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Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

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Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#721

Post by jeroenhd »

consumer451 wrote: post #667
jeroenhd wrote: post #646

This kind of data collection abuse is why I think we need more addons like AdNauseam [1]. Unlike uBlock Origin, it's not available from the Chrome web store anymore, which is a good sign that Google hates these types of addons more than they hate simple blockers. Blocking A/AAAA domains with custom URLs to prevent tracking is almost impossible, so instead let's flood the trackers with useless, incorrect data that's n…

I am very interested in this, thanks for sharing. Adding another party into my web browsing is always a tough pill for me to swallow. I am also a noob at reading trust signaling. What are some of the reasons that I should trust this dev and their processes?

You should put the same amount of trust in this dev as you should in any other. I myself trust Mozilla's store reviews enough to run the addon, but if you're more conservative with trust, you can inspect the source code and build the addon itself.

The addon comes down to a uBlock Origin fork with different behaviour. I believe most of the addon code is actually the base uBlock code base.

I haven't seen any obvious data exfiltration in my DNS logs, but then again I'm just another random on the internet. If you don't feel comfortable installing something with a privacy impact as broad as an ad blocker, you should definitely trust your instincts.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#722

Post by toyg »

cameronh90 wrote: post #602
toyg wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even most ardent EU supporters would admit that the institution was terribly dysfunctional That's a mischaracterization. "Most" would have accepted that there was (and is) room for improvement, but "terribly disfunctional" is an extreme term. The view that the whole institution had to be reinvented has always been a very English idea, based on the fact that some key policies (like agricultural support) benefited ot…

> a very English idea The UK didn't even have the worst public opinion of the EU in Europe on average. Public polling has generally shown other countries - including Italy, Greece and France - have an approximately similar (or worse) opinion of the EU than we did. There's a significant chance that Sweden would have ended up having a referendum on membership if we hadn't, but how terribly it's gone for us has put off…

> The UK didn't even have the worst public opinion of the EU in Europe on average.

The UK is the only country where significant chunks of the elites kept explicitly advocating for (and are now putting in practice) a future outside the bloc. I'm Italian, and with all the usual complaints about this or that policy, Italian elites have never seriously considered backtracking on the project - because they all realize that the European nation-state is dead meat in the age of continent-sized superpowers. Of course they'll bitch and moan that they can't currency-inflate their way out of economic crisis anymore, but that is it; once Eurozone institutions are tweaked to allow for more fiscal transfers across the Union, as it's slowly happening, there won't be any real reason to leave.

Same basically goes for French elites - with the last humiliation in Mali a painful reminder of their actual standing in this brave new world. The only country with a potential future outside the bloc is Germany, but they benefit from it so much in practice that it's never going to happen.

> how can a supranational institution taking over national government function be truly democratic if you don't even have a standard language

This is really a non-issue, EU institutions employ an army of translators and everything is available in any chosen lingo. The working lingua franca are effectively two, French and English. Any decently-educated European is bilingual, these days, to a decent level.

It's more about insularity of the intellectual and political classes in this or that country. Probably because of the overabundance of cultural production coming from the US, the UK outside London is extremely insular. Pretty much any continental elite-person will consume The Economist and the Financial Times in addition to their local press; whereas the UK intellighentsia hardly every touches any continental press.

> f your partner desperately wants to live in Europe and you desperately want to live in the USA

When the alternative is being overrun by Russian tanks and American F15, yes, the Atlantic island will have to do. We will all bitch and moan, sure, but we'll get on it.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#723

Post by airstrike »

dasil003 wrote: post #719
airstrike wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around! As a small aside, The capitalist's answer is that regulating companies to prevent them from steering to the m…

Keep in mind that capitalists have all the power and a lot of time and incentive to rationalize the status quo. The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection. Personally I think the success of either one comes down to cultural factors that are currently stacked in favor of advertisers.

> The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection.

Not necessarily, because creating laws isn't enough to regulate. You also need to enforce such regulation, and that's where the challenge lies. The argument assumes that in the long run consumers are more effective at rationalizing their choices than the government is able to appropriately enforce regulation.

Alternatively, it assumes the cumulative harm created by the disconnect between current customer behavior and rationalized customer behavior (i.e. prior to their rationalizing the status quo) is less than the cumulative harm caused by inefficient regulation, including the defector's problem mentioned earlier but also other negative externalities such as encouraging corruption / fraud (which itself requires further enforcement)

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#724

Post by easrng »

gildas wrote: post #682
pixeldetracking wrote: post #453

I'm the author, good to see this on HN, raising awareness on the topic I don't know who made the translation and when it was made, but the original article in french ( https://pixeldetracking.com/fr/google-tag-manager-server-sid... ) contains more information on recent GTM "improvements"): mainly on how you can easily change JS library names and detailed instructions on how to host your container in other clouds or s…

> I don't know who made the translation and when it was made This page was saved with SingleFile (I'm the author of SingleFile). Therefore, I can tell you that this page was produced on Tue Dec 08 2020.

Thank you for making SingleFile, it's been an absolute lifesaver in a project I'm working on. I was having a lot of trouble trying to manually save pages with puppeteer but the singlefile CLI worked perfectly, even with added extensions. (To get extensions to work I had to add --browser-headless=false --browser-args ["--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform", "--ozone-platform=headless", "--disable-extensions-except=/path/to/extension", "--load-extension=/path/to/extension"] )

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#726

Post by mbesto »

jacquesm wrote: post #712
mbesto wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People were telling each other about these. I've seen this argument a lot, especially by technically minded folks. When you say "telling each other" what do you mean exactly? Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars? I get the sense that lots of people in the HN community don't realize when they read an article from that this is marketing dollars at work. > B…

> When you say "telling each other" what do you mean exactly? I don't think we need to discuss the meaning of words that are in the top 5000 commonly used dictionary words here. > Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars? Yes. It's called word-of-mouth and it is how it has always been done.

> I don't think we need to discuss the meaning of words that are in the top 5000 commonly used dictionary words here.

Good. We're on the same page then. Snarky response not required but okay.

> Yes. It's called word-of-mouth and it is how it has always been done.

I don't know where to start with how to respond, but I'll bite:

Let's magically go back to the gold rush in the US. You're traveling from New York and arrive in San Francisco. You know nothing about products and services in that market. You walk into town and look for a general good store to buy some water. You ask a guy on the corner where the general store is and so you find the general store based on his help. Okay, so word of mouth. You want to prospect some gold and know you need to buy a pan. There are two gold prospecting material vendors in town, Gold Supply Inc and Acme Gold (but you don't know this because you're new to town). You walk through town looking for a vendor and notice a guy with a megaphone is yelling to the crowd about Gold Supply Inc offering better prices on pans. He is paid by Gold Supply to do this. This is marketing/advertising.

So, no, this is not "how it's always been done" and its inconceivable to think any modern company doesn't spend money on advertising/marketing. I understand the grievances about having hundreds of thousands of megaphones in your face 24/7, but let's stop pretending the world's marketplaces can operate efficiently on word of mouth alone because that's what you're implying.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#727

Post by shkkmo »

itsoktocry wrote: post #666
ATsch wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? That's a great example actually, because the reason you can't get anywhere without a car these days is marketing campaigns by the automobile and oil industry. First by suggesting the newly necessary road safety standards and ridiculing people for being in the street without a car ("jaywalking") to the point that it was criminalized, th…

> because the reason you can't get anywhere without a car these days is marketing campaigns by the automobile and oil industry We aren't all brainless automatons. Not everything is a giant conspiracy. Have you considered that there are people that actually like cars and find them convenient and useful? Cars and the highway system completely changed the course of commerce in this country. Sure, that has lead to some p…

> Have you considered that there are people that actually like cars and find them convenient and useful? Cars and the highway system completely changed the course of commerce in this country.

Cars would have been wildly successful without marketing, but the deliberate marketing efforts of car companies significantly amped up that demand and pushed us into being a society that is unheathily dependant on these amazing machines.

> this idea that a bunch of moustache-twirling executives sat in a board room figuring out how to force cars on people is a bit much.

This "idea" is strongly backed up by the historic record, so if this seems like "too much" you really need to recalibrate your intuitions with reality.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#728

Post by gildas »

easrng wrote: post #724
gildas wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know who made the translation and when it was made This page was saved with SingleFile (I'm the author of SingleFile). Therefore, I can tell you that this page was produced on Tue Dec 08 2020.

Thank you for making SingleFile, it's been an absolute lifesaver in a project I'm working on. I was having a lot of trouble trying to manually save pages with puppeteer but the singlefile CLI worked perfectly, even with added extensions. (To get extensions to work I had to add --browser-headless=false --browser-args ["--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform", "--ozone-platform=headless", "--disable-extensions-except=/path…

Thanks for the feedback! It's very timely, I just have an issue that discusses the problem of sideloaded extensions (and profile data).

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#729

Post by HWR_14 »

efitz wrote: post #188
HWR_14 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government isn't shy about adding rules for its contractors. It should be trivial for them to demand (or provide) dedicated IPs for their sites. Then they won't get caught up in the IP address blocking of GCP.

The big tech companies have all built out lobbying capabilities; such a law would end up helping big tech and harming small companies because the big companies would be involved in authoring the law and would be contributing to the sponsors and committee chairs and members to get their favorable language included. And it would all be legal and business as usual.

They don't have to be laws. It's something that Biden can just add into every RFP the US government puts otu.

But no, typically things like that don't hurt small companies.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#730

Post by HWR_14 »

inlined wrote: post #241
HWR_14 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Block the code that they suggest changing the name, domain, and function signatures of? How?

If the loops, if statements, and block scopes are similar then the graph can be fuzzily identified. They’ve had anti-plagiarism software for years.

Can you point me to some anti-plagiarism software? Because this doesn't sound like it will work at a non-trivial level.
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