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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#71

Post by tyingq »

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.

Static blacklists versus live heuristics is a pretty obvious compromise, and prone to lose in the long term arms race. That's exactly why Chrome proposed manifest V3...which is basically implementing Safari rules.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#72

Post by csande17 »

danShumway wrote: post #31
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 is really what's to blame for all of this Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations. Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more compl…

> CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches

Aside from CSS and redirect links, all of these features are fairly straightforward. The consequences of disabling the Referer header, for example, are pretty small and easy to understand: you'll stop sending sites information about what links you used to get to them, but some very picky websites that check the header (e.g. image hosts that try to prevent hotlinking) might not work. This means browsers can provide options to let the user choose their preferred balance of privacy, functionality, performance, and "helping us improve your experience".

With JavaScript, on the other hand, it is very difficult for end-users to tell what a given website is doing. Are those hundred kilobytes of minified code a tracking/fingerprinting script, a crypto-miner, or a Hello World app in the UI framework du jour? It's hard for even an experienced developer to know for sure, and it's basically impossible for browsers. Your options are (1) allow everything, (2) use really crummy heuristics like "what domain is this file being served from", or (3) disable JavaScript and give up on using half the websites on the Internet.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#73

Post by ikeboy »

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…

Yes. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762450..., https://www.jstor.org/stable/3003609

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#74

Post by stargrazer »

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.

wait for WebAssembly to be ubiquitous in the browser. Another turing complete language, but faster and smaller.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#75

Post by freehunter »

tapanjk wrote: post #70

> and indeed, some ad-blockers actually track users! Can someone please explain this?

Browser extensions can see quite a bit of your activity. And if they know your browser/IP/OS and the sites you visit, there's money to be made.

Here's an article on it: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/heres-how-that-adblocker-youre...

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#76

Post by bschne »

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…

There was a paper on the psychological effects, i.e. net negative effects on happiness not too long ago [1], I think it was posted on HN a while back. Haven't read it though so I can't comment on the specific findings and the quality.

If anyone has any literature on the other effects mentioned by the parent, I'd be highly interested as well.

1. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cag...

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#77

Post by schoen »

giobox wrote: post #68
elindbe2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the first place to start implementing ad bans is in public spaces, which I hear is common in Europe. I don't have to watch TV so I don't see TV ads. I don't listen to the radio much so I don't listen to radio ads. I can use an ad blocker on the web, yet for some reason the public spaces I inhabit (and help pay for) are full of ads.

Not saying you are wrong, but which European states is this common in? I’ve never noticed this, and many public spaces in Europe have a great deal of poster/bill board style advertisements. I remember reading Paris tried this, but that’s a long way from “common in Europe”.

The only example I know is São Paulo (not in Europe).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#78

Post by lucb1e »

egdod wrote: post #18
jszymborski wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sane world, DNT would be opt-out and enforced by legislation.

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.

I never had one in my life. I'm 27 and have had the same number since I was ~13 or so. I did get a few spam text messages, maybe one every three years.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#79

Post by lucb1e »

kgwxd wrote: post #6

I've been browsing with EME disabled for years, most stuff still works, I just leave sites that don't. If I accidentally hit a site with EME too much, I add the domain to my link block list so I never see links to them ever again. If most people would get on board with that for just a year, it could sway the industry to stop using it.

For anyone else wondering, EME is Encrypted Media Extensions, browser DRM.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#80

Post by Swenrekcah »

fiblye wrote: post #69
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…

Are those really new models? People’ve been subscribing to newspapers forever, and HBO has been a subscription service.

I guess they mean purely via subscriptions. But of course Netflix also uses product placement and probably sells all your viewing and behavioural habits as well.
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