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

uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

digitalescapetools.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 953 posts

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#331

Post by 8note »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #327
jimrandomh wrote: post #282

Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad. I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. (I think average people are making a horrible mistake about this, and are badly cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realize). If my choices are to look at ad…

Meanwhile, aren't companies already making screen captures to check for presentation (on 'smart' TV at least)? The presence of the output can be required, and it can be tested by hashing or some such (within the monitor, signed by TPU) without need of privacy violations. We'll have to have an overlay screen that is a separate device. Then your meta-glasses will be snitching on you ... Mind you some glasses with a bui…

almost guaranteed that those ad blocking glasses would be DRM-ed out of being able to read anything

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#332

Post by kcexn »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #315
titzer wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom. This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a se…

> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it. It's not computers that are the problem, it's people. We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident. What I can't…

I mean. That's how profiteering works for the most part. Extracting wealth from people who don't know better is many times easier than creating more wealth for everyone.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#334

Post by A1kmm »

Ironically given the purported theme of the 'digitalescapetools.com' site, it's behind Cloudflare, and with settings that initially blocked my from accessing it with latest Firefox on Linux (in i3 with a vertically split screen, with the browser taking up part of the screen). It was consistently giving a Cloudflare error that my browser is not supported.

In case anyone else faces the same: it worked when I resized the browser window and reloaded.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#335

Post by beloch »

dofm wrote: post #310

This is the correct decision, IMO. I only use Facebook in a limited capacity (one phenomenal private group whose usefulness is unfortunately simply unmatched elsewhere, one infrequently updated page and a very locked-down, minimal personal profile). I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts, in the Stafford Beer sense, and I think if enough people…

Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media.

There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#336

Post by bitpush »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #315
titzer wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom. This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a se…

> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it. It's not computers that are the problem, it's people. We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident. What I can't…

> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.

This is a simplistic way to think about it. Even the most altruistic physician needs to advertise their services if they hope to make a living out of it. Even the best film maker, the best actor needs to "hit the circuits" to promote their movie.

"Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. Apple can chose not to advertise, since they are Apple (although they do plenty of advertising themselves).

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#337

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

kotaKat wrote: post #272
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your country has sold your safety to private interests. Demand better from them.

I can't. They spent hours listening to the citizens tell them not to enter a 187(g) with ICE and then they spun around and immediately voted to approve the 187(g). Citizens are powerless, period here, and they keep voting in the worst possible interests because the leopards haven't ate their face yet.

Sure you can. Make calls. Send letters. Get petitions signed. Start a fundraiser to run local TV and radio ads. Lease a billboard. Be a pest. Don't stop.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#338

Post by bitpush »

RunSet wrote: post #329
jimrandomh wrote: post #282

Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad. I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. (I think average people are making a horrible mistake about this, and are badly cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realize). If my choices are to look at ad…

This browser extension is so inimical to online advertising Google (world's largest advertising corporation) banned it from the Chrome web store. https://adnauseam.io/ It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.

is it available on Safari? If not, why?

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#339

Post by Terr_ »

allthetime wrote: post #246
wkjagt wrote: post #164

I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the mo…

Ads do a lot more than advertise. They track and collect data about you without you interacting at all. I don’t use an adblocker to not see ads, i use an ad blocker to not load ads or interact with their providers servers at all.

Yeah, I'm less-concerned about seeing an ad than I am about the spyware/surveillance networks behind them.

If some magic-genie offered the tradeoff of "You can't install third-party adblockers, but your privacy will be magically guaranteed", that would be really appealing.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#340

Post by psd1 »

amazingamazing wrote: post #279
psd1 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, still don't understand. The dom is not complete until JavaScript has run, no? So the ublock extension can do dom traversal on the rendered page, but the proxy can only operate at the request level. I assume your not running a headless browser on your squid box, lol. I'm aware that a proxy can tweak html and js, but the js will be challenging to analyse statically. If you're only blocking requests to ad domains…

No, not a traditional one. You would render the entire page in your server, remove the ads, copy the modified html and your client would get ad free copy. You are not blocking anything in the traditional sense. Ask claude to do it, it works.

Thanks, now i understand you. I didn't think of that because it's insane, but maybe i am just old.
Post reply on HN