83 replies
20h18m
It's always an insane experience when you hop on someone's laptop/PC who has zero ad blocking installed.
POV:
10 replies
19h36m
Adblock would break most websites nowadays. It's commonplace to detect adblock and disable the website if adblock is detected.
4 replies
19h33m
Yeah, better not to install any kind of adblock even as a test. No one else does. You would be alone.
Also, people who use adblock are antisocial.
Also, I'd be mortified if I visited a web page, then the site told me that I cannot continue because I have adblock installed. I wouldn't want that to happen to me even once.
3 replies
16h54m
Uh, it's more that I had adblock installed and found myself needing to disable it for most websites just to access it. Adblock ended up being more of a hassle to use than the small handful of sites where it actually worked.
1 replies
16h53m
Oh, I see that I misunderstood the motivation behind your comment.
I've noticed an increase in sites that do what you describe, but so far I've responded by no longer hanging out on those sites, and that feels OK.
0 replies
38m
My adblocker is Ublock Origin Lite (the one that is expected to continue to work on Chrome indefinitely).
0 replies
1h17m
This hasn't been the case for me and I've been using ublock origin for maybe a decade now.
The only sites that break are streaming sites. Which is expected, I mean they need to make their ad money and they sell ad-free tiers.
All except paramount plus, funny enough. Yes, you can get ad-free paramount plus for half the cost if you just use ublock origin! I guess they forgot to put in that little bit of logic.
1 replies
19h25m
I have uBO, a pihole, and noscript between me and the web nowadays. I'd say I run into a website that intentionally bricks itself once every 3-6 months.
It's an uncommon practice in my experience, and it's easy to understand why. 90+% of websites nowadays are click farms - their content is totally interchangeable with, if not plagiarized from, hundreds of other sites. The one site that implements an anti-adblocker measure simply gives up a portion of its traffic to another site that doesn't. The far more lucrative strategy is to try to subvert the ad blocker, which many sites actually do.
0 replies
14h28m
Even just pure uBO is good enough to stop the vast majority of anti-adblock efforts without any custom tweaking.
0 replies
1h25m
The only time I ever get such messages is following links from HN, and even then I'd describe it as fairly uncommon.
0 replies
19h2m
A lot of this anti-adblock nonsense is also blocked by Ublock Origin nowadays. I can't remember the last time a webpage succeeded in bricking itself intentionally, though I do occasionally get accidental cases where the website is just poorly designed and hangs because of shitty javascript failing to load some tracker links. Usually payment flows. Though it's pretty painless to just disable UBO for a few seconds in those cases. I'd rather have to click that button every now and again than have almost every website be unusable all of the time, but you do you.
0 replies
19h30m
Hmm, it most definitely does not.
8 replies
19h58m
PSA: Even among tech minded folks, a surprising number of people are still using adblock which is widely known to use sponsored whitelists to allow companies to bypass the filters.
The gold standard which works as an extension in both chrome and Firefox is uBlock Origin, annoyingly not to be confused with uBlock.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
Also be aware that Google continues to add restrictions to extension permissions such that uBlock Origin may not be as effective as it once was.
2 replies
19h46m
Is the warning on uBlock Origin Chrome extension page due to it not using the manifest v3? Anybody know if uBlock is still the best option for Chrome?
1 replies
19h39m
Marginally related, I've heard that Brave (which is a chromium fork) is going to maintain support for V2 so uBlock Origin will continue to work on it, but I don't use it personally so take that with a grain of salt.
0 replies
19h12m
Thanks. Many friends of mine use and recommend brave.
2 replies
19h54m
Also be aware that Google continues to add restrictions to extension permissions such that uBlock Origin may not be as effective as it once was.
That's fine. I don't use a Google made browser, so this would not affect me at all. It would also be very easy for this to not affect you too if you just had the courage to stop being a sheeple
1 replies
19h41m
I'm not sure who this comment is directed at and I can't speak for everyone but I do think some people have to use Chrome as a requirement from their jobs - such as UI/UX testing for frontend development.
So for them, it's better than nothing.
0 replies
19h28m
you can use what ever browser for UI/UX testing purposes, but it doesn't have to be your daily driver.
1 replies
19h39m
Not even that. Most of my software engineer colleagues do not use ad blockers at all. They are definitely aware of them, but they don't use them, and they don't bother to use them. Which is surprising.
You would expect that the people who have the ability to write perfect selector rules to block ads and understand how all of this works would be the first to use them. But no.
0 replies
18h18m
I've seen this too, and we see it right here on HN every time this discussion comes up. You can even see it on this discussion just above: there's a bunch of people here who just don't want to use them because they want to "support content creators" or whatever. There's even some people here who will tell you you're a bad person for blocking ads.
I find it baffling too.
5 replies
20h1m
Google has convinced regulatory agencies that they're not responsible for their own complicity with supporting link fraud. I wrote an article about Google's role in enabling link fraud[1], which shows how this is effectively a form of regulatory capture.
Here's a particularly salient critique of these very same FBI recommendations, from my article:
The FBI suggests “Before clicking on an advertisement, check the URL to make sure the site is authentic. A malicious domain name may be similar to the intended URL but with typos or a misplaced letter.” — this is useless advice in the face of unverified vanity URLs
4 replies
19h54m
Can’t an ad always just redirect traffic to a vanity URL while exposing a non-vanity URL to Google?
1 replies
17h14m
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect zero link fraud facilitated by Google, in the same way I don’t expect zero money laundering facilitated through banks. But banks are heavily regulated and (at a minimum) have to go through the motions of KYC and disrupting illegal activity.
I think the issue here is we have allowed online platforms to reap the rewards of scale without requiring any responsibility of serving a billion+ people. Internalize rewards, externalize responsibility.
0 replies
17h10m
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect zero link fraud facilitated by Google
Link fraud is entirely preventable in an automated fashion. They just need to start enforcing their own policies.
Validating ownership of 'display URL' domains via DNS would completely eliminate the issue. It's quite simple.
0 replies
19h45m
AFAIR it's against their code, they do have strict rules regarding their ads.
But it's funny I remember adsense fighting the bs fraud ads on the internet, only to become the bs fraud themselves..
0 replies
19h42m
The core issue here is that Google does not effectively verify ownership of vanity URLs displayed to users. You may not ever connect to the vanity URL in the first place.
4 replies
19h49m
I must be a strange person because I don’t run any adblocker… if I happen to need to visit an ad stricken site I just toggle on reader mode. Get my info and get out… I never have to worry about clicking on a search result and it doing nothing … but also I rarely visit these ad sites…. For the cookie banners I just inspect and delete the elements when they get in the way…
2 replies
19h44m
I never have to worry about clicking on a search result and it doing nothing
I can't remember the last time I noticed that the ad blocker even existed on my machine. Occasionally some clever site will basically say "if you can see this, we're supported by ads and could use your help" -- but it doesn't break things and I don't see ad links in search results.
0 replies
17h33m
Do they remove the cookie banners?
0 replies
2h9m
A lot of food ordering websites don’t work for me on ublock origin. Banks are also 50/50. Reddit will occasionally flag me for bot traffic.
0 replies
19h44m
An ad blocker would save you some extra clicks.
3 replies
19h38m
Recently, my grandmother got herself scammed when trying to pay her bills, because she clicked a Google search ad for a fraudulent website posing as the local gas company. She lost some money and, of course, some of her personal data as well.
When situations like this happen, I mostly place the blame on ad companies. It’s their product, so it should be their responsibility to prevent abuses. But there is scant regulation, and the ad industry itself has little concern for privacy and data protection. Why would it waste money being proactive and effective against malicious ads?
It is nice to see the government recommending ad blockers. However, it bothers me that it is up to us, users and customers, to deal with the negligence of ad companies.
2 replies
15h23m
I wonder what would happen if you (she) sued Google.
1 replies
3h33m
I wonder too, but suing is expensive and demands some time that we don’t have. Yet we did notify the cybercrime team at the police department, so maybe they will do something about it.
0 replies
2h15m
If the amount is/was under the small claims court level, that would be a vastly cheaper and easier route to take. Rules vary by state, but I believe generally you cannot select an arbitrary amount lower than the monetary threshold just to use small claims court, but you might be able to argue Google has 50% or some other culpability if that will get the amount under the threshold. IANAL.
3 replies
20h5m
I'd like to see society in general become less tolerant of unwanted ads.
The original Google site hit the perfect pitch, where they set a few unobtrusive ones out of the way alongside your results screen. Ironic they pioneered and eventually normalized what is now an epidemic of user-hostile spam all over the web. I feel as a whole we lose a lot more productivity and focus to this than we gain in economic activity.
2 replies
19h42m
The original Google site
For your nostalgia and/or despair, I found a chronological list of screenshots: https://scaledon.com/the-evolution-of-google-ads/
0 replies
17h19m
Thank you! I actually tried to find an illustration, and your link fits the bill perfectly.
0 replies
17h19m
Google Ads became more user-friendly in 2014. The yellow box that contains the ad disappears and users could quickly scroll through the ads section.
Can someone please explain these two sentences to me?
3 replies
19h34m
No-JS user here. A disturbing trend noticed in the past two months: can't login anymore to some financial/health services sites (bank/insurance/etc) without disabling all of NoScript - no amount of selective enabling of websites satisfies them, and those websites are using known infractors like Adobe.
In other words, there is code in the backend checking that all tracking/-ware has run on the browser, and refusing to let you login unless you let it all run, while none of it is necessary (as evidenced by older versions - and other sites - accepting only the top site being JS-enabled).
"We either track the living shit out of you, or you don't access the essential services you need, even though technically it is not needed."
0 replies
14h49m
Do you have a list of offenders by any chance?
0 replies
17h19m
uBlock Origin has some advanced filter syntax that can sometimes deal with sites like this. It can intercept, modify or replace JavaScript functions, objects, network requests, parsing data, cookies, etc. That being said, writing filters for sites like these is somewhat of a dark art, it usually involves reverse engineering the page's JavaScript to the point where you understand what it's actually sending and checking for to function correctly, then figuring out a way to bypass those checks by selectively modifying the JavaScript's functionality.
Things like this are why I worry a bit about the proliferation of things like WASM, while JavaScript isn't great, it actually gives a great amount of control to the end user, to both see, understand and the ability to actually modify what is running in their browser. With WASM, all of this becomes highly impractical. Instead of a (semi-)readable, modifiable block of interpreted code, with the ability to inspect and modify the state at almost arbitrary points, you just get opaque binary blobs that you basically can't do anything with. As more and more sites switch to using compiled WASM blobs for their logic, it will become increasingly difficult to observe or modify any behavior of these websites as an end user.
0 replies
1h5m
Meh, I've noticed this without any blockers at all. I cannot log in to my power company's website from my PC (on any browser) and likewise for Delta Dental on any device. So far I have been able to work around this, but I don't understand how its possible to break login so badly that even unmodified Edge doesn't work and it stays like this for months.
2 replies
19h38m
Wonder if someone would make a YouTube video talking about using uBlock origin to block YouTube ads, citing FBI's recommendation, see if it gets taken down by violation of YouTube's ToS.
1 replies
17h21m
Linus Tech Tips just had a video on using adblockers, as part of their "how to de-Google your life" series, taken down by YT for posting "harmful or dangerous content".
0 replies
8h28m
Wow, that sounds like something out of Russia's playbook.
2 replies
20h8m
I make loads of browser extensions, is there any wins that can be had by building another ad-blocker? An manifest v3 compliant one.
Or does unlock origin lite cover everything?
I was thinking continent specific ad blockers etc
1 replies
19h26m
All work is pretty much already done by uBlock Origin Lite and AdGuard MV3.
Manifest v3 fucking sucks, and people will probably need to go to system-wide ad blocking such as AdGuard to block ads using all the filters, as v3 limits the number of filters you can use.
0 replies
18h7m
Is adguard a system level script interceptor like wire shark?
2 replies
20h12m
Can the FBI now arrest Sundar Pichai for obstructing justice with Chrome MV3?
1 replies
20h7m
That’s not how that law works.
0 replies
19h55m
If wishing made it so though
2 replies
19h31m
Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements.
This may be sadly outdated. Android Chrome and iOS Webkit probably account for majority of traffic nowadays, and neither allows adblock extensions.
1 replies
17h45m
That's false. See AdGuard for iOS
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047...
0 replies
8h4m
Oh, thanks!
2 replies
19h44m
We still haven’t reached peak Idiocracy.
YouTube/hulu/disney+ still cut to ads instead of displaying them around the border of the content.
Carl’s Jr/Brawndo still haven’t purchased the FCC.
We are pretty close though.
0 replies
19h17m
Too easy to block adverts around the border with cardboard.
They still need to make people actually think that adverts are good
0 replies
19h13m
Honestly, we are there. It just didn't make the news yet for some unknown reason.
2 replies
19h29m
What's the current status of whole-network blockers that use DNS?
I tried pihole maybe 8 years ago, and it just broke too many websites for me to leave it on for my wife. It really frustrated her.
0 replies
19h25m
I don't use it personally but know several people that do. It has different levels of blocking, and so if you have the patience, you can go full block mode and gradually peel back the blocking to sites that you want to use. My friends thoroughly recommend it.
0 replies
15h23m
I tried pihole maybe 8 years ago, and it just broke too many websites for me to leave it on for my wife. It really frustrated her.
I've been running pi-hole at home for three or four years with minimal issues.
The times when I have seen issues, I just go to the admin webpage, disable blocking for some period of time, and try again. And it's almost never Pi-hole causing the issue unless I'm trying to click on an affiliate link[0].
I mention this not as something your wife might do, but to clarify that pi-hole (with default settings) almost never blocks anything I click on, and when it does, I'm almost always glad it did.
As such, assuming your wife isn't clicking marketing/advertising/affiliate links, pi-hole should be just fine for your home IMHO. As always, YMMV.
1 replies
19h30m
The FBI also suggests using VPNs.
0 replies
14h29m
People shit on the FBI (for good reason) for being a tool of the ruling class, but their cybersecurity recommendations are consistently solid. They were amongst the first to suggest disabling Flash and Java in the browser for instance back in 2012.
1 replies
20h4m
Before clicking on an advertisement, check the URL to make sure the site is authentic
Yeah, good luck doing that with all the various tracking links that mask the actual domain. Sometimes I try to click on links from legit account related emails that are blocked by UBO for being part of a tracker/ad network.
0 replies
19h37m
I hear this advice from other infosec people constantly, and it's starting to grate. In one breath we tell users "attackers are professionals who are doing this eight hours a day; they're probably going to trick you", and in another we're trying to get users -- who are busy doing their jobs -- to recognize the difference between an I or an l, or maybe go do a domain history lookup to see if businessandsons.com is some new knockoff of businessllc.com, or maybe figure out how to parse whatever the email reputation filter mangled the domain into.
I know perfect is the enemy of good and defense in depth and etc, etc, but this advice just seems crap.
1 replies
19h58m
What would tip the scales to justify including an ad-blocker in Safari by default?
0 replies
19h2m
The new version of Safari to be released this month has made very tentative steps into content blocking, but it's all manual by the user, and there's still been a lot of pushback on the feature by advertisers. I guess Apple may be wary of antitrust concerns.
0 replies
20h0m
Windows itself is malware.
0 replies
19h50m
Meanwhile, Microsoft fights with itself on whether adblocking is good or bad:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/learning-center/using-a...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/supported-browser...
0 replies
16h2m
Jeff Johnson’s “Stop the Script” (iOS, MacOS). Blocks all JS, including inline. If a site doesn’t have a fallback to serve static content or is not readable when I disable JavaScript… I leave.
0 replies
20h25m
FYI - this is from December 21, 2022
0 replies
19h0m
And in China, using ad blockers is illegal. Go figure.
0 replies
17h41m
FBI has also warned against placement of smart home assistants (e.g. Alexa) in bathroom and bedroom.
0 replies
19h38m
Previously:
The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916239
734 points | 2 years ago | 430 comments
0 replies
15h45m
Cyber criminals purchase advertisements that appear within internet search results using a domain that is similar to an actual business or service. When a user searches for that business or service, these advertisements appear at the very top of search results with minimum distinction between an advertisement and an actual search result.
Governments should start holding companies that sell ad space responsible for the ads they run. There's no way any company with the resources of Alphabet or Meta should be serving up phishing ads in their search results.
The fact that Google is presently trying to degrade the performance of ad blockers with Manifest V3 is not a good look. This is why we have consumer protection laws.
0 replies
20h13m
For computer health your PC needs an ad blocker, but also for mental health. At what point will the CDC recommend using it
0 replies
19h47m
I've love to see what happens if ad-networks became legally liable for any scams or malware that they enable.
The counter-argument that they don't need to know their customer/ad and are just dumb-pipes doesn't sit well with me: Them having awareness of ad-content and display-context is ostensibly part of their business model.
P.S.: I don't mean just liable for a part of the damages, although that would be a good start. I mean that if your Aunt Tillie gets served an ad of "Your computer is infected, click here to contact a Microsoft Technican" there should be some negative repercussions for the company, even if your Aunt Tillie is secretly the hacker BakinC00kies and spins up a honeypot.
0 replies
15h29m
This is where SEO leading to :(
0 replies
7h7m
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0 replies
20h0m
[2022] - I thought I'd heard this before.
0 replies
8h41m
I hope the raise of llms searching the web and acting as a middle-man makes websites ridden with ads obselete.
If you've ever looked for a recipe, you'll know how many obstacles there is without ublock. My hate is towards these type of websites.
I have a confession to make. I don't really have ad-block. If your site is too ad-infested, I stop using it.
That feels like a pretty fair approach.
If you don’t mind, I’m truly curious why you don’t Adblock? There’s no wrong answer here. ;)
Not the GP you are asking, but I do not use an ad blocker because I predominantly use Safari as my browser. I would absolutely love one, but after Apple made all those API changes years back, I gave up trying to find one that works well and is privacy friendly.
The changes Apple made were to increase privacy. Content blockers that have access to the page have no network access. A separate process that does can only update the blocking rules.
I quite like Ka-block
"The changes Apple made were to increase privacy"
Apple gobbles personal data too and processes it and sells it etc. They are simply rather better at looking ... friendly. They really are very good at that.
What data and how do you know? This seems to be a popular talking point, but I’ve yet to see evidence. It doesn’t make that much sense to frame Apple’s privacy stance as similar to Google’s or Facebook’s. Apple isn’t an ad business, and Google and Facebook are, plain and simple.
I don’t work for Apple, and I don’t use an Apple laptop or desktop, but I don’t buy this Apple is as bad as businesses that are primarily built on ad revenue and are actively eroding privacy. I’m sure they’re not perfect, but I feel like Apple is relatively serious about privacy, making real changes that generally protect consumers, and setting a better example than many big tech companies. Are you sure they don't look better because they really are better?
Then why do they push their crappy browser on iOS which doesn't allow ad-blockers?
Safari does allow ad blockers.
I don't think Apple (or Google, Microsoft, …) sells your data. Or can you point me to the website where I can buy user data from them?
What I would admit is that Apple is maybe not as motivated to protect your data from unintentional leaking. Without user data, Google would be almost nothing. So they have to be extremely careful to maintain the trust of their users. For Apple (or Microsoft) their business is still sizeable enough with out user data.
Where is Apple tracking your usage across the web? This data is sold to who? These are big claims.
Disclosure: I work at Apple, and have seen zero evidence of anything but trying to make things continuously more secure and private. This in fact makes my job (machine learning) much harder because I don’t have user datasets to leverage.
Check this out: https://kaylees.site/wipr.html. It's no UBlock Origin, but it still does an excellent job on many sites.
How do I know tools like this don’t send data home? Does Apple’s API work in a specific way to deny that?
Why don't you just use a different browser that gives you more control?
I find the ecosystem integration and cohesion to be the most compelling reason. Everything "just works." Apple keychain is good enough that I stopped using other password managers and works great with Safari, Messages.app and Mail.app integrate well with Safari, AppleScript works well with Safari, etc..
I do have other browsers, but I only use them for specific needs. Like I keep some version of a Chrome-based browser around solely for if I need to Chromecast something. Other wise, I do not enjoy using third party browsers like Chrome, Firefox, etc., which I use at work all day.
Safari's web developer tools are not my favorite compared to other browsers, so I try not to develop much with Safari other than testing.
I use the DNSCloak app and run the Adguard DNS VPN from their list. It is free and blocks many ads in safari.
I use 1Blocker
NextDNS, Adguard, Wipr are a few that work.
AdGuard is pretty good when it comes to Safari, and has a way to convert uBlock-style rules into the Safari blocking framework (well at least as much as it can), so you can use Easylist/etc.
I don't use one either. I actually think ads are a good system for supporting content, and I do want to support the creators of the content I consume.
I also have a low threshold for obnoxious sites, and will just bail and not return if I get annoyed.
Do you ever make a purchase due to having seen an ad, ideally by clicking on the ad? If not, then in some sense you're still getting something without paying for it. (You're paying with your time, but that's not valuable to anyone unless it ultimately results in paying with money.) But better to screw the people pushing ads than the content creators!
I would say not very often, but yes, very recently even. I've been researching new backpacking gear this summer, looking on sites that are known to me, so I've been seeing lots of ads for that type of stuff naturally.
One store kept popping up that I was not familiar with. So I clicked eventually, and did some online searching about the company to make sure they are legit.
Turns out they are a local independent store. I've made two purchases from them since, and price compared against them for other purchases. Their ads are more likely to catch my eye in the future now.
"naturally"
I personally have a long list of products not to buy. If you somehow repeat the same ad and I remember your product, I stop buying said product. If youre wasting your money on spamming ads, your product sure as shit isnt better than competitors', since they waste less on ads, more on product. I dont use ad blockers, they make it harder for me to find out who has the poorer product.
Wow, that sounds like a ton of work. I think a better idea is to use an ad-blocker, but run a program in the background that downloads the ads (or maybe just samples them, to save bandwidth and resources), processes them to find brand names, and then stores these brand names in a database so you can find their relative frequency and assign a score to each. Then you can just query the db when you want to buy something to find that brand's acceptability score.
Because I don't know how to install one nor do I have any interest in learning how.
Makes sense. Pretty sad people think that’s downvote worthy. It reminds me how easy it is to be ignorant to users. :(
After the first scandal about one adblocker being bought out, and letting by Google ads, I tried the next one in the list, then kept hearing about the issues, and then I realized, I am better off just not visiting sites that:
A) Want me to pay to view a one-off article B) Want me to not see any of their content cause its ad infested.
To be fair, if Firefox's Reader Mode doesn't suffice as a bypass, then I really don't bother coming back.
There might be...
This is one thing I really like about Kagi - I don't have to remember which sites to not use due to ads, I simply add the site to my account-wide block list, and I never see it in search results again.
One can achieve the same thing for any website, not just their search results, with the browser extension 'uBlock'.
Yes, you have to write a pattern. It saves you money while not supporting the erosion of autonomy. What's better than free vegetables? Delivery.
I'm away from my computer right now but I'll copy one of mine later/reply with it. The edit window here is unfortunate.
Just missed the edit window! I'm here to deliver. Two kinds, either will be accepted in the "My Filters" section of the plugin. Edit as desired, the domain is just a recent example.
Eradication/filtering:
Shown, but blocked on-access: To keep the hacker spirit alive, I leave the reader with an exercise. Consider other approaches or HTML tags. Anchors aren't their only vector, hence the document method.HN has a 'hide' button that could be leveraged for nicer integration, removing related widgets.
Some nice user control features.
It's been years since I've seen a Pinterest result for a query like "C++ variadic template"
That alone is worth the price of admission
What's an example of a site that is on the high end lft amount/style of ads that you tolerate?
Good question, if I can't read the article whatsoever, then that's my time to leave. I don't mind ads, but if they take up all of the content, then its just not worth it. If you trick me with ads as if it were content, like some download sites do, I hate you.
By then, its too late if there was malware on there.
If there was, I'd be really surprised if they built it to know how to run on an OS that isn't Windows dynamically.
Typically people with this attitude have no-JS or something though for privacy reasons. That would cut a lot of ads down.
Or do you not use any blockers at all?
I used to, I don't even bother with any of that. If I really need to I maybe bust out reader mode on Firefox, but very rarely.
Especially at work most sites I visit aren't ad infested hellscapes, like StackOverflow and its relatives are not ad infested, neither is wikipedia, etc.
It’s a good way to support sites that respect the user experience while steering clear of those that don't.
Ad-blocking is also about controlling what resources are loaded and executed by your computer. You won't know you were subject to a drive-by 0-day until it's too late and your computer is a botnet or your bank account drains. Not blocking ads also normalizes predatory ad-tech surveillance.
There is a lot more going on beneath the surface of just "annoying ads in my face" which need to be accounted for, since browsers do not ship with effective, granular security controls.
Yup, same here.
I do that too when my adblock is a little behind the adversary
It's no wonder people have gotten a lot more ignorant and less observant when they have to constantly fight the bombardment of their attention by unwanted distractions.
In that situation of using someone else's device, I've had to move windows half off the screen to be able to concentrate on an article when the ads on the side were constantly distracting me.
Funny how here's HN, a site full of Software Engineers complaining about ad bombardment, and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! We (as a profession) are the ones doing this! "Oh, but boss told me to do it!" some will say, as if it's a good excuse. Regardless of which manager told which developer to do it, at the end of the day, a developer typed in the code and pushed it to prod. We're at least partially to blame for what the web has become.
This is completely meaningless. In any population big enough theres going to be a high variance in behaviours, including morality. Expecting all individuals in a huge collective to all behave "good" with little / no inforcement is incredibly naive at best and dangerous at worst.
Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too - > and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer!
Many ads are designed by creatives and placed and run by dedicated non-software engineering people, including deciding how many are run and their placement (i.e. bombardment or not). Sure engineers programmed the platform, but then you're just blaming the post office for the content of the mail, or the ISP for the content of the internet. What do you expect the software engineers to do? Limit 1 ad per page programatically and then every software engineer on earth must agree to enforce that limit and no matter how much pressure their superiors put on them, everybody holds the line?
This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers because of their life situation (it can still be a minority, and ad bombardment emerges)?
By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that type of behavior (bombardment of ads, surveillance capitalism, etc) and changing the culture
Maybe we can apply this line of reasoning to crime too...
We do, and it mostly works
So there's no criminals now? News to me!
There are still criminals, but did you commit a crime today? How about your friends and family?
I don't understand your point. You say you want to change the culture, and that this has successfully been done in the case of crime, but this is blatantly false: every country has prisons with many criminals in them. In the US in particular (since most HNers probably live there), there are well over 1 million people in custody according to a quick google search, and over 5 million in corrections (so I assume most of those are on parole). Obviously, changing the culture hasn't worked, for there to be so many prisoners, and crimes committed so often that so many police officers are constantly needed. If your "change the culture" thing had worked, you wouldn't need police, or at least not many.
Changing bad behavior by corporations (esp. adtech/advertisers) is likely to be about as successful: it's not going to be done by "changing" the culture, but only by changing the laws, and then enforcing those laws and punishing offenders. Just like a rapist sees nothing wrong with raping a person, or a serial killer sees nothing wrong with murdering many strangers, or a "porch pirate" sees nothing wrong with stealing your Amazon delivery, an ad-tech corporation sees nothing wrong with feeding you psychologically manipulative advertising and blatant malware in search of profit.
No. They did not. They explicity said "mostly works".
Of course it is. You set up a blantantly false strawman. Please don't use obviously piss weak rhetorical tactics, they make you look bad.
And every country has varying incarceration rates, they are not all equal.
What should be looked at is countries by cultural attitudes towards crime and incarceration rates .. and the harder question of just how innately criminal imprisoned people are in various countries and whether they are just there from systemic features of a culture.
Again, there are no one size fits all answers and people aren't homogenous.
That was my exact point with the previous post blaming "software engineers" for ads.
Who said that police are not part of the culture?
I'm not arguing whether or not we need police, I'm arguing that if we come to a consensus (i.e., we agree that surveillance capitalism, etc, is not ok), then we can stop the problem. That may mean we even criminalize certain behaviors if we believe it is necessary. But the foundation is consensus. So let's do that- I firmly believe that surveillance capitalism and the bombardment of ads is not ok. What about you?
That sounds cool...but such coordinated, idealistic behavior never occurs in human beings.
Yes it does- it happens all the time. It happens through talking about it publicly and coming to agreement.
How many software engineers here work in defensive cybersecurity? Well, why they do they have jobs? Because of other software engineers who work on the offensive side.
I guess all the cybersecurity engineers should just quit because they're the ones to blame for all the malware...
Similarly, the only reason humans work as police is because humans commit crimes. So humans are really to blame for this problem.
I don't agree with their overall point but this is an either oblivious or bad faith take on their statement.
No, it's not bad faith at all. He's trying to use a collective blame argument: "software engineers" as a group are supposedly to blame for adware, in his argument, rather than a small minority of software engineers. It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.
Just to clarify what I mean is it is a little bit of both: 1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct, and 2. (some) Individuals are actively doing it by actually building the bombardment code.
I feel the same way about software for war fighting, which obviously has higher stakes. The profession itself doesn't push back on the ethics of it AND individual practitioners are actively developing death-dealing software.
You're acting like the profession has some kind of central authority. It does not. It's like asking for agreed-upon ethical standards for dog walkers; you're not going to get it, because there's nothing resembling a centralized organization, nor any kind of licensing for this profession.
If you want to eliminate software for war fighting, this is a fool's errand. Weapons for war are absolutely necessary, unless you want to be a victim to some dictator who doesn't agree with your ethical principles. History is full of examples of peaceful people who couldn't withstand an assault by other people who didn't believe in peace. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that eliminating warfare (and the military apparatus for it: armies and navies etc.) is impossible as long as separate countries exist. Only if we manage to either conquer everyone or get everyone to agree to join a single planetary government can war really be eliminated. And that assumes that hostile aliens won't ever be a problem.
Members of a minority group, such as race or religion or sexual orientation are generally members of that group by birth, not by choice.
Members of the group 'software engineers' are members of that group by (career) choice.
"Every single one of those ads were programmed by... a human! We (as humans) are the ones doing this!"
See? That logic doesn't work so well. "Software engineers" are not a singular entity nor a homogeneous group. To maintain the status quo, it doesn't take more than just a few SWEs willing to implement ads and/or invasive tracking.
Your argument is a little lacking. Software engineers are directly responsible, is the difference.
The people on this site are a group of humans uniquely equipped to actually speak and interact with the people responsible for this bullshit.
Humans are directly responsible, too, so the difference you cite, simply isn't there.
> The people on this site are a group of humans uniquely equipped to actually speak and interact with the people responsible for this bullshit.
There's not any method whatsoever for the people on this site to force all ad software developers to stop developing ad software.
Your key point here is a tautology; it doesn't really lead to any insight.
Despite what management might think we are not interchangeable parts.
Ads teach to not pay attention.
I just go to ublock origin on firefox and install it, they'll never ask about it; i'm just doing them a solid.
Given the numbers of times I've had to disable ad blocker to fix some janky page I have to use, I don't think installing an ad blocker without explaining or even mentioning it is a friendly act.
Absolutely agree. I often disable my ad blocker/cookie blocker when I'm about to make a big purchase (e.g. airline tickets) in case they interrupt whatever crazy redirect flow the airline and their payment processor have.
Never happened to me but I guess that kind of shop would simply loose a sale.
I don't think it happened to me, but then I don't venture outside Amazon, Newegg.. major sites that much. But even then.. if they need all those crazy redirects, maybe they don't want my business.
If you ever limit the number of redirects to one in Firefox by using about:config, you'll see that most sites do at least two per page. It makes me wonder how many useless portals there actually are just because people glue together CDNs and add more off-site frameworks like Akamai and Typekit.
I mention it, they usually have no idea what I'm talking about sadly. I don't think ad-tech is a friendly act. Infact, I find it insulting, invasive, and completely violating what they do with the personal data when they sell it 6 ways to sunday, but enough about that.
Usually if I'm on somebody else's computer it's because they need me to fix things for them, or speed things up or 'make it better' which means it's getting adblock. The amount of modals and tricks and things they fall for especially my elderly neighbors or people wanting their business laptops setup especially Windows that have jank ass webpages that have the 'Download' link be some arbitrary .exe for something completely not what they wanted to download put something on their system is crazy.. hell even Youtube is giving people scams.
I just fixed some women's sobriety center's computer for free and their user account had some anti virus secure browser opening 20+ 'browsers' on boot for 'AG' free anti-virus.
Never had an issue with ublock breaking anything important for me. Air travel, hotels, ordering things online, if something says disable my adblocker I close it out and never go to that domain again.
To each their own though. I don't do ads though and will save every soul I can. Ad-tech is cyber terrorism at this point, and I stick to my guns.
It's such a jarring difference when I'm browsing on my phone at home with Pi-Hole vs. when away. So much that it motivated me to set up a split tunnel VPN so all my phone's DNS requests go through my home Pi-Hole regardless of what network it's on.
I used to do this, but lately I just set my phone to use dns.adguard-dns.com as the DNS resolver which gives extremely similar results. It's a Russian operator, but I don't have much of a reason to trust any other DNS operator more.
Here's your YouTube link without the creepy Google tracking (and with the missing playback controls):
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iV3js9pd5IE
Looks like the same tracking, just main YT view not Shorts
Ads (with untrusted javascript and links) considered harmful.
I've been using Safari on occasion for the past year because it starts up faster. I was too lazy to figure out how to install an ad blocker there and the strangest thing happened. I saw an ad many months later and realized I couldn't remember seeing a single one until that point. I suppose it's because I've become so good at avoiding the types of websites that have ads that maybe I don't even need an ad blocker (I'm extremely opposed to seeing ads that aren't SuperBowl ads). There also aren't that many website I visit. I use GitHub. I watch Netflix and Amazon where I can pay extra to not see ads. I also pay for YouTube Red. I use Kagi which is another place I can pay to not see ads. I also read Hacker News, where I'm always super careful to check that the domain on a link looks like a real person's website (i.e. isn't something like nytimes) before clicking.
Better not use mine...