furyferret

What you're describing is definitely a squash.

How secure something is doesn't only depends on itself but also on its environment. There's a vulnerability known by some which isn't going to be fixed. The moment this vulnerability was disclosed to the FBI, the iPhone became effectively less secure.

More generally, any given version of a piece of software if becoming less and less secure with time, because vulnerabilities are found, although it's the same piece of software.

Re-inventing the wheel in 17 lines of code is called programming.

Unfortunately, this gist is based on the same fallacy that the one it opposes is based on: the idea that visiting sites and consuming their content is a primary need for visitors.

The so-called "other ways of funding" are paywalls. If every blog, YouTube videos, online newspaper, start-up, etc, were behind a paywall, people would just nope out because it wouldn't not worth it, at all. Disabling ads wouldn't result in other ways of funding, it would result in people not working on creating content because they wouldn't be able to make a business out of it.

On the other hand, and for the same reason, content creator shouldn't complain that people block their ads. We don't need to visit your site, we don't need your content, it's a bonus. We don't care whether you make money or not. You chose not to make a paywall (and that's probably a good idea since nobody would pay) and hand over your content for free bundled with ads. We can technically cut out the ads. If you don't want us to do so, make them so that their annoyance isn't worth the effort of cutting them out.

EasyList[1] already contains various per-site adblocking based on CSS selectors, with several packages for different languages and site type. I think the community is big enough and motivated enough to manually lists any ads on most websites.

Also first-party advertising is complicated because it prevents the advertising company from publishing the ads it wants, since the ad would be delivered by the site itself. While this is the business model of Google and Facebook, most sites don't have the analytics power to publish the most relevant ads to their users.

[1] https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/

We need whitelists. I'm using uBlocko to block all third-party requests and manually whitelist requests vital for the site such as those who load the CSS from a CDN. Many sites use their own CDN, with the domain name finishing in .net instead of .com or with whateverwebsite-cdn.com.

I believe a convenient web browsing experience is possible with about 5% of third-party requests granted. We need whitelists, not blacklists.

It's just web developers who lived in a world where front-end layout was supposed to be hard and who distill complexity out of four or five trivial CSS properties to convince themselves that all of the hours they lost aligning divs with floats or bootstrap weren't pointless, and that the new way must be as complicated.

Vulnerabilities don't "magically appear". They're there from the beginning and the goal of the game is to find them and fix them before the bad guys find them and exploit them.

If you use a software which isn't maintained, it's insecure not because of its vulnerabilities, but because of its environment, which is ready to attack the vulnerabilities. From a general point of view, it's not risky to use a software from 2005. It's just risky to use it in 2015.

Try installing a Flash version from 2005 and open a web browser with it in 2015. That's basically killing your computer, and yet we were all using this Flash version in 2005 without a problem (or almost).