Jeff Johnson’s “Stop the Script” (iOS, MacOS). Blocks all JS, including inline. If a site doesn’t have a fallback to serve static content or is not readable when I disable JavaScript… I leave.
FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
151–160 of 238 posts
Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
So there's no criminals now? News to me!
There are still criminals, but did you commit a crime today? How about your friends and family?
I don't understand your point. You say you want to change the culture, and that this has successfully been done in the case of crime, but this is blatantly false: every country has prisons with many criminals in them. In the US in particular (since most HNers probably live there), there are well over 1 million people in custody according to a quick google search, and over 5 million in corrections (so I assume most of those are on parole). Obviously, changing the culture hasn't worked, for there to be so many prisoners, and crimes committed so often that so many police officers are constantly needed. If your "change the culture" thing had worked, you wouldn't need police, or at least not many.
Changing bad behavior by corporations (esp. adtech/advertisers) is likely to be about as successful: it's not going to be done by "changing" the culture, but only by changing the laws, and then enforcing those laws and punishing offenders. Just like a rapist sees nothing wrong with raping a person, or a serial killer sees nothing wrong with murdering many strangers, or a "porch pirate" sees nothing wrong with stealing your Amazon delivery, an ad-tech corporation sees nothing wrong with feeding you psychologically manipulative advertising and blatant malware in search of profit.
Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#153[flagged]
> There is an unwritten social contract here. There isn't, no matter how many times you say there is. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
this has to be a troll account, they keep flip-flopping between advocating both for and against adblockers in every other comment.
Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm with you. I really am. I genuinely miss the web when it seemed wild and free and not just a collection of five companies. The problem is that the old way is dead. And its own popularity killed it. Just for example; There is no way a video hosting site the size and scope of YouTube could have possibly existed when the Internet was a hobby. What do we do with that?
The issue is that I'm generally willing to watch some ads for youtube or such. I get that it's expensive to host that and I get my time/money's worth. But then I load a random recipe site or code docs site and get the page 40% covered by shitty ads for near-pornographic content and I install an ad blocker. So many sites just cramming ads into every single square inch of their sites ruins it for almost everyone else.…
but why are you ok with watching video ads on youtube, but static images on doc sites go too far?
Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#155Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#156[flagged]
>Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content,
That's as may be. I won't use your (that's the generic, "you" here) site if you insist (by blocking me from accessing the site with an ad blocker enabled) on making me watch ads.
But I won't complain about it either. It is, after all, your site and not mine. As such, you can do as you like with it -- and good on you for making your own decisions about your own property!
That said, my browser belongs to me, and I will make my own decisions about what displays in my browser and/or runs on my hardware.
tl;dr: I control my stuff and you control your stuff. If we can come to an agreement, that's great! If not, that's fine too!
Edit: Clarified prose.
Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree with their overall point but this is an either oblivious or bad faith take on their statement.
No, it's not bad faith at all. He's trying to use a collective blame argument: "software engineers" as a group are supposedly to blame for adware, in his argument, rather than a small minority of software engineers. It's absolutely no different than blaming all for the crimes committed by a few members, and paint them all with the same brush.
Just to clarify what I mean is it is a little bit of both: 1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct, and 2. (some) Individuals are actively doing it by actually building the bombardment code.
I feel the same way about software for war fighting, which obviously has higher stakes. The profession itself doesn't push back on the ethics of it AND individual practitioners are actively developing death-dealing software.
Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still criminals, but did you commit a crime today? How about your friends and family?
I don't understand your point. You say you want to change the culture, and that this has successfully been done in the case of crime, but this is blatantly false: every country has prisons with many criminals in them. In the US in particular (since most HNers probably live there), there are well over 1 million people in custody according to a quick google search, and over 5 million in corrections (so I assume most of…
> You say you want to change the culture, and that this has successfully been done in the case of crime,
No. They did not. They explicity said "mostly works".
> but this is blatantly false:
Of course it is. You set up a blantantly false strawman. Please don't use obviously piss weak rhetorical tactics, they make you look bad.
> every country has prisons with many criminals
And every country has varying incarceration rates, they are not all equal.
What should be looked at is countries by cultural attitudes towards crime and incarceration rates .. and the harder question of just how innately criminal imprisoned people are in various countries and whether they are just there from systemic features of a culture.
Again, there are no one size fits all answers and people aren't homogenous.
Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#159>Cyber criminals purchase advertisements that appear within internet search results using a domain that is similar to an actual business or service. When a user searches for that business or service, these advertisements appear at the very top of search results with minimum distinction between an advertisement and an actual search result.
Governments should start holding companies that sell ad space responsible for the ads they run. There's no way any company with the resources of Alphabet or Meta should be serving up phishing ads in their search results.
The fact that Google is presently trying to degrade the performance of ad blockers with Manifest V3 is not a good look. This is why we have consumer protection laws.
Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)
#160[flagged]
> However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly. Let's use Facebook as an example. You can't not get tracked by Facebook if you have a Facebook account. If you use it, they track you and monetize you somehow. All of your interactions with the site, and all your interactions with other users. Blocking as much of Facebook's ads an…
>You can't not get tracked by Facebook if you have a Facebook account. If you use it, they track you and monetize you somehow. All of your interactions with the site, and all your interactions with other users.
Actually, Facebook will track you even if you don't have a Facebook account[0].
In fact, Facebook and others[1] track you whether or not you use their "services" or not.
[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-pr...
[1] Google (but we knew that, didn't we?) and data brokers[2] (but we knew that too, didn't we?)
[2] https://privacyrights.org/resources/registered-data-brokers-...