, severely limiting the frequency of updates, making it impossible to keep up with the frequent changes in YouTube.
How feasible is it to have my vpn gateway self cert and proxy everything and do the work there?
its like 2014-> never happened.
Does anyone know how I can block a website like Facebook on a Mac with whatever new tech they've rolled out? I know Self Control does it, so there's definitely a way.
https://superuser.com/questions/1657925/some-websites-bypass...
whois to find all their IPs range and block all these? They change once in a while but not every day.
See here for the whois command:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11164672/list-of-ip-spac...
FWIW I just reject any outgoing attempt to these range from my firewall using a file I version and update once in a while.
EDIT: I've also got a PiHole running and I'm pretty sure it's also blocking a huge lot of FB related ad domains. I could automate the whois query and check if it's different from the current list I'm using but I don't bother (so far).
What stops advertisers form going through the hassle is the minority of users who use ad-blocking and even those can be easily detected and annoyed with warning pop-ups.
But make no mistake about it, when website owners decide you need to see their ads because their existence depends on it, you most definitely will.
Why would I visit an advertisers web site? :)
Ads inline with content are usually "sponsorships". I have no issue with ads where it's the case that a publisher has a relationship with a product. And this isn't what ad blocking seeks to address.
They would be harder to block. But it is no challenge really for a browser extension. But again - such "sponsorship ads" don't bother me in the least.
Personally I use noscript and other ways to protect myself against malware, so I'm only interested in blocking the major ad companies. Which I could do happily for months using any stale old list.
When they are sued, take the “offending” sites out of the list of blocked sites and post another list of “sites we had to remove because of DMCA”.
Then add functionality “import list from text file”.
And let Barbara Streisand take care of the rest.
Edit: I see the original author did exactly this.
What happens if said files are stored in Y jurisdiction, and not with a service, or cloud provider located in something US related. A fine example would be a privacy centric cloud in Sweden such as Bahnhof. Doesn't this (small) part of the war on advertising simply disappear?
But anyone here use their Ad-blocker? Why I should consider it over uBlock Origin?
I use Chrome only for work-related stuff and for compatibility tests (I don't want to contribute turning Chrome into another IE^2). I use uBlock Origin with Chromium-based browsers.
But if you were breaking the law, and you were met with enforcement, having it in an immutable blockchain won't help you.
Having said that my hosts file gets a new entry .
0.0.0.0 funclam.com
I mean you can say it's not a good reason but uhh FB makes about $40 billion in a quarter so even imagining a world where somehow 1 billion users pay that, they wouldn't, it would have to be $160/yr.
(Regarding your link: I would just firewall India off)
A website chooses to serve ads. You don't like it? Don't ever go (back?) to that website again, I'm sure there's some blacklist extensions out there.
Just because you don't like ads or tracking (neither illegal) you don't have the right to cost that website money (bandwidth, etc.) without anything in exchange.
Actually it's good that some sites are ad-funded. E.g. news sites. Ideally that kind of site would offer a paid, ad-free, tracking-free option for people with cushy jobs like the HN crowd. But Mr. and Ms. Can't Make Ends Meet can still access the news in exchange of seeing some (or a lot of) ads here and there.
At the very least, if there's an ad-funded website you like and visit frequently then disable ad blocking for them.
Why does this need to be a “right”? Let’s assume I allow advertisements but I ignore them completely. Am I likewise costing that website money without anything in exchange?
What if I hated advertisements so much that I had someone place post-it notes on my screen so the banners were not visible, ensuring that at no point in time my attention would given to the ad spaces - would that be unethical?
Ad impressions is what counts, you can place as many post-it notes as you want.
Genuine question,seriously, not an attack, is it you who decides this for everyone or is this a personal decision kind of thing ?
> ad blocking is unethical.
If we are solely going by personal ethics then almost all big ad-tech is unethical in it's implementation, tracking, carbon footprint, extensive profiling with no opt-out.
Even if you adhere to your idea of not going back if it doesn't suit you the damage is already done privacy-wise.
You're assuming they don't want the general public accessing the website, perhaps they do and would also like the revenue that comes with the ad's served on the site, because that is, broadly speaking, how the ad funded model works.
I personally think ads are a terrible model but a paywall is an entirely different business model with different considerations.
This includes links to tracker filled javascripts and images hosted on ad servers.
Rather than gimping the browser stack for everyone, websites should use the tech they already have. Like rendering ads directly into the page contents.
It is a fascinating concept. If I put a blog up, I have a right to demand that people pay me one way or the other. But then as a person that visits that site, that person has no right to say nope. Sold. Pay me about $3.50 for this nugget.
<You don't like it? Don't ever go (back?) to that website again, I'm sure there's some blacklist extensions out there.
It is more and more what I do. If the paywall gets too obtrusive, I don't even try to spend time fiddling too much ( I mostly browse with noscript on by default these days).
edit: removed tangent about corps and moved pay me bit to the front to make a point
When ads are blocked the protocol is working exactly as designed. If you don’t like me blocking your ads, you should block me. When I encounter sites that block adblock users, I simply write them off and never return. If you don’t block me? Clearly you see the ads as optional too.
Remember that just like I don’t have to make a request to a server, that server doesn’t have to respond to my requests.
It is as ethical as:
1. politely declining a marketing leaflet
2. switching to a different TV channel when there is a commercial
3. looking away from the newspaper ads or roadside billboards
etc.
Hilarious. They should be glad I'm running uBlock Origin and not AdNauseam.