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The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

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Re: The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

#181
post #71

Or, in other words, FBI now recommends using Android :-) It's baffling how much better uBlock Origin + Firefox experience on Android is compared to any iOS ad blocker I have tried. They kind-of work but let half of the ads through.

Get Firefox Focus for iOS. Set it as the ad blocker for Safari. Works pretty well. No proxy involved. Extra-tricky ads still get through.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-focus-ios

Re: The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

#183
post #95

It is infuriating that Google seems to be doing nothing about scam ads. For years I have been seeing "Click to install iPhone update!!!" ads on YouTube mobile. Easy to have huge profit margins when your company hires no humans to do things like customer support and ad vetting.

And fraudulent nutritional supplements. And weird speech-synthesied rousing music: ‘Jim worked for a big electronics manufacturer, and had an idea. s for the people. They they wouldn’t let him make it. They stole his idea and made a bad version. Now Jim is making s himself that are twice as good and only a quarter the cost! Buy one to support Jim and stick it to the big evil corporation!”. How did that get to be a ge…

I get so so many of these speech-synthesized "Don't buy solar panels! You can get them for free!" scam ads.

Re: The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

#184
post #71

Or, in other words, FBI now recommends using Android :-) It's baffling how much better uBlock Origin + Firefox experience on Android is compared to any iOS ad blocker I have tried. They kind-of work but let half of the ads through.

Sounds like you need to try more.

1Blocker is fantastic.

AdGuard for iOS is fantastic.

MagicLasso is free.

You can even run uBlock on Kagi Orion if that's your thing.

I use one of the above + NextDNS* and am entirely ad free all the time everywhere.

* See also the new AdGuard DNS.

Re: The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NextDNS (or a similar DNS ad-blocker solution like PiHole) works wonders on iOS.

This assumes you never leave the house (which is true for me lol)

No, install the .mobileconfig profile (or app) and enjoy it everywhere.

Re: The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

#186

Pretty late to the game there, FBI. There are examples going back decades of drive by downloads and exploits from ads on popular websites. It's not enough to avoid shady websites. Any website filled with ads is already a shady website.

Any good case studies to back this up? I’m interested to read more into it.

Re: The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

#187

The same applies to corporate networks - there is no good reason why the default office computer installations for your employees should have a browser without an ad blocker, there are some (not huge, but some) security benefits that make it a reasonable IT policy almost everywhere.

Protip: sell it to exec as a productivity bonus, the reduced cognitive load and accidental missclick a would add up in any medium of large business.

Re: The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

#189

Here are a few things I do to combat nasty websites: - blacklists entire domains using wildcards (using an "unbound" DNS resolver and forcing all traffic to my DNS resolver, preventing my browser to use DoH -- I can still then use DoH if I want, from unbound) - reject or drop a huge number of known bad actors, regularly updated: they go into gigantic "ip sets" firewall rules - (I came up with this one): use a little…

I venture onto the Asian and Russian parts of the Internet semi-regularly, and in all these years I have seen perhaps one or two sites with IDN that were actually useful to me.

Re: The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web

#190

At this point it's irresponsible for browsers not to come with ad blocking preinstalled.

You are correct ads have become popups of late 90s. Yet, very few browsers do, as most of them depend directly or indirectly on ad revenue. AFAIK only Orion browser [1] comes with full 1st party and 3rd party ad and tracker blocking, by default. [1] https://browser.kagi.com

Brave browser is literally built to block ads.
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