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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#531

Post by auslander »

lastpingstandin wrote: post #385
slang800 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money. I feel sad just reading that. Advertisers are paid to deliver targeted psychological manipulation to you, and yet you feel ashamed for making their work less profitable. It's like observing some kind of digital stockholm syndrome.

> targeted psychological manipulation to you This seems exceedingly hyperbolic. With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge. Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc all provide tremendous value to their users while being ostensibly free. Without revenue, they simply wouldn't be able to exist.

> With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge. Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc

Google gets much much more than just showing you ads. You surrender all your digital life using Google free services, and that info is priceless, because 95% of people did the same. What would you say if in 10 years, government, police and businesses will routinely use google data for background checks? It is just one use case.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#532

Post by efreak »

ryacko wrote: post #202
giancarlostoro wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah not to mention malware is often fed through ad services. I want context based ads. Context being the web page I am on not my life story. All it takes is one of these tech giants pulling a Equifax and who knows how much data spills over.

Domain-specific auctions was nice when it was done by Project Wonderful, but there is too much convenience in being able to push advertisements for the entire internet. Designing secure APIs that can’t be misused by a Cambridge Analytica or similar is a hard problem. Google Plus was “breached”.

Project Wonderful is the only ad network I have ever fully whitelisted. I've whitelisted specific networks on specific sites before, but Project Wonderful was not only acceptable to me, I actually occasionally found it useful on the webcomics I saw ads on, as it generally showed off the art style. I (almost) never saw ads for unrelated products, there were no videos, few ads were even animated. To me, Project Wonderful fulfilled the promise of 'relevant advertising' far more than the tracking ads currently do. General location- and demographic-targeted advertising can certainly be annoying, but is not offensive in the manner of tracking my browser history.

I just hope ALPR/facial recognition/etc doesn't get combined with digital billboards to bring internet ads into physical locations.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#533

Post by themacguffinman »

shawnz wrote: post #525
themacguffinman wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you could make that argument and ignore the fact that the declarative API is technically simpler and its battery benefits are apparent from that aspect alone.

It's not apparent that the benefits are significant in any way. They could be minuscule and therefore not worth sacrificing important user experience features like adblocking over. It could also be that because of the reduced expressiveness of the adblocker, more ads are missed, and you might therefore end up with a net increase in the amount of code that has to be executed by the browser. So the declarative API coul…

The Chrome team has already evaluated the change and explain why the benefits are not miniscule [1]:

> In addition to these safety concerns, there are also significant performance costs. In most cases, these costs are not from the evaluation of the extension script processing events, but rather from everything else coordinating the script. That overall performance impact can be very large, even for an extension written as performantly as possible where the JavaScript execution time is negligible.

> As it’s designed today, the blocking version of the Web Request API requires a persistent, long-running process, and is fundamentally incompatible with “lazy” processes - processes that can be set up or torn down as-needed, conserving valuable system resources. There are also significant costs associated with the serialization of the request data, the inter-process communication needed to send that data to the extensions, and the processing of extension responses.

You are free to dismiss the writeup as lies, of course. You're also free to handwave it away by saying "well I don't like the trade-off". But you can't discuss this as if the benefits are not apparent.

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-declarativ...

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#534

Post by vinay_ys »

The article kind of ended abruptly. The point about Encrypted Media Extensions and DMCA and rise of encrypted video playback within browser is an interesting point that needs more elaboration.

The story of how Internet grew and what made it valuable to users and what threatens it – it is worth articulating and illustrating and repeating each year as more and more people take Internet more seriously but don't know about these happenings under the covers.

Also, for the business model innovation to happen, existing business models need to be studied with care and deeper and broader understanding needs to prevail over more and more users.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#535

Post by tim333 »

deanc wrote: post #89
wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the adver…

>forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware

The more worrying ones I've seen don't rely on JS but are just links to bad sites. Downloading software can be a bit ridiculous these days with alongside the main download button about five ads saying "Download Now" linking to god knows what iffy software.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#536

Post by ionised »

brighter2morrow wrote: post #93
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>'Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.' Interesting idea. I just read that over £20bn is spent a year on advertising in the UK. The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues. Netflix is an interesting…

>The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues. I think calling journalism "socially valuable" is debatable.

How else do would you uncover scandal and abuses of power?

The tabloid shit I don't care about, but public interest journalism is something I would never want to be without.

It's absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. The only reason you could possibly be against it is you don't want democracy; in which case, why are you living in one?

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#537

Post by stunt »

Nobody was bothered with ads the way they used to be. But currently you can't use internet without ad-blockers.

Advertisers are pushing too much and they are overheating their market.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#538

Post by skocznymroczny »

amelius wrote: post #55

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 lea…

Are ads really that effective? I'd love for my internet ads to show me stuff I could buy at nice prices. What I get is I bought a mechanical keyboard once and now for two months all ads will be bombarding me with mechanical keyboard offers. Why would I want one if I already got one?

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#539

Post by _archon_ »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #308
afiori wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the moment was when some websites started putting popup ads in every single link and navigation. I a specific instance there was no way to use the site, every link would redirect directly without opening the correct page at all. I literally needed an ad-blocker to be able to use the website.

The uh, seedier parts of the web never stopped using popups it seems.

When referring to popups from such websites, you're not pronouncing it correctly if you're not wiggling your eyebrows.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#540

Post by shawnz »

themacguffinman wrote: post #533
shawnz wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not apparent that the benefits are significant in any way. They could be minuscule and therefore not worth sacrificing important user experience features like adblocking over. It could also be that because of the reduced expressiveness of the adblocker, more ads are missed, and you might therefore end up with a net increase in the amount of code that has to be executed by the browser. So the declarative API coul…

The Chrome team has already evaluated the change and explain why the benefits are not miniscule [1]: > In addition to these safety concerns, there are also significant performance costs. In most cases, these costs are not from the evaluation of the extension script processing events, but rather from everything else coordinating the script. That overall performance impact can be very large, even for an extension writt…

This blog post is highly misleading. For example, they start off with several paragraphs about security/privacy implications, but this change doesn't have any security/privacy implications. That's because they have explicitly stated that they will not deprecate the observational webRequest API, which has exactly the same privacy considerations as the content blocking API. However because the observational API provides "important functionality for which there is no alternative" (to their tracking business), it will not be deprecated. But the content blocking API which also provides important functionality for which there is no alternative (but hinders their advertising business) is being deprecated.

Furthermore here you can see a tweet from Justin Schuh, lead of security and privacy on Google Chrome, where he claims that the "sole motivation is correcting privacy and security deficiencies" (which I just debunked as being a possibility), not performance: https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1134092257190064128

So between Justin Schuh and Simeon Vincent (author of the post you linked), who is lying? It must be at least one of them.

But let's ignore the misleading claims about security/privacy and just focus on the performance issue.

In this post, they include absolutely no numbers or measurements of the performance effects of using the content blocking API. They give some explanation of what is technically required to implement each approach, and certainly the declarative API is a simpler approach, but you made that point already. And I responded to it. Just because the API is "obviously simpler" doesn't mean the performance advantage is in any way significant, and could even be outweighed by the increased ad load due to the less powerful API. It's just not at all obvious from what they are saying here that the change is worth compromising user functionality over.

If you want a source with actual measurements, you should check the Ghostery team's response to the manifest v3 changes: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html

Here are some highlights:

> All content-blockers except DuckDuckGo have sub-millisecond median decision time per request.

> Time to Process a Request in Ghostery (median): 0.007 ms

> Loading Ghostery's Blocking Engine (from cache): 0.03 ms

> Memory Consumption of Ghostery's Blocking Engine (at startup, in Chrome): 1.8 MB

Note that last one: 1.8 MB memory consumption. And they're arguing that we need to be "setting up and tearing down this component as needed" to conserve that "valuable" 1.8 MB. Nonsense.

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