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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#41

Post by csande17 »

lukevp wrote: post #23
kgwxd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript isn't from nature. It could have been designed so that it didn't enable those things, but it wasn't. It's probably more accurate to say the ability browsers grant JavaScript is to blame, but that's just splitting atoms.

It's not possible for a system that can communicate remotely to prevent tracking on some level by using unique IDs and fingerprinting even without JS. It's also not possible to have a programming language that can't also be used as a coin miner, it's just a CPU based operation and there's no way to discriminate between user desired computation and exploitative computation. Your point about pop up ads is valid in that…

I really, really want to see someone write a coin-miner using only HTML and CSS.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#42

Post by skybrian »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #12

I always thought the Do Not Track option was naive. It did nothing to stop tracking except beg.

Incognito mode enforces what do-not-track was supposed to do, and there, the cat-and-mouse game continues. But the reason Chrome can continue to support this is that most people don't use it.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#43

Post by tempodox »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #32
tempodox wrote: post #29

It's somewhat ironic that this page contains the most impressive procession of banner ads that I've seen in a long while. And almost all of them keep changing every thirty seconds or so. Apparently I've been successful in systematically avoiding sites that would torture me like that. They may succeed once but only at the price that they won't see me again.

I can't even tell; I'm using an ad blocker.

+1. I seem to have lost mine. I should really go and get a new one.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#44

Post by tyingq »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #34
dontbenebby wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence my use of NoScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript

It's crazy Steve Gibson (of all people) calls this too impractical to use. If you're a total tech-novice, sure, but as a power user it's fine. I'm blocking ycombinator.com right now. I can still submit this. If something doesn't work, just click the icon and trust its domain. If pictures don't show, trust a CDN. Amazon, Paypal, 99% of sites work with an initial adjustment of trust settings.

The percentage of sites that function without JavaScript enabled is decreasing over time.

Things like React are accelerating that curve. Even for sites that could function without it, they are throwing up hands with "welp, they can't disable it anyway because other sites...so let's not test that use case anymore."

I don't like it, but it is what it is. Technical people aren't going to drive the decision to work without JS. In the end, it's a cost decision, with the usual PHB[1] outcomes.

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=PHB

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#45

Post by yborg »

ori_b wrote: post #25

Something is different in the arms race this time. Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.

And ironically Safari has the worst adblocking capability of the 3. Open source is the only effective weapon against corporate control of software.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#46

Post by danShumway »

microtonal wrote: post #26
danShumway wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legislation doesn't stop criminals. The best way to stop browser tracking online is to make it technologically impossible for malicious actors to track the browser. Everything else is just a band-aide.

Legislation doesn't stop criminals. But these are incorporated entities. If proper privacy laws are/were put in place and enforced, they would have to honor DNT. This is as much a failing of these companies to respect privacy as it was the failing of governments to protect privacy of their citizens. Besides violating privacy, ad networks have also been a proxy for malware. They should have been sued into oblivion for…

It's a matter of what order you want to tackle things in. I'm not interested in only stopping the worst actors. I want to stop all tracking, and if I can't, I'll settle for stopping some of the worst actors through solutions like legislation.

I understand that some people come from the opposite direction -- they try to stop the obvious bad actors with laws, and if those laws fail, then they'll look for solutions that put control in the hands of individuals.

I don't dislike those people, but my perspective is that people who focus on tracking by corporations don't have a good perspective of the entire problem.

> Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.

Amen on that. I'd like to see the ad industry collapse, but that's a separate conversation.

I'm not convinced that pervasive advertising to the degree we currently see is good for society as a whole. I would encourage people to block ads even if they didn't include any trackers at all. I would even block ads off of one-way mediums like the radio if I could.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#47

Post by mikeash »

emptyparadise wrote: post #17
guscost wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, you can build any program with a Turing-complete language.

Being Turing-complete seems a bit overkill for a hyperlinked document platform.

Yes! All the replies here are missing the point completely. It’s not that JavaScript is somehow uniquely bad among programming languages. It’s that the entire idea of putting a general purpose programming language into the system was a bad idea.

99% of my web browsing shouldn’t need it. Every site I visit uses it, but almost all of them could be built just fine without it.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#48

Post by IceWreck »

grenoire wrote: post #10

In the end, it's an arms race, and I don't think either side is giving up on it anytime soon. The only thing that concerns me is that one side has way too much money, while the other side has way too much time. Let's see who wins.

There is no winner here. Its Whac-A-Mole. Ad companies try some kind of new technique to stop their ads from being blocked.

Users innovate new ways to block them. Its a never ending cycle.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#49

Post by mikeash »

booleandilemma wrote: post #7
gergles wrote: post #3

Regrettably, nobody bothers to mention that JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this. If unnecessary use of JavaScript earned the same sort of derision that "best viewed in IE 6" banners did, we wouldn't be where we are today. That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it ena…

JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware Isn’t this like saying atoms are to blame for nuclear warfare? Atoms enabled nuclear weapons?

Yes, if the world had functioned just fine without atoms, and then atoms were invented and foisted on everyone for little gain.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#50

Post by hombre_fatal »

yborg wrote: post #45
ori_b wrote: post #25

Something is different in the arms race this time. Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.

And ironically Safari has the worst adblocking capability of the 3. Open source is the only effective weapon against corporate control of software.

Safari's (Webkit's) declarative adblocker is really good while optimizing for performance and battery life.

Have you tried 1Blocker X?

Though, for fun, I've rolled my own Safari extension for content blocking. You get 90%+ of the way just concatenating lists of ad domains and feeding them into the blocker. But, for example, you can encode all of Easylist as content-blocker rules.

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