181–190 of 241 posts
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Reddit forces you to download the app now. You can scroll like 2-4 pages worth of content and then it'll pop up asking you to open in app. On every page you navigate to from within the website you'll first get a pop up asking to choose between browser and reddit app.
It's worth noting that Reddit has a vibrant community of excellent third party apps, none of which display Reddit ads.
Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…
Actually, Web Components and Shadow DOM bother me more than Web Assembly. You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside and this creates an impenetrable barrier for content blockers. We've already seen examples of whole web pages transformed into a shadow-dom web component.
I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…
In the end solved my attack of the guilts by becoming a subscriber. However, I had no sympathy for them no getting money form ads. That was totally self inflicted. The ad blocker, the thing they were blaming, wasn't the problem. Without the ad blocker I would not be visiting their site at all.
Who is honestly clicking on all these ads that makes advertising worthwhile? I am honestly baffled sometimes how this all works... In my 30+ years of internet usage in one form or another I have rarely, rarely, rarely ever clicked on a freakin ad. Yes, I've generally had them blocked for the most part. But when they aren't blocked, I see what the content is and why would I even want to click on one! Color me confused…
I think the reason the advertisements have become so good at targeting her is because she likes looking up clothing on Pinterest.
I feel that we've done ourselves a disservice by referring to them as ad blockers rather than content blockers or, better yet, virus blockers. With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view. Could you imagine visiting a…
Many ads are not computer viruses, but almost all of them are malicious.
I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…
I occasionally go The Guardian's web site, and they displayed a nag say I should not be blocking their way of making money out of a non-subscriber. I thought "fair enough" and disabled my ad blocker. About 2 minutes later, which is what it took for their web site to load with the ad blocker off, I turned it back on again. In the end solved my attack of the guilts by becoming a subscriber. However, I had no sympathy f…
I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…
Does the new owner, under their own power, set about adding ads to their site? Do they install a 3rd party ad tool that does the dirty business? Or does some smooth talker show up and tell them they'll take care of everything for a modest cut of the profits and that person makes a hash of everything?
Because it really does feel to me like there's a certain detachment from the userbase. If the owners are the actors instead of just complicit, maybe they're 'doing us a favor' by showing us how they really feel.
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> With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view. I don't understand this. How are malicious ads the primary way to compromise a computer?
It depends on the ad. In the before time, long ago, ads were a simple static image or body of text. And in that case, while not impossible, it's rather hard to compromise a computer with a static image or block of text. You'd have to have a fairly specific image crafted to adversarially target a specific bug in the rendering of images to get code execution, and thus compromise a computer. It is no longer the before t…
It just seems like a huge security hole and is not in the interest of ad networks for multiple reasons.
They might have JS in ads, but isn't that from the ad network's infrastructure.
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Don't paint webassembly as something terrible. Webassembly does not add anything substantial to what's already in web. You could compile C code to JavaScript before. Webassembly does not provide new API unavailable from JavaScript. Webassembly is just an optimization. Some code will work faster and consume less memory, that's all. You could write website which paints itself on canvas with JavaScript years ago. The fa…
The threat of WebAssembly is that it may encourage more sites to require users to allow client-side code execution to work. For those of us who aren't trusting enough to allow this, it means that the web gets smaller even faster than it already is.
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The threat of WebAssembly is that it may encourage more sites to require users to allow client-side code execution to work. For those of us who aren't trusting enough to allow this, it means that the web gets smaller even faster than it already is.
It seems like if you replace WebAssembly with JavaScript in this comment it makes just as much sense. What is different about WebAssembly?
That's pretty much the entire difference. It's a difference of degree more than of kind. As I said, Javascript is making much of the web inaccessible to me, and WebAssembly, if it becomes popular, will only accelerate this loss.