151–160 of 207 posts
If ad blockers go by URLs, why don’t advertisers simply serve ads from the same domain with a path masquerading as content?
ublock origin has a "DNS unmasking" feature in firefox that defeats this. I think there's a less effective workaround used for other browsers.
> Copyright (c) 2024 Mechazawa
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software with specific restrictions, provided that the user intends to use the Software explicitly FOR the purposes of evil or advancing evil, including but not limited to:
> Genocide, Wanton Destruction, Fraud, Nuclear/Biological/Chemical Terrorism, Harassment, Prejudice, Slavery, Disfigurement, Brainwashing, Ponzi Schemes and/or the Destruction of Earth itself,
> with this, including without limitation the rights to copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, sell and/or run copies Software or any executable binaries built from the source code.
HN converts single newlines into spaces. The license text on Github [1] has apparently intentionally obstructive newlines within the "paragraphs".
[1] https://github.com/Mechazawa/103-early-anti-adblock/blob/mas...
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If there is competition offering ad-free services, this would be an option. But for large parts, there isn't.
If food was free, no one would pay for it. But it isn't free.
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Price thing: no one can afford to pay "a latte per month" for every site they visit. Trust thing: the site is likely to still spy on you even if you're a paid subscriber. Even if they drop ads they'll send your data to google or some other analytics provider, at the least. They'll "accidentaly reset" your email preferences. Plus other shenanigans *. Infrequency thing: I won't subscribe to $SOME_SITE just because it's…
I managed to subscribe at a really good annual rate vs. list through some online aggregator, where they pre-warn me of renewal and rate changes to let me cancel if I want. I don’t remember what it was without searching my email, so not shilling for them in any way, but there are methods. That said, yeah-no one can reasonably afford the constant “I just want to read this one linked article twice a year on your local c…
Google was playing around with ad-replacement purchases, but they never made a version that does the same thing as youtube: pay X and all the google ads go away.
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The entire point of ad is to make you notice. As you said you "don't mind", this is not something ads would want. It's a raising bar as people are starting to learn to ignore ads more and more subconsiously.
I've successfully removed ads from basically my whole life, but now when I do happen to see one I'm less conditioned to ignore it. So boy oh boy do I notice. I kind of hate it. My eye is immediately drawn to anything flashy or moving, to the point where I'll make an effort to sit facing away from any TV screen in a restaurant.
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The entire point of ad is to make you notice. As you said you "don't mind", this is not something ads would want. It's a raising bar as people are starting to learn to ignore ads more and more subconsiously.
I've successfully removed ads from basically my whole life, but now when I do happen to see one I'm less conditioned to ignore it. So boy oh boy do I notice. I kind of hate it. My eye is immediately drawn to anything flashy or moving, to the point where I'll make an effort to sit facing away from any TV screen in a restaurant.
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As far as I know, current ad blockers can't block ads from Widevine (DRM protected) streams, so I guess it's only a matter of time until Chromium team comes up with Widevine for webpages and then it's game over for normal consumers.
By the time that happens my hope is that we might have the new GPT-5 with personal agents curating information for us.
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While i know its evil, i always wished widevine was an option for creating captchas. Most captcha solutions are defeated by services like 2captcha.net and generally aren't the most privacy respecting.
Widevine has already been reverse engineered. You just need to extract a device private key and there are numerous methods for doing so. "Web Environment Integrity" will never work.
It will work to make ad-blocking difficult enough that most people don't bother anymore.
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I'd prefer to see proof-of-work based captchas. I'd much rather give up 10 minutes of CPU time for a token that can be revoked as soon as I actually use it for evil than give up all of my privacy (and two minutes of my personal time) for the privilege of using your annoying website.
Spammers would actually prefer it I think. I think for each captcha solved, spammer are ready to pay more than real users(be it electricity or real money). They were already paying real humans before AI became good enough for solving captcha.