It is my understanding that this is not an official port by Raymond Hill and that his name is being used without his permission. If someone knows what the actual story is on this, I'd love to know.
I knew it was owned by someone else, I didn't expect it to have been sold to Adblock Plus though! I wish they would just hand the domain over to gorhill. It feels shady that they squat on it for the name recognition.
Yeah .. I dislike the route that Adblock Plus went too, they make a ton of money off of lists like EasyList, and their silly Acceptable Ad (read: how is this not extortion) program.
AdBlock Plus is different from AdBlock. AdBlock is owned by an unknown entity and the source has been based on ABP since 2016. ABP is owned by Eyeo Gmbh (which I think was founded by the original developers of ABP).
Aljoudi hijacked the "uBlock" name from gorhill (apparently because gorhill was more concernted about building a good tool than maintaining trademark protection, and I guess no one volunteered to donate (para)legal work), so handing it back would be a "wish" indeed.
uBlock Origin really really needs to do something to distinguish itself from uBlock. Every thread I read about ad blockers has a comment trying to clarify.
How can it distinguish itself without giving up the name that Aljoudi (and not AdBlock) has been hijacking?
Imagine if a company launched a (non-Google) "Chromium" browser or non-Microsoft "Explorer" or "Edge", how would the authentic developer defend against that? (Probably with a trademark suit, which is a dificult strategy for a tiny open source project).
gorhill could create a brand new name to replace Origin, but hat runs the risk of losing even more people to the knockoff "uBlock".
Perhaps "uBlock Official" would be a better name than "uBlock Origin", but ultimately it comes down to a sog of hard marketing work to protect and build mindshare.
I feel the same way. If it contains the word uBlock, it's going to loose no matter what.
Maybe fork uBlock Origin, give it a new name, update the current uBlock Origin official pages to point to the new one, keeping links in older threads still relevant for a while.
I'd do my part and promote the new name as much as possible. I'm already spending a lot of time typing out the explanation about the current name whenever I get a chance.
I’m pretty sure Eyeo did register the uBlock trademark, and has a good case to sue for someone implying through their product’s name that it’s “the official” uBlock.
There definitively isn't a good case for Eyeo. See: First To File vs First To Use. The US is a First to Use country for trademark law. I'm not saying it's a clear and cut case at all but I'd actually bet on a Judge siding with uBlock Origin if it ever went to court, which is unlikely.
I had this backwards. How in the world did AdBlock end up with rights to the uBlock name if 'uBlock' is a fork of what was originally called 'uBlock' but then became 'uBlock Origin'? Seems like the fork should have been required to change it's name. EFF should get in on this and resolve it once and for all.
I really think it was a mistake not to rename the project completely after the Origin fork. It's super confusing, especially since most of us still refer to Origin as "ublock" for short.
On both Google and DDG ublock.org is still the first match when you search for "ublock". I wonder how many people install this crap extension by mistake every day.
This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.
Indeed. Once I finished the article I sat there and had to think: "what am I supposed to be feeling after reading this?". I think they want us to be angry that EasyList is only maintained by 4 people. Or maybe just be angry that EasyList exists. I'm not really sure.
My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.
I was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person editing each page in textmate.
Maybe Autotrader has hundreds of thousands of template, CSS, and JS files with those paths hardcoded. Imagine the hell it would be to work on that website.
Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.
why should an e-commerce focused site do anything at all to avoid the term 'advert' in the first place? anyone there is ostensibly interested in commerce/advertising..
list maintainers should be responsible regression test their lists for normal content and not do dumb things
this is also a problem with bad/unscrupulous spam listings which list domains based on unsubstantiated requests, etc
It's probably not that it's hard to type sed -i but that they can not change URLs so easily. It might be price indexing engines, external partners authorized to edit certain paths, and any number of other things.
If parts of your audience blocks ads then it's probably a good idea to test your web site with uBlock installed, just as you already test with Safari and MSIE.
It's specifically not a good idea to rely on the block list maintainers who will have a hard time separating earnest bug reports from all the bogus ones who think they've found a clever way to avoid blocklists.
Isn't it a bit disconcerting that we're so used to articles telling us what to feel that, when they don't do that, we get confused?
Maybe it's good just to have a reminder that much of our infrastructure is maintained by volunteers. Sometimes important policy decisions get made by whoever showed up and started doing the work in a way that looks competent to others.
Articles are supposed to have a point, a goal, etc. The goal might be persuasive, it might be to establish facts, it might be to argue for a specific change or against one. It's up to the reader to agree or disagree with what the article has laid out.
But we need something to agree or disagree with. In this case, I had no idea what the point of the article was (beyond a vague feeling that the author doesn't like EasyList).
Why does an article necessarily have to have a point? Why cant it just lay the facts and let the reader process them and judge them and feel about them how ever the reader wants?
Here's the forum thread in question. The suggested fix from EasyList was to rename a folder on AT's server from /advert/. As AT explained this folder was part of the URL for hundreds of thousands of cars and that the URL was used not only by the website, but other systems as well that move data around. In the end of the thread, you can see that the problem was fixed between EasyList and Autotrader.
Impressed that they respond in a timely manner, as per the article. The part you excluded from the quote is sort of the crux of my statement. I made no comment to the how they respond.
I haven't looked, but I'm guessing ... When you list a second hand car for sale, that's an "advert". Sometimes the adverts are the content you want :-)
Also as a quick aside, they mention that AutoTrader would've had to fix "hundreds of thousands of pages" and I'm calling bullshit. No site of that magnitude is using straight up HTML pages. Even if it's a jekyll thing where you'd have to change a bunch of templates, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of the required changes could be done in a few seconds with any decent text editor.
I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth here.
I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages.
The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav.
I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups of pages used subtly different html it was a real mess.
It took a long time for them to get all the pages replicated in a templating system to avoid seo loss.
The thing is though that's a bad system, whether EasyList is prompting the changes, or the SEO, etc. and it feels like they're trying to pin "we had to fix thousands of pages" on EasyList as though their shit workflow is EasyLists' fault.
The thing is is that AutoTrader is a website that advertises cars, they don't even have any other advertising on their site. And because EasyList doesn't like a word in their URL, the website breaks through no fault of their own. If the owner of the website is doing nothing wrong, the onus is on the owner of the blocking technology to come up with a system that works correctly.
I just visited the AutoTrader site (from the UK), and uBlock Origin blocked 34 requests related to ads and tracking. I recall in the past having been surprised at the number of extra requests being made via their site. They don't serve only vehicle listings.
Ooops, that's my misread of the forum posting from the AutoTrader team. They have 2 sites, one public, the other is a portal for car dealers to post cars in which they stated does not serve ads. The problem they were having though is that the ad blocker was affecting popup menus within their site.
In that light, I agree with your original comment, though it's amusingly ironic that their portal site was negatively impacted by mitigation measures against the kind of things their public site engages in.
I've been working in big tech companies for too long. When I got to that part, I thought to myself, "Wait, they think hundreds of thousands is a lot of content? That should be fixable over someone's lunch break!"
What big tech company do you work at that can edit other people's websites to link to renamed URLs? I am sure that "mv /www-data/adverts /www-data/foobar" is a trivial operation. Making links work (adblock will block the 302 you skillfully put in place) is harder.
Ahh--the lunch break comment assumed that this was a local change to hundreds of thousands of pages, so disregard that. I was commenting more on the notion that hundreds of thousands of files/urls/database records is a lot. It sounds like a lot to the average reader.
I used to work at a commercial website host where the primary product they sold was "promo pages for your xyz business and abc products" and each and every single page was manually updated down to the head/footer and statically served. They had "templates" in a notepad, and you copy and paste it out and edit as needed. Which means that after you make the initial creation, any subsequent edit (including things like headers, meta tags, etc) needs to be done by hand. This product was still being sold very very recently, and they have a lot of clients (like in the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue)
I wouldn't be at all surprised if AutoTrader used manual editing for everything, with no access to scriptability.
Not everyone is using jekyll or any modern stacks ... the echo chamber is strong here. I guarantee you 65% of the Internet is still being edited by hand.
You would be surprised. Many years ago I worked on a CMS for a large household-name client. Their entire website was made up of individual HTML pages. No shared header, footer, or anything; if you wanted to update one of those, you would be updating it thousands of times.
My task was to move all of that into a very minimal CMS. All the content would be in flat files, and the page itself would load the header, footer, content, etc.
Because every page was different, but mostly similar, I wrote an Emacs extension that let you identify the content areas (it tried some heuristics and you could guide it) and it would do the extraction and emit the flat content file and the replacement JSP file.
What you have to realize is that many people have systems that are designed for 1 "thing" and have since "scaled" that up 1000x. People still treat their website as a directory of arbitrary HTML. People manage 1000 servers like they managed their one and only very first server. It is the natural way of growth. Engineering is figuring out when that model doesn't apply anymore, and changing it. Engineering is in short supply, however, leading to stories like mine above or the "thousands of pages" blocked by EasyList.
If HN is going to upvote suspicious articles, maybe we could have a separate voting system in the corner of the HN article page, for guessing whether some third party initiated the article.
> "It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this," said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program.
If only there were a business service that might help me navigate this perilousness of which I have just learned, so that I might better monetize.
Easylist is not well maintained, and sometimes they have really petty arguments with website owners instead of just fixing rules that break actual content. For example, they have a specific list of sites that are not allowed to show Amazon affiliate links. They don't block all such links as a policy or anything, it just breaks specific websites. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=37621623#p3762...
I've read the EasyList forum thread linked above for the AutoTrader site, and the issue there was indeed a generic rule that just breaks every link containing advert. That is some monumental, unfathomable stupidity. And instead of realizing that, they have the gall to refer to that rule existing for a very long time!
The same issue was seen with Spamhaus and similar IP block services for eMail spam. What were selfless intentions quickly morphed into ineffective, power-crazed gatekeepers and extortion artists that have made SMTP an unusable protocol unless you are Google or Amazon.
I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work anymore.
I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website.
But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussions with publishers told me that they're more interested in convincing their users to give up on ad blockers rather than face the fact that people are not going to abandon ad blockers.
This looks interesting. We had problems with AdBlocks breaking functionality on the parts of our pages that talk about ads. Super annoying. We basically had to rename all the assets and file paths to words with no meaning.
I had an issue with this recently, where buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked.
I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content?
I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long the issue was there before I realised it :/
Depending on how they're implemented, buttons linking to your Twitter and Facebook pages can double as trackers for Twitter and Facebook.
Anyway. People rarely intend to block legitimate content. At the same time, it's not always easy to tell what is and isn't legitimate when you're writing fairly general rules.
> buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked
Was everything hosted on your domain there? If they have images hosted by twitter/facebook that's enough for them to track users which is what these lists don't like.
My users were complaining they couldn't see some avatars on my forum. I realized it's because I generate a UUID for each upload and bucket the files into folders such that a hex ID of "ad73a7a8b9" has the URL of "/ad/ad73a7a8b9".
I realized the blunt force approach of various adblockers will block anything on "/ad/...". Some would even block "/ad...". I found that a bit annoying.
The name "fanboy" sounds familiar, so it might have been that.
Seems a bit heavy-handed to me personally. I absolutely want to block intrusive ads and tracking, but this was a bit OTT. It also must have been included by default with uBlock Origin, as I didn't add it myself.
Buttons as in CSS stylized anchor elements point to twitter.com/whatever, or loading javascript, added dynamically, etc?
Because most social media buttons have trackers, so...
Nope, I'd understand that. See my other replies - it was pure HTML, simple `a` and `img` tags, with locally hosted images. The block rules were based purely on very generic CSS class names, which is a bit silly IMO.
>buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages
So, was it simple <a> elements linking to your Twitter/Facebook page?
Or was it maybe a metric ton of obfuscated JS fetched from a Twitter/Facebook CDN, that would relay every bit of data about your visitor, and as a side-effect display a button?
Nope, see my other replies - it was pure HTML, simple `a` and `img` tags, with locally hosted images. The block rules were based purely on very generic CSS class names, which is a bit silly IMO.
>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.”
Why would you ever want your adblocking list run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization"?
Sounds like they would be balancing publisher monetization and serving malware and intrusive ads to users. Exactly the right kind of people we need to be running a adblocker list.
Yea seriously.. that dude seems so out of touch. Unfortunate that they set cadence of adding exclusion rules when they really could have leveraged this situation to make a real change on a lot of websites.
Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad.
However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.
Kinda had the same reaction, but if you went to your friend's house every week and drank all his beer an never gave anything back, eventually that would make you feel bad.
If I'm getting something that required skill and labor, 'moral fiber' suggests some quid pro quo. How are you going to reciprocate?
At some point someone observed "we can profit off of audiences" so that answer was "by being an audience member." But now it's kind of a mess, and either we haven't found a better model or inertia and collusion have prevented it from arriving.
I'm not sure I really agree with the analogy, but there are other approaches that don't involve assaulting my senses. For instance, they could just flat out charge money for it.
On a tangentially related note, I think there's a special place in hell for the engineers that created gas pumps that display ads while fueling. Those things are pure, unadulterated evil.
It would be better if your friend insisted you bring beer instead of launching into a sermon or his MLM pitch, sure.
But we’re talking about moral fiber. For some people “they hit me first” is not ethically sound. There’s some ambiguity here about who hit first, but rather than a fair exchange we are getting what is rapidly approaching brinksmanship. Nobody is really in the right here.
But we also can’t seem to just go back to a paid model for high production values. We are satisfied with amateur work and underpaid professionals slowly burning a nest egg and hoping something changes. The advertisers are the only ones with a hand out, so they get to set the agenda.
I had hopes Brave was going to alter this trajectory but there seems to be some regulatory capture there. i kind of wonder if they hired some ad people and charisma won over the origin story.
Sometimes I have to use a friend's computer and there's a little too much "moral fiber" for my liking. Adult ads, trackers etc. I explain how easy it is to get rid of and before you know it I've installed ublock origin and I can get back to depravity.
I fear that with adblocking nearing 25% market penetration we're going to see fundamental changes in the way ads are delivered in response. Maybe a transition from third party ad servers to locally hosted ads that have to be added to block lists individually. Maybe YouTube will start inserting unblockable ads directly into the video stream.
Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.
If that happens, projects like Adblock Radio will hopefully step in to make "unblockable" ads more tolerable, by automatically turning the volume down for example.
I was responding to the possibility of YouTube just embedding ads directly into the video to thwart current ad-blocking techniques. If that happens the audio would already be playing before an advertisement started. Something like Adblock Radio is a more sophisticated approach that could still detect ads like that.
I think you're right. For me personally, if a site was toxic enough with ads (eg: the reason I started using an adblocker originally) I'd just completely avoid it. I did originally try that, but in particular "chum boxes" started appearing everywhere on more sites than I could remember to avoid and that was the last straw. The easiest solution was an ad blocker, and unfortunately for publishers, it's just easier to block all ads everywhere than try to be selective and only block annoying ones.
If enough sites started using anti-adblock techniques with toxic ads, my next step would be a 'site blocker' plugin that would effectively eradicate it from the internet for me. This is kind of the nuclear option. No links from others sites, no showing up in search results. The technology exists already for blocking adult sites: the thing missing is the ability to add to your block list from a search result page or on the site itself.
The next logical extension to that is sharing block lists among users, and projects that maintain block lists you can subscribe to.
It actually would be nice if there's a way to notify the site when you were blocking them, such as your browser hitting `/.well-known/eradicated?origin=http://page/containing/link`.
> inserting unblockable ads directly into the video stream.
In a sense, it's already kinda happening with Twitch. A few months ago, they rolled out Server Side Ad Insertion [1] which broke ad blockers. Now, ublock origin and streamlink can still block them though but the arms race will continue. I don't think it'll ever come to reencoding the video to incorporate ads because most ads are dynamics but maybe future encoders or hardware are really fast.
Maybe news (and other) websites will stop auto-loading megabytes of scripts, images, auto-playing video etc because because they can no longer fund it.
Maybe we'll get a resurgence of text-only websites.
>but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.
Yes! I think what has staved it off is the lack of adblocking on mobile devices. I use uBlock on every computer I have, but on my iPhone? Not so much. I think as more traffic moved to mobile it has offset ad blocking to some degree. I can't imagine that 25% of people are blocking ads on mobile?
I can't speak for anyone else but on my phone I adblock through the Hosts file and additionally have Ublock Origin and Noscript installed in Firefox Mobile.
Agreed. It's been sad to see so many sites fall into the temptation. These days even Ars Technica is quick to twist and contort their headlines for maximum flammability.
Okay the ads are no ads anymore are web experiences. Seriusly i barely can understand the level of corporatism this days, this is not an article is esencialy a weapon against adblock in particular probably paid by the same anti-adblocking groups.
My take after reading this, is that the author wants EasyList to either not exist or to be run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization" (aka adman)
It reminds me of the famous spam form letter [1], where one of the standard objections is "Why should we have to trust you and your servers? [to identify which domains should be blocked]"
Not just basically - it is a hit piece. It's a website run by and for advertisers, publishers, and media, aiming to monetize content as much as possible. They are supported by advertisers masquerading as ad blockers (uBlock trying to pretend to be uBlock Origin) and sites that literally just advertise.
Just another day of unsavory corporations and the assholes that run them trying to mislead the average consumer.
In nature, the best parasites divert a 'balanced' amount of resources from the host so as to prolong the interaction for as long as possible.
Sometimes reading about things like "balancing publisher monetization" puts the picture in my head of a bunch of anthropomorphized tapeworms trying to have a public policy debate.
This is not journalism. This is a hit-piece on EasyList, with a clickbait and false title.
It seems even plausible, reading it, that the author knows about uBlock origin but avoids naming it, instead listing the two sellouts that are morally shady.
Seriously -- every Adblocker will allow you to subscribe to custom lists, there's no vendor lock-in, there's no network effect, there aren't significant regulatory or commercial barriers to entry. This isn't like Facebook.
Blockers like Ublock Origin also don't benefit from legitimate sites breaking; if they're turning on EasyList by default it's because they think it's currently the best balance available for their users.
If anyone can make a better list than Easylist, then they should just go do it. In fact, companies already tried to make an alternative with the Acceptable Ads initiative -- and if their list is better, people will switch to it. The only barrier of entry to displacing EasyList here is quality over time.
> But there are occasions when those changes are hard to make. In Autotrader UK’s case, for example, the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages.
I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask about why exactly that's a big task.
At some point, for popular sites, the strategy will flip from filtering to scrapping.
We'll need some clever strategies to counter the arms race.
Image side-by-side visual diffing. Some process renders pages with and without ads. Ads are progressively identified and removed until it renders like the "print" or "reader" view.
Temporal diffing. Snap shot popular websites over time. The meat (content) will likely remain the same. Everything else is chrome or ads.
My other ad detecting notions are even more harebrained, so I'll stop there.
I remember https://serpapi.com breaking with EasyList because we use Prism.js for code syntax coloration. And Prism.js is also the name of a tracker. Opened a ticket with them. However it has been easier to just rename `prism.js` to `pri-secure-sm.js`. Not sure why author is so upset about that. It's not like they are trying to break websites on purpose.
Because they're breaking things without much regard to it.
We discovered a few years ago that our list of advertisers (in a digital magazine) was being blocked by ad blockers. It was coming over the wire with the word "advertisers" in the URL. These aren't ads that pop up and display on the pages, but simply a list of advertisers in the issue.
Rather than try to get adblockers not to block it, we simply used another word in our URL and went on with things. We shouldn't have had to. Those are lazy adblock rules and are incredibly likely to get false positives and break sites.
But we're realists and knew that even if we fixed the existing adblockers, another would come along and do the same lazy thing.
> Because they're breaking things without much regard to it.
This claim comes accross as disingenuous. These guys are trying to block ads accross the whole internet without ruining the user's core experience. Maintaining a hard-coded black/whitelist of URLs and elements simply wont cut it. Sometimes there will be false positives.
If this impacts enough of your users, then it's your responsibility as a web developer to test your site on environments that reflect your users' and make something that works on their environment. You can always choose not to support those users, but that's your problem.
I don't get the title - Just four dudes. What if it was four dudettes/chicks?
Maybe it's because they started the project and they have the right to be in charge?
Also, you don't have to use EasyList if you don't like it..
FYI those four dudes are whats keeping me from disabling javascript and images from every website on the face of the earth.
> the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages
Even if these pages are static files (although any site opetating at that scale should have some kind of page-generation system), this still sounds like it could be resolved with a simple find-replace using <insert your favorite text editor>.
EasyList is definitely in the right here. Adding an exception results in an unnecessary performance penalty and creates more complexity for the project. Both of these impacts are small, but they can't afford to accommodate for every website like that.
If they want their users to use their site, they should make it work on their user's environments. I doubt they would demand Google or Mozilla accommodate for them like that.
Several years ago I worked on a monolithic website that used static files with no templating engine. The problem is they had so many contractors working on changes for specific ranges of content that there were a variety of ways that even a mundane meta tag with the same content value was written (is the tag self-closing, is the value placed before the property, are certain characters in the value encoded, etc.). Find & Replace can quickly end up becoming a bigger game of Trial & Error especially if there are no standards in place.
Quote: "In the past six months, EasyList changes have broken the buy buttons on commerce site The Inventory, the video player on Animal Planet, disrupted site navigation on Fandom, and disrupted the style and CSS loading process on job search site Indeed."
Good, very good. Break them all. Learn to go back to basics, use TABLE, not gazzilion of nested DIV's for what should be a single BUTTON element instead. I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up. Your shitty site has the same merchandise like many others and if your "buy" button is broke I'll just go to the next site...and while on this, how come Amazon "buy" button is not broke? Almost feels like Amazon devs actually test with ad-blockers their content before allowing it on the wild.
No, for big sites the adblock users report issues, or more likely the adblock list developers just fix the issues right away. The issue is small sites with no sizeable adblock-using population.
> I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up.
Yes! I'm doing this too, as a kind of community service. If sites get broken because their privacy-invading "like" button doesn't work, that's on them. People will just move on.
Fandom (aka Wikia), in particular, has run some incredibly intrusive -- and occasionally even malicious -- ads on some of their sites. I have very little sympathy for them.
Useless article is useless, there is no point in emphasising the maintainers are men.
No one is preventing 4 women or LGBTQ+ from starting a list with a better end user experience. But I guess their end goal is "balancing publisher monetization" which is too optimistic, no one would want to see slower pages with crap wherever they go.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadTIL According to Wikipedia: "In July 2018, uBlock.org was acquired by AdBlock"[1]
This is not uBlock Origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin
It's true that it's about a year out of date, but I've never had any ads get through regardless.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-comp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock
Imagine if a company launched a (non-Google) "Chromium" browser or non-Microsoft "Explorer" or "Edge", how would the authentic developer defend against that? (Probably with a trademark suit, which is a dificult strategy for a tiny open source project).
gorhill could create a brand new name to replace Origin, but hat runs the risk of losing even more people to the knockoff "uBlock".
Perhaps "uBlock Official" would be a better name than "uBlock Origin", but ultimately it comes down to a sog of hard marketing work to protect and build mindshare.
Maybe fork uBlock Origin, give it a new name, update the current uBlock Origin official pages to point to the new one, keeping links in older threads still relevant for a while.
I'd do my part and promote the new name as much as possible. I'm already spending a lot of time typing out the explanation about the current name whenever I get a chance.
I’m pretty sure Eyeo did register the uBlock trademark, and has a good case to sue for someone implying through their product’s name that it’s “the official” uBlock.
On both Google and DDG ublock.org is still the first match when you search for "ublock". I wonder how many people install this crap extension by mistake every day.
My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.
Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.
Please.
... but that's also something they could again fix with another RewriteRule, I guess?
... would've worked just as well?list maintainers should be responsible regression test their lists for normal content and not do dumb things
this is also a problem with bad/unscrupulous spam listings which list domains based on unsubstantiated requests, etc
I am against advertising and marketing and yet spend a considerable amount of money online, and I’m confident most of HN does the same.
If parts of your audience blocks ads then it's probably a good idea to test your web site with uBlock installed, just as you already test with Safari and MSIE.
It's specifically not a good idea to rely on the block list maintainers who will have a hard time separating earnest bug reports from all the bogus ones who think they've found a clever way to avoid blocklists.
Maybe it's good just to have a reminder that much of our infrastructure is maintained by volunteers. Sometimes important policy decisions get made by whoever showed up and started doing the work in a way that looks competent to others.
Articles are supposed to have a point, a goal, etc. The goal might be persuasive, it might be to establish facts, it might be to argue for a specific change or against one. It's up to the reader to agree or disagree with what the article has laid out.
But we need something to agree or disagree with. In this case, I had no idea what the point of the article was (beyond a vague feeling that the author doesn't like EasyList).
https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148
They responded and removed amp-analytics. I'm not that impressed.
https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/8311
I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages.
The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav.
I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups of pages used subtly different html it was a real mess.
It took a long time for them to get all the pages replicated in a templating system to avoid seo loss.
https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148&sid=e0edf...
I wouldn't be at all surprised if AutoTrader used manual editing for everything, with no access to scriptability.
Not everyone is using jekyll or any modern stacks ... the echo chamber is strong here. I guarantee you 65% of the Internet is still being edited by hand.
My task was to move all of that into a very minimal CMS. All the content would be in flat files, and the page itself would load the header, footer, content, etc.
Because every page was different, but mostly similar, I wrote an Emacs extension that let you identify the content areas (it tried some heuristics and you could guide it) and it would do the extraction and emit the flat content file and the replacement JSP file.
What you have to realize is that many people have systems that are designed for 1 "thing" and have since "scaled" that up 1000x. People still treat their website as a directory of arbitrary HTML. People manage 1000 servers like they managed their one and only very first server. It is the natural way of growth. Engineering is figuring out when that model doesn't apply anymore, and changing it. Engineering is in short supply, however, leading to stories like mine above or the "thousands of pages" blocked by EasyList.
I once worked on a site that had over 25k pages, all hand coded HTML with Microsoft Frontpage. And all in the root folder.
Not even the owner knew how many pages there actually were.
It makes me giddy to consider how much the quality of the internet will improve when the bottom-feeders are at last excluded from it.
> "It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this," said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program.
If only there were a business service that might help me navigate this perilousness of which I have just learned, so that I might better monetize.
The same issue was seen with Spamhaus and similar IP block services for eMail spam. What were selfless intentions quickly morphed into ineffective, power-crazed gatekeepers and extortion artists that have made SMTP an unusable protocol unless you are Google or Amazon.
I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website.
But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussions with publishers told me that they're more interested in convincing their users to give up on ad blockers rather than face the fact that people are not going to abandon ad blockers.
I'll be taking a closer look at the tool.
I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content?
I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long the issue was there before I realised it :/
Anyway. People rarely intend to block legitimate content. At the same time, it's not always easy to tell what is and isn't legitimate when you're writing fairly general rules.
`<a href="our_twitter_page"><img src="/img/locally_hosted_image.png"></a>`
Was everything hosted on your domain there? If they have images hosted by twitter/facebook that's enough for them to track users which is what these lists don't like.
`<a href="our_twitter_page"><img src="/img/locally_hosted_image.png"></a>`
The block rules were purely based on very generic CSS class names - I forget exactly, but something like "social-twitter", "social-facebook"
I realized the blunt force approach of various adblockers will block anything on "/ad/...". Some would even block "/ad...". I found that a bit annoying.
It's now part of a bigger "annoyances" list so maybe that was included somewhere in one of the filterlists.
Seems a bit heavy-handed to me personally. I absolutely want to block intrusive ads and tracking, but this was a bit OTT. It also must have been included by default with uBlock Origin, as I didn't add it myself.
So, was it simple <a> elements linking to your Twitter/Facebook page?
Or was it maybe a metric ton of obfuscated JS fetched from a Twitter/Facebook CDN, that would relay every bit of data about your visitor, and as a side-effect display a button?
Yeah they are, the balance they're targeting is zero ads.
Why would you ever want your adblocking list run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization"?
However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.
Maybe your moral fiber. Definitely not mine.
If I'm getting something that required skill and labor, 'moral fiber' suggests some quid pro quo. How are you going to reciprocate?
At some point someone observed "we can profit off of audiences" so that answer was "by being an audience member." But now it's kind of a mess, and either we haven't found a better model or inertia and collusion have prevented it from arriving.
On a tangentially related note, I think there's a special place in hell for the engineers that created gas pumps that display ads while fueling. Those things are pure, unadulterated evil.
But we’re talking about moral fiber. For some people “they hit me first” is not ethically sound. There’s some ambiguity here about who hit first, but rather than a fair exchange we are getting what is rapidly approaching brinksmanship. Nobody is really in the right here.
But we also can’t seem to just go back to a paid model for high production values. We are satisfied with amateur work and underpaid professionals slowly burning a nest egg and hoping something changes. The advertisers are the only ones with a hand out, so they get to set the agenda.
I had hopes Brave was going to alter this trajectory but there seems to be some regulatory capture there. i kind of wonder if they hired some ad people and charisma won over the origin story.
Why?
Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.
https://www.adblockradio.com/en/
Unrequested audio is flat-out absurd behavior in a browser.
If enough sites started using anti-adblock techniques with toxic ads, my next step would be a 'site blocker' plugin that would effectively eradicate it from the internet for me. This is kind of the nuclear option. No links from others sites, no showing up in search results. The technology exists already for blocking adult sites: the thing missing is the ability to add to your block list from a search result page or on the site itself.
The next logical extension to that is sharing block lists among users, and projects that maintain block lists you can subscribe to.
It actually would be nice if there's a way to notify the site when you were blocking them, such as your browser hitting `/.well-known/eradicated?origin=http://page/containing/link`.
In a sense, it's already kinda happening with Twitch. A few months ago, they rolled out Server Side Ad Insertion [1] which broke ad blockers. Now, ublock origin and streamlink can still block them though but the arms race will continue. I don't think it'll ever come to reencoding the video to incorporate ads because most ads are dynamics but maybe future encoders or hardware are really fast.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/media/tech/what-server-side-ad-insert...
Maybe we'll get a resurgence of text-only websites.
Yes! I think what has staved it off is the lack of adblocking on mobile devices. I use uBlock on every computer I have, but on my iPhone? Not so much. I think as more traffic moved to mobile it has offset ad blocking to some degree. I can't imagine that 25% of people are blocking ads on mobile?
I would argue that too much of the content that is paid for is created purely to generate page-views to carry advertising.
Those people who are motivated to share knowledge and opinions sincerely are crowded out by click-bait.
My take after reading this, is that the author wants EasyList to either not exist or to be run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization" (aka adman)
[1] https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Just another day of unsavory corporations and the assholes that run them trying to mislead the average consumer.
Sometimes reading about things like "balancing publisher monetization" puts the picture in my head of a bunch of anthropomorphized tapeworms trying to have a public policy debate.
And also they should talk about uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock Plus or UBlock.
It seems even plausible, reading it, that the author knows about uBlock origin but avoids naming it, instead listing the two sellouts that are morally shady.
They were elected by people voluntarily installing EasyList. We had enough of you experts™, thanks.
Blockers like Ublock Origin also don't benefit from legitimate sites breaking; if they're turning on EasyList by default it's because they think it's currently the best balance available for their users.
If anyone can make a better list than Easylist, then they should just go do it. In fact, companies already tried to make an alternative with the Acceptable Ads initiative -- and if their list is better, people will switch to it. The only barrier of entry to displacing EasyList here is quality over time.
I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask about why exactly that's a big task.
We'll need some clever strategies to counter the arms race.
Image side-by-side visual diffing. Some process renders pages with and without ads. Ads are progressively identified and removed until it renders like the "print" or "reader" view.
Temporal diffing. Snap shot popular websites over time. The meat (content) will likely remain the same. Everything else is chrome or ads.
My other ad detecting notions are even more harebrained, so I'll stop there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/
We discovered a few years ago that our list of advertisers (in a digital magazine) was being blocked by ad blockers. It was coming over the wire with the word "advertisers" in the URL. These aren't ads that pop up and display on the pages, but simply a list of advertisers in the issue.
Rather than try to get adblockers not to block it, we simply used another word in our URL and went on with things. We shouldn't have had to. Those are lazy adblock rules and are incredibly likely to get false positives and break sites.
But we're realists and knew that even if we fixed the existing adblockers, another would come along and do the same lazy thing.
This claim comes accross as disingenuous. These guys are trying to block ads accross the whole internet without ruining the user's core experience. Maintaining a hard-coded black/whitelist of URLs and elements simply wont cut it. Sometimes there will be false positives.
If this impacts enough of your users, then it's your responsibility as a web developer to test your site on environments that reflect your users' and make something that works on their environment. You can always choose not to support those users, but that's your problem.
FYI those four dudes are whats keeping me from disabling javascript and images from every website on the face of the earth.
Thank you EasyList maintainers!
They couldn't be widely shared, but they're less whack-a-mole in practice and from a security perspective, a more superior solution.
Even if these pages are static files (although any site opetating at that scale should have some kind of page-generation system), this still sounds like it could be resolved with a simple find-replace using <insert your favorite text editor>.
EasyList is definitely in the right here. Adding an exception results in an unnecessary performance penalty and creates more complexity for the project. Both of these impacts are small, but they can't afford to accommodate for every website like that.
If they want their users to use their site, they should make it work on their user's environments. I doubt they would demand Google or Mozilla accommodate for them like that.
Good, very good. Break them all. Learn to go back to basics, use TABLE, not gazzilion of nested DIV's for what should be a single BUTTON element instead. I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up. Your shitty site has the same merchandise like many others and if your "buy" button is broke I'll just go to the next site...and while on this, how come Amazon "buy" button is not broke? Almost feels like Amazon devs actually test with ad-blockers their content before allowing it on the wild.
No, for big sites the adblock users report issues, or more likely the adblock list developers just fix the issues right away. The issue is small sites with no sizeable adblock-using population.
Yes! I'm doing this too, as a kind of community service. If sites get broken because their privacy-invading "like" button doesn't work, that's on them. People will just move on.
Fandom (aka Wikia), in particular, has run some incredibly intrusive -- and occasionally even malicious -- ads on some of their sites. I have very little sympathy for them.