UBlock Origin • Hacker News Board

Re: UBlock Origin

#241

Post by darkmighty » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 9:09 PM UTC

drostie wrote: post #229

darkmighty wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The respondents have a solid point. You can't criticize them blocking ads, if they're willing to see degrading service because of it. What we lack that would be ideal is full transparency from the site's point of view to know which user is blocking ads and, if they choose so, prevent that user from viewing any content. It should be illegal to 'fake' watching ads just to get the content. This imbalance is indeed a big…

> It should be illegal to 'fake' watching ads just to get the content. You mean, like, by-law illegal? Or just something more like "an illegal state" in a program? Because if we're talking about by-law, that's an awful sentiment and you should feel awful for expressing it. If you mean by-program-state illegal, that's not actually too complicated: add a software dependency on your ad-generation or analytics code to al…

As a user you can always fake watching ads, there's no technical solution from the server side -- you have complete control of your browser (actually just controlling the display is sufficient). That's why websites don't even try to deny service for ad-block users -- it's a waste of time. So yes, I think a legal in the sense of law solution is the only way out. Unless you want to propose something like full DMR'd computers being the norm (essentially iOS everywhere), which I wouldn't want.

Re: UBlock Origin

#242

Post by effie » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #232

baddox wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're right, it's like subscribing to a service that does it for you. You mean the blacklist services? Those are just a list of URL rules for your browser to reject. You still request the content from the web and the content provider obliges. > No, if they had an easy way to enforce your viewing of ads that scaled, I think it's fairly obvious they would Given that I have seen several websites that do this, I think…

That's your choice, but I don't think it addresses whether the action is moral or not (unless you also ascertain that you refrain from all morally ambiguous actions), or whether it's bad manners (as the initiating comment termed it). I think there are a great many slightly immoral things that people do every day and justify by weighing how small the moral infraction is against the perceived benefit to themselves. The…

Mr. kbenson, you and many of your kind are trying to foist on the idea that people filtering the information companies give to them are doing something immoral. I do not think even you believe that, but perhaps there is a profit-seeking based incentive to seed a feeling of guilt in the people who avoid ads, or perhaps to make yourself feel good by verbalizing your frustration with decreasing profits from online ads. Whichever the motivation for such church-like patronizing and false analogies, private profit from ads is not and will not be more important than fundamental freedoms of people to read only that which they want. My recommendation to you is to stop crying and seeking the ones guilty for the decreasing profits from online ads and think of some different business model that instead of bothering people with ads, does something good for them.

Re: UBlock Origin

#243

Post by guelo » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #173

Is there a good ad blocker that can be set to NOT block by default, and that provides an easy, one button or so, interface to turn blocking on for the site currently being viewed? I want to operate under a policy of giving new sites I visit a chance to show me that they can advertise responsibly and blacklist them if they show that the cannot. All the ones I've tried so far (AB, ABP, uBlock) are strongly oriented tow…

uBlock has a big on/off button. You can just leave it off until you want it on.

Re: UBlock Origin

#244

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 9:38 PM UTC

darkmighty wrote: post #239

vbezhenar wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying it should be illegal for me to mute TV when ads are displayed? I must carefully listen to ads and periodically pass an exam to ensure that I indeed listened to them and not thought of other things. What a wonderful feature. For ad companies.

That's an extreme example, but I'll play along. No, I what I mean is TV manufacturers/broadcasters, if they so chose, could make it so that if you use their TV and press the mute button, you accept the TV will inform the broadcaster -- who may deny you service in the future. They should be free to decide if the consumer who doesn't want to watch any ads can watch their content, or if he has to pay subscription. As a…

And you want it to be illegal to stop my TV from phoning home (or to make it phone home false info)? That's nightmarish!

Re: UBlock Origin

#245

Post by gandarojin » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 9:49 PM UTC

justabystander wrote: post #185

onli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that this is actually true. Yes, gorhill started ublock and then handed it over, but chrisaljoudi just continued development and made some changes (like a call for donations). I'm not aware he did anything bad, and in the video he put up sounded just a bit unlucky, not like planning to do bad things ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D1TpddtVUA ). Or see https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/38lf1y/a…

> but chrisaljoudi just continued development and made some changes Yeah, there's more to it than that. Gorhill started it as a free and non-profit solution to help. He gave a lot of the credit to people maintaining the block lists. When he got tired of dealing with it, he transferred maintainership over to one of the devs that showed interest - chrisaljoudi. Who promptly started to monetize it. Like how he stripped…

> And then there's the removal of other developer's attribution. Which he thankfully stopped after everything blew up. Or his personal site which initially gave the impression that he was the sole creator of uBlock.

https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/6850fa0a262b87...

> Can you remove me as collaborator of the project please? Thanks.

> @chrisaljoudi Remove me too from collaborators, please.

They asked for it.

Re: UBlock Origin

#246

Post by tripzilch » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 9:49 PM UTC

darkmighty wrote: post #239

vbezhenar wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying it should be illegal for me to mute TV when ads are displayed? I must carefully listen to ads and periodically pass an exam to ensure that I indeed listened to them and not thought of other things. What a wonderful feature. For ad companies.

That's an extreme example, but I'll play along. No, I what I mean is TV manufacturers/broadcasters, if they so chose, could make it so that if you use their TV and press the mute button, you accept the TV will inform the broadcaster -- who may deny you service in the future. They should be free to decide if the consumer who doesn't want to watch any ads can watch their content, or if he has to pay subscription. As a…

You can't be seriously arguing for that TV muting analytics thing! That'd be, in my opinion, a terrible invasion of privacy.

Also, what if people have their TV plugged into a separate sound system? They could always use the mute button on that. The only way around that would be to equip the TV with a microphone, to check if the expected sounds are in fact audibly in the room ... (I kid)

(Another thought, would they also block deaf people for using the mute button on their TVs? But maybe they could request a special permit or something ...) (again, I kid)

Re: UBlock Origin

#247

Post by onli » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

justabystander wrote: post #185

onli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that this is actually true. Yes, gorhill started ublock and then handed it over, but chrisaljoudi just continued development and made some changes (like a call for donations). I'm not aware he did anything bad, and in the video he put up sounded just a bit unlucky, not like planning to do bad things ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D1TpddtVUA ). Or see https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/38lf1y/a…

> but chrisaljoudi just continued development and made some changes Yeah, there's more to it than that. Gorhill started it as a free and non-profit solution to help. He gave a lot of the credit to people maintaining the block lists. When he got tired of dealing with it, he transferred maintainership over to one of the devs that showed interest - chrisaljoudi. Who promptly started to monetize it. Like how he stripped…

Sorry, but that looks an awful lot like bad-mouthed rumours I don't like at all. https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock mentions gorhill and ublock origin in a positive way and asking for donations is totally fine - it would've been a bit strange if that was the first thing he did after getting the project, in an extensive way, but I did not see that while using the extension. Can't have been too bad. Seeking for donations is especially a good idea since the original developer left the project because it was too much work -> counteract that work with money.

And I saw the offers to give back the project, which does not fit at all to the negative image projected here.

The donations sought are maybe a bit high (which only harms him, since less people might donate), and the one thing that I also don't like. But even that is nothing really bad, setting the current author is what needed to be done, and finding a proper representation of the original author could be in another commit.

There were big expectations that ublock would be totally great, than gorhill left and the new developer (who acted not in a good way to prevent that) got the fallout of the betrayed expectations. And how gorhill acted did not help at all.

Re: UBlock Origin

#248

Post by kup0 » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 10:01 PM UTC

fridek wrote: post #49

beagle3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you think you'll make from ads? Chances are, much, much less than you expect. There are exceptions (e.g. plentyoffish.com), but people I know who run popular niche sites (in the low millions of page views per month, a few tens-of-thousands unique) are happy when they manage to make $1,000/month from ads.

Actually I have no idea. Never made any money from ads, but $1k/month sounds like the kind of money I could use to improve/market the game I'm working on. There is also another question with the same roots - how much money do the sites I read need to make in order to work and maintain the same quality. I'd be glad to pay something like an equivalent of what I'm worth as an advertisement target. There was Google Contr…

The reality is that a large quantity of people will continue blocking ads, so your contribution will amount to nil, unless you can get a non-blocking movement going.

The unfortunate thing is no matter how much we decide to not block ads, the ad companies will continue to take advantage of us with extremely intrusive, unvetted (for safety) ads. You give them an inch, they take a mile. I'm not willing to give them that inch. They will not reciprocate.

If all ad networks were tidy and nice, like The Deck network, I probably wouldn't block ads. But my pre-adblock experience WITH ads is what caused me to block them.

The advertisers had their chance and they blew it. I could care less if all ad-supported sites go away now. You're in bed with ad company scum, you deserve what you get.

If they want to ruin the user experience. I will force the user experience to be better with an ad-blocker.

I understand some content (especially content available for those that are underprivileged) may go away if ad-blocking continues to grow. I don't know the solution, but the solution isn't more ads or not blocking them. Maybe there's some other way... shrug

Re: UBlock Origin

#249

Post by LoSboccacc » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 10:12 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #234

danso wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he wants free content without any convenience to him. He doesn't care about the so-called bigger picture, just the instant gratification he's been entitled to.

I'm very surprised you havent been downvoted yet. The sad truth is that adblockers are not a good thing. The value exchange with online content is free access for ads. Adblockers are just incredibly simple to install and use which allows people to skirt this agreement without issue, however just because something is easy doesn't make it "right". It's always interesting when people argue about privacy without really k…

I agree with that as ads support the content rich internet we all know and love

However ads have become just too much annoying with all the pop left and right and other shady tactics to steal your eyeballs or get you to dow load a virus

It is time user started pushing back, since content owners are currently little to no incentive to push back to ads provider for getting high quality ads.

Adblocking puts the right incentive where its due. They should however play nice to web site owners. If the content owner wants not show content unless an ad is displayed, the ad blocker shouldn't circumvent that

They aren't gonna fixing ads provider getting too far by getting to far on the opposite direction. That will just put more content behind paywalls in the long run.

Re: UBlock Origin

#250

Post by darkmighty » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 10:17 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #244

darkmighty wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extreme example, but I'll play along. No, I what I mean is TV manufacturers/broadcasters, if they so chose, could make it so that if you use their TV and press the mute button, you accept the TV will inform the broadcaster -- who may deny you service in the future. They should be free to decide if the consumer who doesn't want to watch any ads can watch their content, or if he has to pay subscription. As a…

And you want it to be illegal to stop my TV from phoning home (or to make it phone home false info)? That's nightmarish!

False identity is already illegal. You don't have the right to fake you're not who you are for anything legally binding. Is the law currently nightmarish?

I don't think this is a necessity for TVs, I was just playing along the extreme example.

I meant you can stop your TV from phoning home, just don't complain if they stop providing you service. If you instead falsely convey you are watching their ads, that is what would be illegal. Ads are a form of payment so to speak, and by actively concealing it you are making a false payment -- I'd expect that to be illegal just like false identities are.