... proving once again why regulation of internet advertising is needed.
Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
81–90 of 107 posts
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#82AI is holy grail of adblocking !!
I think there are quite a few things that AI could work very well as a solution for... that it will never be used for because it would threaten industries that profit of the existence of the problem.
The parasite that is advertising, especially internet advertising, is one of them.
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#83Websites being hacked does not necessitate ad block. It necessitates better browser security. The title here is fallacious. I say this in all fairness as someone who uses adblock extensively, where I don't even like cookies being held by ad companies.
A secure browser that loads an ad doesn't prevent you from being surveilled. Tor mitigates this to a large degree but doesn't entirely eliminate it. The only real solution is to block ads altogether. This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.
Recommended by more than one US Federal three letter agency.
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can disable it on Firefox by setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false. I haven't had any issues with it. Someone shared the code in the comments, it uses 'copy' and 'cut' event listeners, so disabling this setting would have prevented the exploit regardless of an adblock.
dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled=false removes the non-consensual clipboard read access, which is an enhancement but not a strict requisite for attacks of this type. The utility of the other events boils down to mostly convenience: The website can still indirectly observe how you use the clipboard, even when not explicitly notified. The website also remains in control of the CSS properties that can be used to create…
It prevents event dispatch, upon which this exploit relied. The same could be achieved without listening to clipboard events, in which case the setting would be insufficient. I'm not sure there is a way to fully prevent clipboard manipulation in the browser.
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#85I have a feeling everyone with understanding of the situation or even a vague malaise opening a news article and being bombarded with popups that intercept their attention knows why ad blockers are needed, and any perceived "discourse" to the contrary is one sided, from the ad agencies and media platforms that largely and subversively direct the narrative. It's getting harder by the day to tell sentiment apart from n…
Nobody wants ads (*) but somehow they are never banned. Makes you wonder, are we living in a democracy or not? (*) shown at inconvenient moments and tracking the user; yellow pages were fine
If people not liking a thing is enough reason to ban it in a democracy, then how come we still pay tax?
And if you want to say "but someone must pay for the public services," the I have some bad news about what pays for your online content consumptions.
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just want to understand: Are you saying that a black person born in South Carolina today has a worse life and with less justice than a black person born into slavery a few hundred years ago? I don’t think slaves got university educations for free.
Do they have free university education in South Carolina? And why only black people?
The implication was that we are worse off now because we have to pay for education, my point is that a black person now may have to pay for education but hundreds of years ago it would have been illegal for them to get any education. To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that we’ve solved all the world’s problems and everything is great, just that I think right does win over wrong over a long enough timespan.
I’m not sure what you mean by “only,” it was just an example.
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Black people were bought and sold in the US just a few hundred years ago. For years one of the perks of being a soldier was raping and pillaging, now that lands you in prison (depending on the country of course). The world isn’t some utopia where everyone is treated fairly and there are no oligarchs, but I think it’s hard to argue that the amount of justice is unchanged for all of human history.
What is a labor market? Do you know that today's soldiers still rape and pillage?
What do you mean “what is a labor market?” That we’ve had an open labor market is fairly modern, and even more modern is the idea of broad workers rights. Would you rather work in a factory now, or 150 years ago? Not everything is always getting better and there are ups and downs, but over a long enough time frame we’re clearly always trending towards better.
I guess I thought it was clear that I understand that soldiers still rape and pillage. But it being illegal anywhere is a fairly modern development.
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#88The sad thing is that we need adblockers in the first place. Granted, even in the 1990s there were ads; I remember blinking banners and what not. But often the underlying website was still fine as such. Fast forward some years. Now if you look at e. g. medium.com but many other websites, you are CONSTANTLY bombarded with pointless pop-ups, slide-ins, and pester-naggers. No I do use ublock origin (it works on thorium…
I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the le…
I guess we call advertisers hippo butt leaches now? haha, i like that analogy of yours.
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you are paying more than you should for a loaf of bread because your local shop is making a profit? because if you went to the factory you could buy the same loaf for less? Of course you could make the bread yourself for even less because the factory is making a profit, and grow the wheat yourself for even less because the farmer is making a profit. You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because ther…
That's a fallacy like the broken window fallacy. In no way is the consumer helped here, in the end. To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption.
I'm not saying the consumer is helped.
I'm saying that all businesses aim to make money, so the fact that this one is doesn't make it morally wrong.
Further you've ascribed some price we 'should' be paying. There's no such thing, and you can't even say that prices would be lower without it. Tobacco companies haven't lowered prices in countries where advertising is banned.
>To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption
A. Surely the consumer would have bought something else? Although gambling advertising is popular...
B. You are now contradicting yourself. You made the claim that advertising was essentially an economic dead weight. Now you're saying it contributes to over consumption. If advertising only puts up prices, that means we can buy less things than we would be able to.
C. This is assuming only bad things are advertised.
In summary. You're trying to make a quasi economic argument against advertising that isn't really correct. I have my own issues with advertising, so I'm not particularly defending it. But that doesn't excuse making up an argument that doesn't make much sense.
Re: Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
#90It's definitely proof that dynamic ads added via an external script library are a massive security risk, that's for sure. Even if the provider doesn't actually get hacked like Adform here, you're still banking on them being able to reject/filter out malware and malicious ads, which plenty of 'credible' networks seem completely unable or unwilling to do. Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with f…
> Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with fire, especially nowadays. It feels more like having casual unprotected sex. Easy to do in the moment, easy to ignore the risk, painful if "it never happens to me" doesn't come up cats eyes this time. If we called the first programs that self-propagated worms and viruses as per the real world analogy, then I think it's time we rebrand adblockers as "con…
With the difference that casual unprotected sex is enjoyable.
That ad blockers improve security is a side benefit, most people, me included install ad blockers because ads are annoying.
Ad blockers are one of these rare cases where security improve the user experience. Usually, it is the opposite. To go with the condom analogy, most people don't really like condoms, it is the safe thing to do, but they would rather not have it. I don't know anyone who would rather see the ads, but don't because it is unsafe.
In fact I don't really understand why not everyone has an ad blocker, from a personal perspective, it is all upside and no downside. But well, I guess I can't complain, if everyone had an ad blocker, websites would just make ad blocking harder, switch to paywalls or something. So thank you non-adblocked people for letting me visit websites for free without ads :)