321–330 of 367 posts
Blame Adblock Plus and friends. They try to extort sites by asking for a cut of ad revenue (up to 30%) to be whitelisted in the "acceptable ads" program. Given that ABP have already determined the ads are "acceptable" when they reach out, the demand for cash is mere extortion. FB obviously chose to not give in and told ABP to take a hike by obfuscating the source code.
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Regexes can be evaluated in linear time, so you'd have to send gigabytes worth of text to cause any noticeable slowdown.
I believe with lookahead/behind a regex is technically not "regular" anymore, so you can definitely DoS a regex without GB worth of text.
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Yeah but what if your salary was north of $150/yr + stock and you were in your 20's? I'd be all over that back then. Hell, I'd be all over that now!
There isn't enough money in the world for me to want to have a job who's goal is to make the world a worse place.
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They could render the whole thing in canvas for example
So you'd block all canvas elements if ads are always a . If they turn all their posts into then it'd kill any accessibility features and the ability to copy-paste text and such so I doubt they'd go that far. Even then, a scraper could run OCR on the canvas image to get the text out of it.
I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.
Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.
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A dentist's parents are usually proud of them. "What are you doing at work these days, kid?" "I'm inventing new ways to make people see advertising." "Have you considered doing something positive with your life?"
You are fooling yourself if you think the parents' of facebook employees' aren't proud of them. What's with the neverending facebook bashing. So much of it is propagandistic and unreasonable. It's funny how the media says something and so many people just parrot it. Do you really believe parents are disappointed that their child works for one of the most important companies in the world? Where the average salary is d…
Career tobacco lobbyists probably make ten times as much money as your average dentist and work for very important companies, but I don't know any parent who would be proud of their kid being a poison vendor rather than a doctor
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Many local news sites now have online subscriptions available. Combined with an ad blocker, it seems as though you can generally get a pleasant local news experience, while still supporting the publisher.
> Many local news sites now have online subscriptions available. Combined with an ad blocker It's kind of disappointing that news website still have ads even after I decide to pay for access.
I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.
It sounds like a fun challenge. It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever. Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) .... That's where I'd want to nope out.
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I find that avoiding ads isn't avoiding wanting to pay for a product. It's avoiding wanting to be a product. If my attention has value, then I get to determine what that value is. It's a sad state to be where corporations work so hard to steal people's time, attention and privacy and give them as little as possible in return.
> If my attention has value, then I get to determine what that value is. That's exactly what you're doing by using the product. You could spend your time doing something else, or paying to skip ads instead.