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Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

businessinsider.com

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Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#11

Post by eli »

huntermeyer wrote: post #3
ck2 wrote: post #2

I've always wondered what happens if a browser extension gets taken over by an entity someday that puts in bad code after millions of people have it installed and it gets auto-updated. Sure it's open-source and will get noticed eventually, but there will be days if not weeks of exposure. Same thing for all those android apps you have installed. If it doesn't add permissions, you'll never get a warning that something…

I'm placing 80% of my bet on Google (Alphabet). The remaining 20% on Yahoo.

oh who purchased the plugin? I'll take the other side of both those bets.

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#12

Post by quesera »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #5
dantillberg wrote: post #4

I'm glad to see this here. I saw this update yesterday, and the text was so typical of a company-acquisition-I-should- not -trust. Excerpt: "I believe this is a great thing for you users". Yet this is not accompanied by anything that suggests how users will possibly benefit from any of this. Can someone suggest alternatives to Adblock that aren't controlled by dubious/secret/obviously-sketchy third parties?

uBlock

Critically, uBlock Origin.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#13

Post by cmcnally »

ck2 wrote: post #8
huntermeyer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm placing 80% of my bet on Google (Alphabet). The remaining 20% on Yahoo.

Didn't get that for a moment, you mean you think Google or Yahoo bought the very product that blocks their income? Despite all the alternatives that can be installed instantly?

Adblock does not block Google ads by default.

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#15

Post by makecheck »

ck2 wrote: post #2

I've always wondered what happens if a browser extension gets taken over by an entity someday that puts in bad code after millions of people have it installed and it gets auto-updated. Sure it's open-source and will get noticed eventually, but there will be days if not weeks of exposure. Same thing for all those android apps you have installed. If it doesn't add permissions, you'll never get a warning that something…

That's what's funny about some of our security mechanisms today...for instance the browser tries to help you ensure that this is the site you really meant to reach but it has no information about whether the site is under "new management" (which you tend to care about for something like a restaurant).

Maybe companies should be mandated to update their key stores every time they change their board members, say, so that the old keys are revoked and you must take some action to "approve" of the new people running the company.

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#16

Post by kazinator »

Note that Adblock isn't Adblock Plus:

AdBlock is not to be confused with Adblock Plus. The creator of AdBlock claims to have been inspired by the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox, which is itself based on another extension called Adblock. But otherwise AdBlock is unrelated to the other efforts.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBlock]

No alarm here for ABP users. (Like me).

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#19

Post by newscracker »

kazinator wrote: post #16

Note that Adblock isn't Adblock Plus: AdBlock is not to be confused with Adblock Plus. The creator of AdBlock claims to have been inspired by the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox, which is itself based on another extension called Adblock. But otherwise AdBlock is unrelated to the other efforts. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBlock ] No alarm here for ABP users. (Like me).

ABP also introduced an Acceptable Ads option a few years ago that triggered the creation of a fork called AdBlock Edge without that option. Adblock Edge was recently discontinued in favor of uBlock Origin [1], which has a much smaller memory footprint and is faster.

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

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