Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

community.blokada.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 608 posts

Re: Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

#271

Post by throw_a_grenade »

cft wrote: post #187
matkoniecz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a result, less and less of the independent web is getting traffic Tracking cookies are not mandatory. You are not obligated to present cookie banner: you can simply drop nonessential cookies.

Getting money for running websites is also non-mandatory? Are we going to fund them from the government 5-year plans yet? Our hosting expenses alone are 8k per month.

Yes, it's not mandatory. In fact, running sites themselves is not mandatory, so if you can't find a way to run a site which respects its users, then I'd argue you should fail. That's the free market at its finest.

Re: Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

#272

Post by k__ »

smileybarry wrote: post #162

I started using NextDNS years ago and it's been a blessing. Blocks almost every ad on a DNS level on mobile devices, and on PC I still augment it with uBlock Origin. Per-device logs also let me debug connectivity if something breaks, and it's great for mapping local device names without mDNS debugging or some dnsmasq resolver lying around.

Yes, NextDNS and Brave is my stack.

Sadly, it doesn't work on IG.

But I have blocked a few meme sites, and now I'm doing less mindless scrolling.

Re: Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

#273

Post by manquer »

Yhippa wrote: post #165
Larrikin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experience is so awful when I browse on my iPad, instead of my Android phone with Firefox+UBlock. I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads. The modern web is so much worse than the pop up ads of the old web.

It's almost like half the membership here are trying to serve you ads and the other half are trying to avoid them.

There is probably an overlap too , I mean it is not like people who work for ad networks like Facebook and google want to see ads either

Re: Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

#275

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

piaste wrote: post #225
washadjeffmad wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fork the web. I'd be down for a non-commercial / ad hostile design.

Sounds like Gemini.

>In terms of simplicity, the native content type, “gemtext”, is meant to be loaded in a single request, therefore there are no inline images, no iFrames, fonts, scripts or anything else.

Good luck replacing the web with request/response markdown. I would figure at the least something that could serve Wikipedia would be a bare minimum.

Re: Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

#276

Post by Bedon292 »

jrm4 wrote: post #243
Terretta wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The experience is so awful when I browse on my iPad, instead of my Android phone with Firefox+UBlock. I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads. Most people don’t. Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like: - 1Blocker - super full featured, including custom script and css rules. business model is paid software, not ‘acceptable ads’ paying them for placement or…

Whoa. Customized adblocking DNS servers? This is definitely striking me as one of those "why didn't I think of that" and "why don't we already have a lot of this?" Any ideas? Seems like you could go wild with this and do something like "Tor"ify, or "torrentify" or dare I say "blockchain" it? Someone can probably school me on why this is harder than it sounds.

AdGuard Home is another option along with the PiHole another commented mentioned. I have that running at home forcing all port 53 traffic to it via the firewall. So ads are blocked on all devices on the network. So easy I sometimes forget I have it running and then I browse on mobile away from home and get bombarded with ads and am reminded why I do it.

They do also have their own paid DNS service, but I haven't attempted to use it. Might be a way to deal with mobile better.

Re: Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

#277

Post by lloeki »

thesuitonym wrote: post #161
lloeki wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding AdGuard. Also, while not an ad blocker, Hush helps reclaim a bit of sanity regarding all these nagging GRPR/cookies "privacy" popups.

Does it block cookies, or just silently accept them?

I'm not privy of the technical details.I don't think it acts on cookies themselves, it merely removes the nagging banners, and in that case the EU-compliant site is supposed not to set any cookie or other tracker since none were explicitly accepted.

Basically at a high level it's like what DNT should have been i.e "as a default don't track me since I'm not giving consent"

Re: Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

#279

Post by wpietri »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #238
disintegore wrote: post #178

I categorically reject ads. I want them completely abolished. I will do everything that's in my power to get them out of my machines. If I had just a little bit more courage I would go out at night with cans of spray paint and deface billboards.

That is quite unrealistic though. You either need to pay up or put up with the consequences of wanting a free service, such as dealing with the never ending battle of blocking ads. I wish companies would offer the opportunity to pay what you want to remove ads. People with adblock are probably more likely to pay for it, because anyone not running ads is probably not bothered by them anyway. And people running adblock…

It's not particularly unrealistic.

Advertising is popular on the web for historical reasons. Content delivery advanced much faster than payment, so for ~20 years ads were the easiest way for many sites to pay the bills. Nobody was sure what else to do.

But that's no longer the case. Soft paywalls have been around for circa a decade, so selling subscriptions while letting your content self-market is viable. Content creators also have plenty of direct revenue options. Patreon is doing something like $2 billion/year in revenue for creators. Twitch became a huge platform without ads, just allowing direct cash transfers from fans to creators. And that's not even counting the ~$50 billion/year now spent on streaming and VOD in the US.

On the other side of it, per-ad revenue has been falling for decades. I helped start a content site and keep in touch with people in that area. The reason so many ad-supported sites look like absolute shit is that to make any money, you keep needing to up the amount of ads you run, making them more and more annoying to overcome learned ad blindness. So advertising is slowly strangling itself, leading to lots of people using ad-blockers, and counter-ad-blocker technology becoming widespread. What sane person would start an ad-funded content business today?

A world-wide web with little or no advertising is not only plausible, it looks like that's where we're headed.

Re: Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

#280

Post by 3np »

jrm4 wrote: post #243
Terretta wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The experience is so awful when I browse on my iPad, instead of my Android phone with Firefox+UBlock. I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads. Most people don’t. Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like: - 1Blocker - super full featured, including custom script and css rules. business model is paid software, not ‘acceptable ads’ paying them for placement or…

Whoa. Customized adblocking DNS servers? This is definitely striking me as one of those "why didn't I think of that" and "why don't we already have a lot of this?" Any ideas? Seems like you could go wild with this and do something like "Tor"ify, or "torrentify" or dare I say "blockchain" it? Someone can probably school me on why this is harder than it sounds.

It's not harder than it sounds! Pi-hole is the most popular one (could it be the most individually self-hosted FLOSS service if we don't count stuff like SSH?) but you have various options and it's not that tricky to roll your own based on dnsmasq or unbound. If you're on openwrt there are two options with Luci web-UI as well.
Post reply on HN