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Comment by stuartd | Hacker News Reader

A bash script to set a config value…?

I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away.

Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.

I’ll still block them, though.

[0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)

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> Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.

This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.

The actual change-commands aren't actually that much longer than its worrisome instructions telling you to download unpredictable arbitrary data from an internet URL and blindly execute it.

"Concerned about your privacy? Don't worry, just pipe this code right to your shell"

Setting the flag in about:config is simple enough, I don't understand why anyone would do anything else. Who's seeing this page who is also unable to make an about:config change?

A picture-based guide seems both safer and more effective. e.g. many Firefox users run Windows, where curl | sh doesn't even work - clicking on the right buttons also requires less technical expertise.

You don't even have to go to about:config - it's got a checkbox on the user settings page!

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