Adblocking: How about Nah? • Hacker News Board

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#51

Post by inimino » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

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…

> It's also not possible to have a programming language that can't also be used as a coin miner

It's certainly possible.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#52

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

tempodox wrote: post #40

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.

There is also “Brave” but that seems to be a Crome clone.

Any "browser" without its own engine isn't really relevant here, as 95% of their product is being maintained by a third party. This includes Brave, Opera, Gnome Web, and now even Edge.

(I'm admittedly not sure how I'd classify stuff like Pale Moon, which is primarily based off someone else's engine but now backports its own patches.)

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#53

Post by xfs » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

I used to not use ad blockers as I'm not bothered by ads. But it's getting increasingly difficult not to because the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs. It has got to the point that ads and analytics are being added so mindlessly (I saw it first hand as random CPU hogging battery killing trackers were pushed onto my single-page web app by product managers) that browsing without an ad blocker isn't viable anymore performance-wise.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#54

Post by beatgammit » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

guscost wrote: post #8

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…

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

But you can't build a pop-up if you don't have access to create new windows, yet you can still be turing complete. For example, WASM is Turing complete, but it can't create popup windows because it has no access to the DOM.

I think JavaScript should have to request access to use browser APIs, and you should be able to disable access to any of all of them. For example, I should be about to disable:

- network access (disables adding script tags, XMLHttpRequest, fetch) - 2d canvas access - 3d canvas access - WASM

And so on, just like mobile apps, but perhaps more granular. The app should also be able to put a note as to why it needs each specific feature.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#55

Post by amelius » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.

Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.

(Of course, if you measure the success of an economy by the GDP, then it might seem that ads have a positive influence, but that seems a bit like a broken-window fallacy to me).

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#56

Post by OnlyRepliesToBS » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

Criminalize advertising.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#57

Post by IceWreck » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

nutjob2 wrote: post #30

egdod wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's legislation to stop robocalls. How many have you gotten in the last 24 hours? I've had 3, and it's been a pretty typical day.

Meanwhile I haven't gotten any in many years, because my spam call filter works a treat, and always has. Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.

And that spam call filter probably requires proprietary software, which has access to your call logs and theres every chance that the spam filter app company can steal your data.

> Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.

This a nice idea but on the rare occasion that your filter incorrectly blocks the wrong person, you might be annoying someone who really needs to talk to you.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#58

Post by tyingq » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

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.

Chrome deprecating the most useful adblocking apis is a pretty strong shot across the bow signal. (manifest V3 if you haven't heard)

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#59

Post by IceWreck » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

tempodox wrote: post #43

jakelazaroff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Use uBlock Origin, not any of those top search result Google sponsored AdBlock plus or Ghostery (which is owned by an ad company)

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#60

Post by shawnz » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:11 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #50

yborg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome is now moving to a declarative model and it is widely considered to be a downgrade purposely meant to stifle ad-blocking technology.

I think the ideal system would support declarative and non-declarative modes (since a fully declarative system could never account for every possible use case).