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FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

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Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#91

Post by hunter2_ »

tyleregeto wrote: post #55
Waterluvian wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feels like a pretty fair approach. If you don’t mind, I’m truly curious why you don’t Adblock? There’s no wrong answer here. ;)

I don't use one either. I actually think ads are a good system for supporting content, and I do want to support the creators of the content I consume. I also have a low threshold for obnoxious sites, and will just bail and not return if I get annoyed.

Do you ever make a purchase due to having seen an ad, ideally by clicking on the ad? If not, then in some sense you're still getting something without paying for it. (You're paying with your time, but that's not valuable to anyone unless it ultimately results in paying with money.) But better to screw the people pushing ads than the content creators!

Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#92

Post by Nextgrid »

hirvi74 wrote: post #29
Waterluvian wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feels like a pretty fair approach. If you don’t mind, I’m truly curious why you don’t Adblock? There’s no wrong answer here. ;)

Not the GP you are asking, but I do not use an ad blocker because I predominantly use Safari as my browser. I would absolutely love one, but after Apple made all those API changes years back, I gave up trying to find one that works well and is privacy friendly.

AdGuard is pretty good when it comes to Safari, and has a way to convert uBlock-style rules into the Safari blocking framework (well at least as much as it can), so you can use Easylist/etc.

Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#93

Post by malux85 »

ryandrake wrote: post #79
userbinator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no wonder people have gotten a lot more ignorant and less observant when they have to constantly fight the bombardment of their attention by unwanted distractions. In that situation of using someone else's device, I've had to move windows half off the screen to be able to concentrate on an article when the ads on the side were constantly distracting me.

Funny how here's HN, a site full of Software Engineers complaining about ad bombardment, and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! We (as a profession) are the ones doing this! "Oh, but boss told me to do it!" some will say, as if it's a good excuse. Regardless of which manager told which developer to do it, at the end of the day, a developer typed in the code and pushed it to prod.…

This is completely meaningless. In any population big enough theres going to be a high variance in behaviours, including morality. Expecting all individuals in a huge collective to all behave "good" with little / no inforcement is incredibly naive at best and dangerous at worst.

Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too - > and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer!

Many ads are designed by creatives and placed and run by dedicated non-software engineering people, including deciding how many are run and their placement (i.e. bombardment or not). Sure engineers programmed the platform, but then you're just blaming the post office for the content of the mail, or the ISP for the content of the internet. What do you expect the software engineers to do? Limit 1 ad per page programatically and then every software engineer on earth must agree to enforce that limit and no matter how much pressure their superiors put on them, everybody holds the line?

This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers because of their life situation (it can still be a minority, and ad bombardment emerges)?

Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#94

Post by yura »

ryandrake wrote: post #79
userbinator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no wonder people have gotten a lot more ignorant and less observant when they have to constantly fight the bombardment of their attention by unwanted distractions. In that situation of using someone else's device, I've had to move windows half off the screen to be able to concentrate on an article when the ads on the side were constantly distracting me.

Funny how here's HN, a site full of Software Engineers complaining about ad bombardment, and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! We (as a profession) are the ones doing this! "Oh, but boss told me to do it!" some will say, as if it's a good excuse. Regardless of which manager told which developer to do it, at the end of the day, a developer typed in the code and pushed it to prod.…

"Every single one of those ads were programmed by... a human! We (as humans) are the ones doing this!"

See? That logic doesn't work so well. "Software engineers" are not a singular entity nor a homogeneous group. To maintain the status quo, it doesn't take more than just a few SWEs willing to implement ads and/or invasive tracking.

Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#95

Post by beedeebeedee »

malux85 wrote: post #93
ryandrake wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how here's HN, a site full of Software Engineers complaining about ad bombardment, and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! We (as a profession) are the ones doing this! "Oh, but boss told me to do it!" some will say, as if it's a good excuse. Regardless of which manager told which developer to do it, at the end of the day, a developer typed in the code and pushed it to prod.…

This is completely meaningless. In any population big enough theres going to be a high variance in behaviours, including morality. Expecting all individuals in a huge collective to all behave "good" with little / no inforcement is incredibly naive at best and dangerous at worst. Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too - > and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! Many…

> This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers

By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that type of behavior (bombardment of ads, surveillance capitalism, etc) and changing the culture

Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#96

Post by hunter2_ »

the_snooze wrote: post #22
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #3

It's always an insane experience when you hop on someone's laptop/PC who has zero ad blocking installed. POV: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/iV3js9pd5IE

It's such a jarring difference when I'm browsing on my phone at home with Pi-Hole vs. when away. So much that it motivated me to set up a split tunnel VPN so all my phone's DNS requests go through my home Pi-Hole regardless of what network it's on.

I used to do this, but lately I just set my phone to use dns.adguard-dns.com as the DNS resolver which gives extremely similar results. It's a Russian operator, but I don't have much of a reason to trust any other DNS operator more.

Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#97

Post by shiroiushi »

ryandrake wrote: post #79
userbinator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no wonder people have gotten a lot more ignorant and less observant when they have to constantly fight the bombardment of their attention by unwanted distractions. In that situation of using someone else's device, I've had to move windows half off the screen to be able to concentrate on an article when the ads on the side were constantly distracting me.

Funny how here's HN, a site full of Software Engineers complaining about ad bombardment, and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! We (as a profession) are the ones doing this! "Oh, but boss told me to do it!" some will say, as if it's a good excuse. Regardless of which manager told which developer to do it, at the end of the day, a developer typed in the code and pushed it to prod.…

How many software engineers here work in defensive cybersecurity? Well, why they do they have jobs? Because of other software engineers who work on the offensive side.

I guess all the cybersecurity engineers should just quit because they're the ones to blame for all the malware...

Similarly, the only reason humans work as police is because humans commit crimes. So humans are really to blame for this problem.

Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#98

Post by shiroiushi »

beedeebeedee wrote: post #95
malux85 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely meaningless. In any population big enough theres going to be a high variance in behaviours, including morality. Expecting all individuals in a huge collective to all behave "good" with little / no inforcement is incredibly naive at best and dangerous at worst. Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too - > and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! Many…

> This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that type of behavior (bombardment of ads, surveillance capitalism, etc) and changin…

Maybe we can apply this line of reasoning to crime too...

Re: FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

#99

Post by shiroiushi »

rty32 wrote: post #49
vunderba wrote: post #25

PSA: Even among tech minded folks, a surprising number of people are still using adblock which is widely known to use sponsored whitelists to allow companies to bypass the filters. The gold standard which works as an extension in both chrome and Firefox is uBlock Origin , annoyingly not to be confused with uBlock. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ub…

Not even that. Most of my software engineer colleagues do not use ad blockers at all. They are definitely aware of them, but they don't use them, and they don't bother to use them. Which is surprising. You would expect that the people who have the ability to write perfect selector rules to block ads and understand how all of this works would be the first to use them. But no.

I've seen this too, and we see it right here on HN every time this discussion comes up. You can even see it on this discussion just above: there's a bunch of people here who just don't want to use them because they want to "support content creators" or whatever. There's even some people here who will tell you you're a bad person for blocking ads.

I find it baffling too.

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