by GraemeL on 2/28/20, 3:18 PM with 234 comments
by Blackthorn on 2/28/20, 9:09 PM
Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time!
I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice.
I paid $10/mo or $20/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again.
If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.
All of this could be avoided if they just made the ads less shitty. Not showing up in the middle of navigation bars. Not being bigger than the surrounding content, so it completely stretches it and ruin's the site layout. Not having a completely clashing background color to the site. All extremely simple stuff.
by SignalsFromBob on 2/28/20, 8:12 PM
Could you imagine visiting a web site only to have it tell you to disable your virus blocker to view the web page? Yet, web sites make the same requests of your "ad blocker" even though the end result is the same. They want you to disable your security protections and risk infection to view a web page.[1]
Sadly, I believe we've already lost this battle and are worse off for it.
1. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-malware-...
by mrspeaker on 2/28/20, 5:20 PM
My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.
Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!
by jslabovitz on 2/28/20, 5:38 PM
> The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created.
GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN, wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along until later.)
Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there, in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.
by bubblethink on 2/28/20, 6:22 PM
by izzydata on 2/28/20, 5:56 PM
by einpoklum on 2/29/20, 12:39 AM
Personally, seeing ads in public spaces feels just like in totalitarian countries you would see large portraits of the supreme leader or government propaganda. Somehow this is legitimized because they're private corporations. Not in my book.
More power to ad blocker authors, and a particular shoutout to:
* Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin fame: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/
* The EFF, for blocking trackers and other 3rd party nasties with Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
by throwaway55554 on 2/28/20, 6:20 PM
It's mostly just not worth the effort any more unless you have an ad blocker in some form.
by mrlala on 2/28/20, 8:17 PM
I am honestly baffled sometimes how this all works... In my 30+ years of internet usage in one form or another I have rarely, rarely, rarely ever clicked on a freakin ad. Yes, I've generally had them blocked for the most part. But when they aren't blocked, I see what the content is and why would I even want to click on one!
Color me confused who is keeping the web running by clicking on ads.
by jsjddbbwj on 2/28/20, 5:08 PM
by paulie_a on 2/28/20, 5:48 PM
by wespiser_2018 on 2/28/20, 9:03 PM
They propose a perceptual ad-blocking scheme where ads are always rendered in a DOM, but elements only displayed to the if they are not "ad like". This is makes it much easier to evade ad-block detectors, since your browser appears as if it does not have an ad-blocker! https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-blocki...
by kurehajime on 2/28/20, 11:16 PM
---
A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages
Alan C. Kay
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972
https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/kay72.html
>A combination of this "carry anywhere" device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) or the world to the home. One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising!
by droithomme on 2/28/20, 9:46 PM
by ck2 on 2/28/20, 9:44 PM
Then images and javascript were eventually allowed and it was all downhill from there. Now it's a race to the bottom of how many hundreds of external objects and tracking that can be added to a page as well as malware since so many badly behaving ads slip right through any attempt at automated bans.
by superkuh on 2/28/20, 7:32 PM
by m3047 on 2/28/20, 7:19 PM
This is already a concern in the DNS world, with Response Policy Zones (RPZ) on one hand for DNS-based control (https://dnsrpz.info/) and DNS Over HTTP(S) (a.k.a. DoH) on the other.
by 8bitsrule on 2/28/20, 10:16 PM
by einpoklum on 2/29/20, 12:43 AM
Also - don't get your apps on Google or Apple's app stores! Use APKMirror, APK pure, etc. Some of these even have app-store-like apps to use instead of Google's, that don't need a Google account.
Also, there's at least one app "store" app specializing in FOSS purely: https://f-droid.org/en/
by jakub_g on 2/28/20, 8:15 PM
It changed the landscape on Android in my opinion: it was the first browser that was as good as Chrome (fast, same look & feel -- being a fork of Chromium -- plus regularly updated and having strong, credible technical team behind it) but also having ad blocking built-in and other additional privacy measures. Soon Opera added ad blocking as well, and other browsers (except Chrome) followed.
by Causality1 on 2/29/20, 5:30 AM
by mwsfc on 2/28/20, 5:32 PM
by kristianc on 2/28/20, 9:23 PM
I often wonder if people realize that they’re being that person.
by mariushn on 2/28/20, 8:49 PM
by aSplash0fDerp on 2/28/20, 6:16 PM
What do you estimate the cost is annually for all of the wasted bandwith (especially mobile data) on predatory marketing?
by monksy on 2/28/20, 7:25 PM
by notRobot on 2/28/20, 5:23 PM
Go back to contextual static-image ads, folks.
by ddevault on 2/28/20, 10:21 PM
2. Open network panel
3. Google Analytics
4. Close tabs
It's disgusting how so many so-called privacy advocates can't even get this right even when talking about privacy.
by jiveturkey on 2/28/20, 7:03 PM
typo. He means "Safari on iOS". Safari on desktop had normal extension-based ad blocking since day 1. Then the content blocking API came to iOS then later the same API in macOS.
> • No debugging tools
perhaps in 2015 -- I wouldn't know -- but today it's certainly debuggable with the help of a macOS host. Much like remote gdb.
> The maximum number of rules limitation is a huge problem,
not a problem at all. rules limitation is per filter but each adblocker can install multiple filters. I suppose the rules limitation is for latency reasons, in case of a poorly designed blocker.
> It was disproportionately hard to maintain a completely different filter list for Safari alone.
Completely false. filters are regex's. It's trivial to use the same source list with whatever filter technology.
I guess because this article is content marketing, and not academic research, these errors (and omissions) are ok. But I do wish, that given the title, the author had bothered to mention that Bing inserts ads that are not blockable via simple URL filters. adblock+ currently doesn't handle them and I believe they are not handle-able at all via the Safari content filter API. By extension => ad blockers are doomed. So yeah, he's not going to say that because he's selling an ad blocker ...