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Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

0x44.xyz

931–940 of 962 posts

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#931
post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, instead consumers pick products because of advertising. What an improvement.

Being prescriptive about human nature will always be frustrating. You and I can argue about what consumers “should” do but the reality is they will always pick the highest perceived benefit at the lowest perceived cost, even if deeper technical knowledge or improved ideological perspective would change those choices.

Yes, and so you should always assume every (large) company is lying through it's teeth as hard as it can, because it is in their best interest to confuddle the consumer as much as possible...

It's not ideaology to want things to work. Last time IE lost because it lost sight of the fact that it was utter dogshitte.

Chrome is now utter dogshitte, users will (eventually) be unable to ignore that...

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#932

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Treating cancer is immoral. Miss me with this shit!

Advertising is cancer?

Yes. Advertising is inherently manipulative, a cancer not of the brain, but of the mind. Advertising is also a exploitation vector. Removing a security threat that's damaging my mind is like removing a physical health threat that's damaging an organ.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#933

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument just doesn't hold water, though. That's like saying Y Combinator shouldn't be the only company paying for our tech forum. It's perfectly fine unless Y Combinator decides to ruin HN it somehow. And, if they did, wouldn't people just switch to one of the many HN clones overnight? That's what's known as FUD - "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". FUD is often spread about the present, but it's often just as usefu…

Users were supposedly massively exiting Reddit when that cesspool imploded, but if you find one of those threads through any search engine and click around on usernames who were leaving their "last messages ever, fuck reddit, I'm out", I'd estimate about 95% of them never left. Do it if you have 10 minutes to waste, it's easy to check and changes your opinion about how much people are willing to endure to avoid actua…

> Users were supposedly massively exiting Reddit when that cesspool imploded

According to who? Tech journalists?

> 95% of them never left

Probably 95% of a VERY small number.

> it's easy to check and changes your opinion

Actually, I'd encourage you to take into account my theory that an incredibly, INCREDIBLY small percentage of Reddit users were making a LOT of noise about leaving Reddit, and it made a lot of people believe that there was a mas exodus, when most people didn't care at all. (What was the mass exodus supposed to be over, anyway? Blocking 3rd party apps? I know that HN is a tech worker echo chamber, but really, how many people out in the wild even trust 3rd party apps at all?)

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#934
post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that makes it better why? Come on, this is pretty low hanging fruit.

Because it is an independent codebase free from any design decisions from Google. Chromium derivatives cannot stray far from Google’s interests.

> Chromium derivatives cannot stray far from Google’s interests.

Says who? It's opensource and has a BSD license, you can literally do whatever you want with it.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#935
post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'crypto grifting' is something you can turn off completely, it's there as a way to make the browser sustainable without accepting payments from Google to make it the default search engine. I'd argue its far more trustworthy than modern day Firefox/Mozilla, they're not exactly the second coming these days. What makes Firefox more trustworthy?

"You can turn off the evil feature that evil people added" isn't really an argument that's gonna convince me that evil people are trustworthy. Tell me I can turn off the evil intent, and not just one of its manifestations, and we're in business. But you can't tell me that.

By that logic you'd have to extend the same argument to Firefox, Chrome and Edge. All have a bunch of "evil" (which by your own definition evil = thing that makes a business money) things that can be disabled.

Once you've done that you're back to the same old question - why is any better/safe/trustworth than Brave, which is arguably the only one that's gone out of their way to make sure its sustainable and not reliant on farming user data to the highest broker.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#936
post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'crypto grifting' is something you can turn off completely, it's there as a way to make the browser sustainable without accepting payments from Google to make it the default search engine. I'd argue its far more trustworthy than modern day Firefox/Mozilla, they're not exactly the second coming these days. What makes Firefox more trustworthy?

That's kind of like saying "yeah this is a mafia pizzeria but you can come eat at hours when the goons aren't there". Besides, why does Brave need that much funding? All they make is a Chromium wrapper, Google does all the work for them. They're not really an actual alternative in that sense, they just stuff it full of adblock, crypto, and god knows what. There was even a thing recently where it autoinstalled a VPN.…

> and god knows what

That right there sours your whole argument. Your entire reasoning here is based on "they're probably doing something dodgy", ignoring the bit about it being opensource, or that Firefox and Chrome are at the very minimum on equal terms of "dodgyness", as you'll no doubt already know.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#937
post #919
post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you only want capitalism Yeah, I prefer not to die in a coal mine at ripe age of 14, so a coal baron can increase their wealth by 0.001%.

Totally Capitalism is defensible as an economic system It is indefensible as a social system. It must be subordinate to the social arrangements

I agree. The endgame for capitalism is a mega-corp roleplaying as state. You get food, housing, and so on, but you may never leave it. You will live however long the CEOs need you to live and not a second more.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#938

Even if bigs exists to work around what Google is doing, that isn’t the right way forward. If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers). Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.

Firefox is very nice these days, and will prompt you to import all your Chrome data if you haven't opened it in a while. It's a very easy thing to do, and U-block origin works on it.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#940
post #630
post #584

Reading the comments, I see a lot of hate for Firefox. What is the explanation for this (other than people not trying Firefox and assuming it's inferior)?

Mozilla sells user data to third parties. Their statement: The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise c…

I wouldn't say that this implies they really are selling user data. By that definiton of sale, I can understand why their lawyers would consider it almost impossible to fully comply with.

I totally understand why the Act would use such vague wording and cast such a wide net, considering the underhanded actions of ad companies. But I also understand no longer feeling comfortable guaranteeing that nothing that could reasonably be argued to fall under this definiton would ever happen. Heck, I think some lawyers might argue that even just sending an anonymous GET request to any web server would qualify (disclosing personal information to a third party). Seems like the only way to stay fully compliant is to ship a browser with only an offline mode, haha.

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