71–80 of 151 posts
FYI those four dudes are whats keeping me from disabling javascript and images from every website on the face of the earth.
Thank you EasyList maintainers!
They couldn't be widely shared, but they're less whack-a-mole in practice and from a security perspective, a more superior solution.
I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work anymore. I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website. But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussio…
I had an issue with this recently, where buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked. I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content? I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long t…
I realized the blunt force approach of various adblockers will block anything on "/ad/...". Some would even block "/ad...". I found that a bit annoying.
This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.
Indeed. Once I finished the article I sat there and had to think: "what am I supposed to be feeling after reading this?". I think they want us to be angry that EasyList is only maintained by 4 people. Or maybe just be angry that EasyList exists. I'm not really sure. My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.
They responded and removed amp-analytics. I'm not that impressed.
This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.
Also as a quick aside, they mention that AutoTrader would've had to fix "hundreds of thousands of pages" and I'm calling bullshit. No site of that magnitude is using straight up HTML pages. Even if it's a jekyll thing where you'd have to change a bunch of templates, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of the required changes could be done in a few seconds with any decent text editor.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if AutoTrader used manual editing for everything, with no access to scriptability.
Not everyone is using jekyll or any modern stacks ... the echo chamber is strong here. I guarantee you 65% of the Internet is still being edited by hand.
I fear that with adblocking nearing 25% market penetration we're going to see fundamental changes in the way ads are delivered in response. Maybe a transition from third party ad servers to locally hosted ads that have to be added to block lists individually. Maybe YouTube will start inserting unblockable ads directly into the video stream. Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AdBlock and uBlock are both sellouts. Long live uBlock Origin!
Wish a real version was available on Safari.
It's true that it's about a year out of date, but I've never had any ads get through regardless.
At some point, for popular sites, the strategy will flip from filtering to scrapping. We'll need some clever strategies to counter the arms race. Image side-by-side visual diffing. Some process renders pages with and without ads. Ads are progressively identified and removed until it renders like the "print" or "reader" view. Temporal diffing. Snap shot popular websites over time. The meat (content) will likely remain…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it a bit disconcerting that we're so used to articles telling us what to feel that, when they don't do that, we get confused? Maybe it's good just to have a reminder that much of our infrastructure is maintained by volunteers. Sometimes important policy decisions get made by whoever showed up and started doing the work in a way that looks competent to others.
I don't think its disconcerting at all. Articles are supposed to have a point, a goal, etc. The goal might be persuasive, it might be to establish facts, it might be to argue for a specific change or against one. It's up to the reader to agree or disagree with what the article has laid out. But we need something to agree or disagree with. In this case, I had no idea what the point of the article was (beyond a vague f…